Torture Chambers

Snigdha Poonam, author of Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World, writes on the lucrative world of literary scams. A British author has also just written in The Guardian about his own encounter with these scammers, and the grim reality behind at least some of them: Last year, authorities raided a facility in Bamban, north of Manila, freeing nearly 700 people who had been trapped there and forced to work as scammers. Inside the building, it resembled a hybrid between a call centre and a prison, rows upon rows of computers and green screens, and tiny dorms with bunk beds. About half of the workers were Filipino, while the others had been trafficked from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Rwanda, their documentation withheld. The bosses, meanwhile, splashed around in the swimming pool next door. When another nearby compound was raided, they found it had its own brothel, karaoke suite and torture room. Someone “torturing” LLMs in a robot prison…

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