361: The Hidden Link Between Romance Scams and Forced Labor

Matthew Friedman joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore how pig butchering scams work, why they’re so effective, and how they’re tied to forced labor and human trafficking, while explaining what prevention can look like from personal red flags to safeguards in financial systems.

https://youtu.be/-2VkwSMhurk

Matthew Friedman

Matthew Friedman is the Founder and CEO of The Mekong Club, a pioneering organization that mobilizes the private sector to fight modern slavery across Asia. A globally recognized expert on human trafficking, Friedman has spent over three decades working at the intersection of business, government, and humanitarian action to combat exploitation and promote ethical leadership. Before founding The Mekong Club, Friedman served as Regional Project Manager for the United Nations International Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP/UNDP), overseeing a six-country initiative spanning China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand. He also served as Deputy Director for the USAID Office of Public Health (Asia Region), managing a $100 million annual portfolio. Friedman holds a Master’s degree in Health Education from New York University and is a renowned keynote speaker who has delivered more than 900 presentations in 20 countries, inspiring individuals and organizations to take a stand in the fight against modern slavery.

Key Points

Pig butchering scams are sophisticated romance scams where criminals build trust over weeks before convincing victims to invest life savings in fake cryptocurrency schemes, with the metaphor referring to “fattening the pig before the slaughter.”
An estimated 300,000 to 400,000 young professionals have been trafficked into scam centers across Southeast Asia, where they are forced under extreme violence and coercion to run online scams targeting victims in wealthy nations.
The Prince Group sanctions marked one of the most significant global crackdowns on forced-labor scam centers, with the UK freezing real estate assets and the US freezing $15 billion in cryptocurrency, signaling increased international cooperation.
Financial institutions can help prevent pig butchering by monitoring unusual withdrawal patterns, such as when customers who haven’t touched their accounts for 30 years suddenly liquidate everything, and by contacting clients before large transfers are completed.
Victims in scam centers face brutal violence including being tasered, beaten, and in some cases tortured to death with videos sold as “hardcore” content, creating a level of violence unprecedented in modern slavery according to Friedman’s 35 years of experience.
Only 0.2% of the 50 million people in modern slavery receive assistance globally, not because counter-trafficking organizations don’t care, but because the $236 billion generated by criminals vastly outweighs the $400 million available to fight it.
Public education and awareness are critical for prevention, as people in North America remain largely unaware of pig butchering scams while Asian communities have become more informed through widespread media coverage and victim testimonies.
The Mekong Club has developed multilingual e-learning tools including a three-and-a-half-minute video to help raise awareness about both human trafficking into scam centers and the scams themselves, emphasizing that prevention must be widespread.

Resources

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matthew Friedman: for me, and for a lot of people in this part of the world, this is a blinking DEFCON five

[00:00:04] scenario

[00:00:05]

[00:00:05] Delaney: If you don’t know how modern scams work, you can’t protect yourself or the people you love, and that gap is costing lives. In this episode, you’ll learn about pig butchering scams, why they’re so effective, and how they’re tied to forced labor and human trafficking. Matt Friedman explains how organized crime scales these operations, why rescue and repatriation are so complicated, and what prevention can look like from personal red flags to safeguards and financial systems.

[00:00:35] Hi. I’m Delaney. I’m a student here at Vanguard University and I help produce this show. Today, Sandie Morgan talks with Matthew Friedman, founder and CEO of the Mekong Club, who has spent decades working across the UN government and businesses to combat modern slavery. And now here’s their conversation.

[00:00:59] Sandie Morgan: Matt Friedman, thank you for coming back on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast.

[00:01:05] Matthew Friedman: Happy to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

[00:01:08] Sandie Morgan: The last time you were here was episode 363, Empowering Businesses to Create a Slave Free World, and the title of that came from our conversation, and it really reflects your very positive approach to helping businesses become part of the solution. So are you well?

[00:01:38] Matthew Friedman: I am, I’m looking forward to the holidays. It’s the end of the year. It’s been a rough year for a lot of NGOs like us because of the cuts in the United States, but we’re optimistic that next year is gonna be a new opportunity.

[00:01:51] Sandie Morgan: And I think your work in the private sector is particularly significant in this moment, and the Mekong Club has been a catalyst, a consistent catalyst for engaging, especially Asia’s business community in the fight against modern slavery. And one of the things I wanted to ask you is what are your key elements to build trust and create buy-in from major corporations?

[00:02:28] Matthew Friedman: Well, as you probably know, the private sector in the NGO world haven’t always gotten along, and the reason for that is the NGOs are often wagging their finger at the private sector saying you’re doing bad things and you should change the way you do things, and so forth. And so as a result of that,

[00:02:46] private sector doesn’t want to engage in the NGO sector. We approach this a little bit differently because from right from the beginning we have come to realize that the private sector has a nexus with the communities that we’re trying to reach. We’re trying to reach workers and workers within supply chains and so forth.

[00:03:02] So if you’re able to develop that sense of trust and work with them in a positive, supportive way, then they will give you access to helping them go through the process of ensuring that they have all the systems and procedures in place that they need in order to protect not only their business, but by doing that at the same time, protecting these workers that are in the supply chains and so forth.

[00:03:23] So if there’s a company that has, let’s say a supply chain that includes a half a million people and they put the policies and procedures, and they do the auditing and the grievance mechanisms and everything else in place, what you’ve actually done is created an immunized community that is protected from modern slavery.

[00:03:43] And so, in order to develop that trust, we are positive in everything we do. We don’t do any naming and shaming. We are not judgmental in terms of if we hear things, we address things as they come up. And that association and relationship with the private sector allows us to do what we do.

[00:04:01] Sandie Morgan: I hear that the background to this approach is really a message to the NGOs and maybe even government, that that wagging finger approach isn’t going to be very effective and we need to change.

[00:04:20] Matthew Friedman: And to a certain extent, what happens is it closes businesses down to having discussions. Like for example, I’ve seen NGOs that have approached governments or businesses with the wagging finger only to say afterwards, well, let’s now sit down and figure out how we can help you to get to where you need to be.

[00:04:40] That’s like slapping somebody in the face and then expecting them to go and have coffee with you. It’s not gonna happen. And so it’s really important for the NGO world to understand that if you work with the private sector in a positive, respectful way, and you do it in such a way that you don’t embarrass them or create any business vulnerability, they’ll have conversations with you.

[00:05:02] Sandie Morgan: Conversations are the beginning of change. Well, let me jump into your recent posts online, particularly on LinkedIn, that captured my attention. You were talking about coordinated sanctions, criminal actions against Cambodia based Prince Group and one of the most significant global crackdowns on forced labor scam centers.

[00:05:33] So from your perspective, what does this moment signal about the future of international cooperation against transnational criminals?

[00:05:47] Matthew Friedman: Well, let me start off by just talking a little bit about the issue just to remind people. So during COVID, when a lot of the infrastructure related to offsite betting was shut down, the criminals in Cambodia and Myanmar and Laos decided that they needed to pivot to something else. So they started doing scams and they came to realize that if you come up with a sophisticated

[00:06:11] pig butchering scam, which is a long romance scam, you can generate a tremendous amount of money in order to be able to do that. They started trafficking young professional people from all over Asia into these scam centers, and there’s probably three or 400,000 of these young people in there now. Now these scam centers have been running for about four or five years now, and they have generated a tremendous amount of money, but initially,

[00:06:37] not too many people in the West paid attention to this. And the reason for it is that these were Chinese criminals in these locations. These individuals themselves were using Mandarin instead of English, and so there’s a lot of information available in foreign languages, but not in English. So it took a long time for the

[00:06:56] West to wake up to the fact that this is a real problem. Now, to put this into perspective, literally billions of dollars are being taken from the West here to this part of the world, and then laundered in all different mechanisms across Asia. The first significant change, and this is what you’re talking about,

[00:07:14] the Prince Group, was identified as being a leader in addressing these scam centers all across Southeast Asia. And as a result of that information, the UK government froze a certain number of real estate sites of the leadership of that particular group. And then the United States, they froze $15 billion worth of cryptocurrency.

[00:07:37] And then you saw the cascading effect of this happening in the Philippines and Singapore and Malaysia and so forth. And so all of a sudden the West is woken up to the fact that this is a topic that needs to be addressed. Now it’s a little bit late in the game because so much money has been generated, but at the same time it’s happening and it’s part of this process.

[00:07:59] As you start peeling the layers of the onion and getting closer and closer to the nexus of this, you’re gonna find that there’s more and more groups that are associated with this particular network. And so financial crime agencies within governments or private entities and so forth are pretty good at using forensic accounting in order to figure out what’s happening.

[00:08:21] And so I think you’re gonna see the tentacles of all of these businesses being reviewed and this hopefully will have a positive impact on addressing this particular crime.

[00:08:32] Sandie Morgan: Well, and the issue of forensic accounting, we did an interview with the company Validate with the number eight at the end, and it was hard to imagine the scope of their ability to find trafficking patterns by following the money, not just at from this bank across the street to that bank, but globally.

[00:09:03] And what really began to crystallize for me is the understanding that when you follow the money, when you are able to literally track it across the globe, you also find where those trafficked workers are trapped. And now, though, my question is, how are we actually freeing those workers? What happens?

[00:09:37] You talk about 300,000 young professionals, do they just lock them in?

[00:09:45] Matthew Friedman: Well, I mean, you may have seen KK Park is a notorious center across the border from Thailand and Myawaddy. It’s estimated there’s about 40,000 victims in that one location. When I was living and working in Thailand as a UN official, the village across in Myanmar where this KK Park is, was just a fishing village, probably had 30 houses there and so forth, and now it’s this sprawling mechanism and facility and so forth with all these people.

[00:10:16] The Myanmar government basically raided them recently and a certain number of people were let out and they crossed back into Thailand. But when you’re talking about this number of people that have to be repatriated and sent back and so forth, even the 1500 people that made it out of there, and there’s still

[00:10:34] thousands in there, it’s probably gonna take six months or a year just to repatriate them. So the logistics associated with this, just imagine you have to get their, they don’t have any paperwork, so you have to identify who they are. You have to then figure out whether or not they were involved in the

[00:10:50] industry in a positive or a negative way. You have to then have to figure out who’s gonna pay for them and so forth. And so the logistics of helping and saving these people are incredibly complicated and people don’t understand that. So imagine if you were to repatriate 300,000 people.

[00:11:07] So this is the dilemma. How do you go about, if you rescue people from these centers, getting them home, closing the centers down? Because what we’ve seen is either the center gets raided and then the people stay there because bribes are paid to the people who are doing the raids. Or it’s like the push down pop up, where you close a center and then it pops up someplace else.

[00:11:31] Or they hear that a raid is about to take place and they move everybody to another place so that when the raid takes place, nobody’s there. There’s all of these games that are being played, and the reason why they can do this is because they’re so flushed with cash. They can pay all kinds of people off, and that’s the real problem that we’re facing.

[00:11:49] How do you address a scenario where the amount of money that they have is so obscene that there’s a point at which even people who ordinarily wouldn’t take money for something like this might take it because it’s that one time opportunity. We heard that there was this Ivy League graduate who went into one of the centers for three weeks to set up the systems and the procedures, and he was paid a million dollars.

[00:12:14] I mean, maybe that guy’s a regular guy, but a million dollars changes that person’s life. And so this is what we’re up against when it comes to addressing this issue.

[00:12:26] Sandie Morgan: So you use the term pig butchering, and we’ve heard that before a couple of times recently on podcast interviews and I would love to have you break that down for us, because there is no butcher shop there.

[00:12:45] Matthew Friedman: Yeah. Okay. The metaphor is that you’re fattening the pig before the slaughter. And so the way this scam works is, let’s say that there’s a 55-year-old divorced guy living in Hong Kong. He’s lonely, he’s drinking too much wine. He doesn’t feel like he has any friends. He’s lonely, and then all of a sudden he gets this WhatsApp text message.

[00:13:08] Hi Michael. How are you doing? He goes back and says, I’m not Michael. And the person on the other end who’s pretending to be a 27-year-old Thai woman says, oh, you’re so nice. You are so polite. I’m so sorry. I’m so and so, and I’m living in Thailand and I’m alone. And so they enter into this text messaging relationship.

[00:13:29] And for the first 4, 5, 6 weeks, they don’t talk about anything about falling in love. And it may be that the person on the other end isn’t a 27-year-old. It could be a 55-year-old Chinese guy, but he’s pretending to be, and they’ll, she’ll send photos now and then and say, well, I can’t Zoom. I can do it periodically because I have such bad wifi and so forth.

[00:13:48] So he’s beginning to fall in love with this person. Finally, she says to him, well, I had just made 5,000 US dollars with this crypto deal. So he takes the bait and then she shows him how it works. And so she convinces him to put 5,000 in. He does the next day, it’s 10,000. She convinces him to take it out so it’s physically in his hands.

[00:14:09] Okay? So he can see it’s real. She gets him to put it in a second time. 10,000 becomes 20, $20,000 in his hands. If he stops at that point, he made $10,000. Another week goes by and she says, oh, this coin is coming out. If you put a million dollars in, you’ll get $3 million back. Okay. So he has this relationship.

[00:14:29] He’s in love. He feels like this person is a trusted contact, he’s seen that the money goes in and comes out. So he’s convinced to take his life savings, put it in there. Maybe he only has 750,000, so he borrows 250,000 from his family and everybody else ’cause he knows this is a real deal. He puts the money in.

[00:14:49] He sees that it goes up to 3 million. He tries to take it out and then she says to him, because of fiduciary oversight and so forth, US government and taxes, you have to have an assessment. You have to put another 150,000 in. So he puts it in, he had nothing left, and then the relationship is terminated.

[00:15:08] That’s the slaughtering of the pig. So again, the metaphor fattening the pig for the slaughter, and that’s why they call it pig butchering. Or another way of calling it is a romance scam.

[00:15:17] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Wow. I talked to some victim service providers here in Southern California and there is story after story of particularly senior citizens who have lost their life savings to this pig butchering. And this is not being talked about on a big scale in our media or in our social services, but there are ways that the private sector can be more proactive in defending their customers, and I’ve heard a couple of times as I’ve listened in on some of your interviews, that you have some thoughts about how businesses can help.

[00:16:10] Matthew Friedman: Well, first of all, I mean, elderly people often don’t understand the internet. They don’t understand computers. Maybe they’re on there, maybe they’re using their phone and so forth. And so when somebody sounds official and comes and says something, they can often convince them to transfer money or give access to information.

[00:16:33] Your account is about to be frozen if you don’t, that type of scams been around for quite some time. But on the romance scams, they are very particular in terms of who they go after. They’ll do their homework, so they collect a bunch of WhatsApps. They then identify, well, who these people are through Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, and then they get closer and closer to targeting a particular type of person.

[00:16:58] Now, many of the financial institutions, both here in Asia and the rest of the world up until now, have said, well, we don’t feel the responsibility to get involved in this because it’s crypto that they’re dealing with. And so it’s really not our problem. And so I was in Australia and I was presenting at a large conference with 400 bankers, and this kept coming up and I said to them, well, maybe you think it’s not relevant, but

[00:17:25] go back to your files to determine the number of people who have had money in your bank. They’ve never touched it for 30 years, and all of a sudden they liquidated it. You’ll see that it’s more than a percentage point. And they did. And they came back and they said, yes, it is relevant. And so what you’re seeing is that

[00:17:43] if banks in both in the United States and Europe and so forth, see significant withdrawals, then they will contact the client to say, we have to have a conversation. We have to see what’s going on. That type of built-in scenario allows for that scenario to take place. The other thing is on the crypto side of things, if you think that you’re dealing with the legitimate crypto websites and wallets and so forth, maybe you started with that.

[00:18:11] It’s very easy for these criminals to get you to press one button to put you into a mirror version of it, the legitimate website that you think you’re on. And so doing crypto online with people that you don’t really know or trust in any circumstance needs to be addressed.

[00:18:34] But where does the public education related to that come from? It should be from the government. The government should be putting all these public service announcements related to this topic. But there’s so many distractions in the United States now related to so many other things that it’s just not business as usual.

[00:18:51] And so in this part of the world, there’s a lot more basic information about scams and scammers and so forth. And that’s happened as a result of so many victims publicly describing what it is that’s happened. And so there’s that protection, but in other parts of the world, it just doesn’t exist.

[00:19:09] I was just in New Zealand about a month ago, and I was talking about this. The New Zealand people both within the banks and the financial professionals and even in the general private sector, didn’t know anything about what I was talking about. If you don’t know about an issue, you’re not gonna protect yourself.

[00:19:28] Sandie Morgan: So how can, because in part of the conversations we’re talking about what the banks are doing, and you mentioned, okay, they’re gonna call the client because there’s an aberration in their banking habits. But the resistance to believing that somebody’s doing something seems to be pretty high and the ability of these AI chatbots and romance schemes, all of that seems to be so sophisticated that it’s very hard. It’s like I feel like I am on rewind. I’ve been working for years to do prevention with adolescents on social media so they wouldn’t get catfished and sex extorted. And now I feel like I need to start taking the same prevention approach with my aunt and my grandmother.

[00:20:35] And what do you see that can, banks be more effective, government? It always takes a long time for social services and government to ramp up. How can we look to the private sector for more help?

[00:20:53] Matthew Friedman: Well, before I answer that, I’m gonna just give it another bit of information. A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to talk to a scam center manager. He was arrested and he was in a situation where he was gonna go to jail and so forth. He was educated, spoke English, and what he said to me, ’cause he was a narcissist and he was bragging about the situation, was have you ever seen one of those old James Bond movies where he had SPECTRE, where the organized crime had this big room and the big TVs and they had all the data and so forth.

[00:21:29] That’s, he said that’s what’s happening with the scam center community, it used to be all these syndicates would compete with each other for drug trafficking and other illegal activities, but now they have come to realize that there is an advantage of everybody coming together because they can launder money and they can move money and transfer it, and everyone’s so flush that they don’t really even know what to do with it.

[00:21:52] And so he said, the world’s not paying attention to this, but organized crime is getting more and more organized. We are now beginning to ask the question, how do we use this money to franchise with other criminal activities to get involved in elections, to do all kinds of other things that we can do.

[00:22:08] And so for me, and for a lot of people in this part of the world, this is a blinking DEFCON five scenario for which the world doesn’t understand that this is happening. And so in order to address the issues of the aunts and the grandmothers and the people that we know and so forth, somebody has to just seriously go and help them to understand that if you get communication from anyone that you don’t know through any mechanism, whether it’s a phone call or a text message or whatever, and you have any questions about it, you need to talk to somebody.

[00:22:41] And the question is, well, who do you talk to? Well, first should be your family members or your friends and so forth. But this idea that a person can enter into your life and then immediately become like your best friend and immediately give you advice about these things,

[00:22:56] that’s a red flag. I know that, but the people who need to know that don’t know that. And that’s really where this becomes so important, the public education on this particular topic. And the reason why I am frustrated at this particular point is again, in Asia, a lot of people have figured out what’s going on because of the experiences.

[00:23:19] But in North America, there’s very little voice, whether it’s from the banks or the financial transaction or the crypto companies to address this. And so we’ve been working with Interpol. We brought a bunch of private companies together, the social media, financial crime, crypto banking, and the idea was to see in this part of the world, what can we come up with in terms of suggestions to address this.

[00:23:43] One of the top determinants of an event that took place was prevention. We gotta raise awareness of both the human trafficking into the scam centers and the scams. And so the Mekong Club has developed a series of e-learning tools that are in multiple languages. I’m happy to share it with your audience.

[00:24:03] It’s a three and a half minute video that says this is what you need to do to prevent these things from happening. But it has to be a lot more widespread, and it has to be a part of the education of even the young people who could find themselves into these scam centers. Now, although there’s 60 different countries that have had victims of human trafficking in these scam centers, including Canada and the United States and Australia, so we’re talking about not only the scamming aspect of it, but there’s Americans and there’s North Americans in these scam centers as well.

[00:24:35] Sandie Morgan: How, okay, so I understand human trafficking elements are force, fraud and coercion. So I’m thinking to keep, especially these bright young people, trapped in a scam center is going to take a lot more than locks on the doors and covered windows. What are the tools that are used that we could reverse engineer to end that power?

[00:25:13] Matthew Friedman: Well, okay. Let’s just talk about how people get into scam centers. You’re seeing a transition now during COVID where there weren’t a lot of jobs, so people were desperate. You had graduates who just wanted to get any job, and all of a sudden they see on a social media platform, you can get 5,000 US dollars a month.

[00:25:31] You can go to an exotic place like Cambodia. You can work in a restaurant or in a casino and you’ll be hanging out with people your own age. And so they show these pictures of people having fun and by the pool and everything. And so they say, okay, well I’ll do this for a year or a couple of months and just have some adventure and get outta the, and so they accept the job.

[00:25:50] Sometimes they’re lured through romance scams as well, where again, a 27-year-old Thai woman is reaching out to a nerdy guy who doesn’t have much opportunity to meet people from the opposite sex and doesn’t have the social skills. And all of a sudden she encourages him, I’m going to Cambodia.

[00:26:11] Why don’t you go there? And then we can meet up and then be a part of this thing. So that’s the lure. And they don’t realize there’s a problem, and there may even be like a Zoom interview with them. They have contracts, they get plane tickets, everything seems good until they arrive in country.

[00:26:26] Somebody has a sign, they put ’em in a van and then the van takes them off to wherever they’re gonna go. There’s a point at which they start feeling like, well, something’s wrong with this. I’m in Phnom Penh, but it seems like I’m driving very far away. And then the people in the car say, well, it’s okay that we have to do this.

[00:26:46] And it’s actually a little bit further because of the taxes and the real estate is less here, et cetera, et cetera. They pull into the compound and we know where all these compounds are. And when I say compound, it’s like a prison. It’s got high walls, it’s got barbed wire.

[00:27:01] They pull into this thing, there’s closed circuit television, there’s guys standing there who are security guards. And once they’re in there, that’s it. There is no getting out of that. And so I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the videos of what happens to the people if they do something wrong or they don’t meet their targets.

[00:27:20] Have you seen any of those videos?

[00:27:21] Sandie Morgan: No, why don’t you describe that for us?

[00:27:24] Matthew Friedman: Okay, so at the end of the day, if a person doesn’t meet their targets, they’re tasered, they’re beaten with a bat or a belt. If you’re a woman, you can imagine what happens to them. They’re often raped. And these videos are filmed initially in order to show victims this will happen to you if you don’t meet your targets and so forth.

[00:27:47] So these have leaked out. There in mainland China, you see these videos all the time, but what happens in some cases is the person is catatonic and can’t function and can’t be sold back to their family. They torture them to death. They videotape that, and then they sell the videos to people who get off on hardcore violence and so forth.

[00:28:09] It’s called hardcore. So every aspect of this will exploit the person to the point at which sometimes they die. Now, when you’re in this situation, you are told immediately if you contact your family and you find out something severe is going to happen to you, and it will be very severe because even just not meeting your targets at the end of the day results in the beating,

[00:28:33] results in something terrible happening. Now, I got involved in this not because I felt I needed to, or it wasn’t even associated with my business, but based on the violence that I saw associated with this. I’ve been addressing modern slavery for 35 years. I’ve never seen violence like this before.

[00:28:51] It is just beyond, and it’s like the violence you would see 200 years ago where people were whipped and beaten and tortured and hung and all that other stuff. That’s what we’re seeing here and imagine the constituent you’re dealing with here. These are young, professional kids who graduated.

[00:29:06] They’ve never experienced any strife in their life. All of a sudden they’re in this scenario, they have no defense mechanisms, no ability to adapt to this situation. It completely destroys their life.

[00:29:18] Sandie Morgan: Matt Friedman, you have been my go-to guy for hope and a positive look at the future, and so this really dark report is disconcerting at the very least. And I want to know what the next steps are that you feel are most urgent this decade.

[00:29:47] Matthew Friedman: Okay, well, I’m gonna start off with the bad news and end with the good news. Okay. So the bad news is there’s 50 million people in modern slavery. Last year, the world helped 108,000 out of that. That’s 0.2%. Now when you hear that, you might ask the question, does the counter trafficking world not care?

[00:30:04] Are they lazy? They’re not doing their job. That’s not the issue. The issue is $236 billion is generated by the bad guys. The amount of money that’s available to fight this is about 400 million, which is 0.13%. The other thing is the number of people that do this globally to address it is about 40,000 against a half million greed incentivized criminals.

[00:30:25] And lastly, people don’t know about this issue. So to a certain extent, we’re not even in the game, not even a half percent or 1%. And so you might ask the question after 35 years, how, Matt, do you survive with knowing that there’s not much impact? And the answer to that question is that it’s just a matter of time before the world wakes up to the fact that this is a horrible, terrible thing.

[00:30:49] And so, I don’t know if you know, there was a case in India about 15 years ago of a medical student who was raped on a bus.

[00:31:01] And then that became an issue in India that woke up the sleeping giant. All of a sudden, this particular case went viral, and then there were protests and there were all these people coming together and saying that laws had to change. And that lasted almost eight months, and a lot of significant changes have occurred.

[00:31:18] In my mind, I’m waiting for the day when that moment happens in human trafficking where everyone has that aha moment that wow, this is a terrible thing and it’s been going on for a long time. It’s unacceptable. And even look at the Epstein case now, this is a good example of the fact that it’s getting attention related to sex trafficking and so forth.

[00:31:40] When this happens, then I think that we will have a change like what we saw in India. So that’s what brings hope to me. Now, for that to happen, we need people like you to do podcasts, to talk to people like me to have a conversation about this particular topic in order so people understand it.

[00:31:58] Because the prerequisite for action is there has to be enough of a critical mass of people understanding what’s happening and then saying, collectively, this is unacceptable. And that’s when the breakthroughs are gonna happen. So, I mean, there are amazing people within law enforcement, within the NGOs, within the United Nations, within the private sector that care about this issue and they’re doing things and trying to move things forward.

[00:32:22] We just need a lot more people to have the same spirit and the same energy and the same motivation and then perhaps someday, and it may not be within the time that I’m working in this, there will be that aha moment while we need to address this. And that’s what keeps me going.

[00:32:37] Sandie Morgan: Matt, I’m a decade behind you, but we just had a report released right here in Orange County, California that showed our statistics for child trafficking reached 50% of the total of trafficking. And every time I share that number, it’s like, okay, we knew it was happening, but 50% are children, and someone says to me, well, they’re bringing them up across the border or something.

[00:33:15] And so I went back and found out from our child welfare, 76% of those victims are residents right here being trafficked. That’s our wake up, that’s our bus case, and

[00:33:31] this generation is waking up. And our commitment, I mean, you’ve really lit my fire here that we have to double down on prevention.

[00:33:43] Matthew Friedman: Absolutely. We’re committed to that.

[00:33:46] Sandie Morgan: We’re gonna post links to your videos, your toolkits. We’re gonna go back and review the last episode we had with you. We’ll invite you back. I am encouraged because you haven’t faded away. Oh, well, it’s not possible. We cannot give up.

[00:34:09] Matthew Friedman: Yeah, I’ll just, I said this in my last video, and I’ll say it again, is that I get in front of a lot of audiences, whether it’s high school students or college students or bankers or the private sector or government or whatever, and at the end of every one of my presentations, there is a group of individuals, two or three out of a hundred, that will come up and say, I don’t know what it is about this issue, but I just have to get involved.

[00:34:33] There’s something in my DNA, we as human beings, don’t pick our causes. Our causes pick us. And so I mine those people. I find them, I engage with them, get them committed. So if they’re within an organization, they’re gonna be the ambassador within the organization to infect them with a sense of good and righteousness and injustice.

[00:34:54] If it’s a student in the high school, I’m going to encourage them to do a project. I’ll sit down and spend an hour with them. If it’s somebody within the general public, I’m going to engage them. And so what the two of us have to do is to find this army of individuals who self-identify as being counter trafficking people.

[00:35:14] They don’t know why. They don’t know what it is. It’s in their DNA. They can’t stop themselves. They are the champions that are gonna move us forward. So I never go into a company to go to the corporate social responsibility or ESG or sustainability office. I find the people within the organization that care about this, they then become the people that we work with.

[00:35:33] And they exist within the United Nations and the governments and in the faith-based groups, they’re there. We just have to figure out how to bring them together. I mean, look at, if there’s protests against a particular scenario in the United States on a, the same type of approach needs to be done.

[00:35:51] You just find those. Nobody’s really tried to encapsulate the large number of people who care about this issue to have events that basically allow for their voice to be heard. It hasn’t happened.

[00:36:04] Sandie Morgan: So for people listening to this episode and inside, they’re raising their hand and saying, Matt, I’m one of those, how do they contact you?

[00:36:16] Matthew Friedman: Just send me an email. I mean, give list my email there or LinkedIn. I encourage people to join my LinkedIn. As you see, I try to post twice a week, at least.

[00:36:29] Sandie Morgan: I teach at Vanguard University because those students come through my office door every day and I send them out and they are warriors in this fight. And so I keep growing the army, but now I feel just so intensely that we need a much bigger, a much bigger army.

[00:36:55] Matthew Friedman: Matt, thank you for coming back and you know you’re gonna hear from me again. I think I have a much better grasp of what pig butchering is, and I want to encourage listeners to share this episode with your friends and if this is something you care about, go to the endinghumantrafficking.org website and send Matt an email.

[00:37:22] Or email me. Thanks Matt.

[00:37:25] Matthew Friedman: Thank you very much for the opportunity.

[00:37:28] Delaney: Thank you to Matthew Friedman for highlighting something easy to miss. That trafficked people aren’t only victims of scams, but are often forced to run them under violence and coercion. That insight reframes online fraud as a human trafficking issue and gives listeners a clearer lens for prevention.

[00:37:46] Listeners, if you love this conversation, make sure to check out our website at endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources. If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

[00:38:03] And as always, thank you for listening.