Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A tech company accumulates a ton of user data, hoping to figure out a business model later. That business model never arrives, the company goes under, and the data is in the wind.
The latest version of that story emerged on March 24, when the onetime genetic testing darling 23andMe filed for bankruptcy. Now the fate of 15 million people’s genetic data rests in the hands of a bankruptcy judge.At a hearing on March 26, the judge gave 23andMe permission to seek offers for its users’ data. But, there’s still a small chance of writing a better ending for users.
After the bankruptcy filing, the immediate take from policymakers and privacy advocates was that 23andMe users should delete their accounts to prevent genetic data from falling into the wrong hands. That’s good advice for the individual user (and you can read how to do so here). But the reality is most people won’t do it. Maybe they won’t see the recommendations to do so. Maybe they don’t know why they should be worried. Maybe they have long since abandoned an account that they don’t even remember exists. Or maybe they’re just occupied with the chaos of everyday life.
This means the real value of this data comes from the fact that people have forgotten about it. Given 23andMe’s meager revenue—fewer than 4% of people who took tests pay for subscriptions—it seems inevitable that the new owner, whoever it is, will have to find some new way to monetize that data.
This is a terrible deal for users who just wanted to learn a little more about themselves or their ancestry. Because genetic data is forever. Contact information can go stale over time: you can always change your password, your email, your phone number, or even your address. But a bad actor who has your genetic data—whether a cybercriminal selling it to the highest bidder, a company building a profile of your future health risk, or a government trying to identify you—will have it tomorrow and the next day and all the days after that.
Users with exposed genetic data are not only vulnerable to harm today; they’re vulnerable to exploits that might be developed in the future.
While 23andMe promises that it will not voluntarily share data with insurance providers, employers, or public databases, its new owner could unwind those promises at any time with a simple change in terms.
In other words: If a bankruptcy court makes a mistake authorizing the sale of 23andMe’s user data, that mistake is likely permanent and irreparable.
All this is possible because American lawmakers have neglected to meaningfully engage with digital privacy for nearly a quarter-century. As a result, services are incentivized to make flimsy, deceptive promises that can be abandoned at a moment’s notice. And the burden falls on users to keep track of it all, or just give up.
Here, a simple fix would be to reverse that burden. A bankruptcy court could require that users individually opt in before their genetic data can be transferred to 23andMe’s new owners, regardless of who those new owners are. Anyone who didn’t respond or who opted out would have the data deleted.
Bankruptcy proceedings involving personal data don’t have to end badly. In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission settled with the bankrupt retailer ToySmart to ensure that its customer data could not be sold as a stand-alone asset, and that customers would have to affirmatively consent to unexpected new uses of their data. And in 2015, the FTC intervened in the bankruptcy of RadioShack to ensure that it would keep its promises never to sell the personal data of its customers. (RadioShack eventually agreed to destroy it.)
The ToySmart case also gave rise to the role of the consumer privacy ombudsman. Bankruptcy judges can appoint an ombuds to help the court consider how the sale of personal data might affect the bankruptcy estate, examining the potential harms or benefits to consumers and any alternatives that might mitigate those harms. The U.S. Trustee has requested the appointment of an ombuds in this case. While scholars have called for the role to have more teeth and for the FTC and states to intervene more often, a framework for protecting personal data in bankruptcy is available. And ultimately, the bankruptcy judge has broad power to make decisions about how (or whether) property in bankruptcy is sold.
Here, 23andMe has a more permissive privacy policy than ToySmart or RadioShack. But the risks incurred if genetic data falls into the wrong hands or is misused are severe and irreversible. And given 23andMe’s failure to build a viable business model from testing kits, it seems likely that a new business would use genetic data in ways that users wouldn’t expect or want.
An opt-in requirement for genetic data solves this problem. Genetic data (and other sensitive data) could be held by the bankruptcy trustee and released as individual users gave their consent. If users failed to opt in after a period of time, the remaining data would be deleted. This would incentivize 23andMe’s new owners to earn user trust and build a business that delivers value to users, instead of finding unexpected ways to exploit their data. And it would impose virtually no burden on the people whose genetic data is at risk: after all, they have plenty more DNA to spare.
Consider the alternative. Before 23andMe went into bankruptcy, its then-CEO made two failed attempts to buy it, at reported valuations of $74.7 million and $12.1 million. Using the higher offer, and with 15 million users, that works out to a little under $5 per user. Is it really worth it to permanently risk a person’s genetic privacy just to add a few dollars in value to the bankruptcy estate?
Of course, this raises a bigger question: Why should anyone be able to buy the genetic data of millions of Americans in a bankruptcy proceeding? The answer is simple: Lawmakers allow them to. Federal and state inaction allows companies to dissolve promises about protecting Americans’ most sensitive data at a moment’s notice. When 23andMe was founded, in 2006, the promise was that personalized health care was around the corner. Today, 18 years later, that era may really be almost here. But with privacy laws like ours, who would trust it?
Keith Porcaro is the Rueben Everett Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law School.
The first clinical trial of a therapy bot that uses generative AI suggests it was as effective as human therapy for participants with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. Even so, it doesn’t give a go-ahead to the dozens of companies hyping such technologies while operating in a regulatory gray area.
A team led by psychiatric researchers and psychologists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College built the tool, called Therabot, and the results were published on March 27 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Many tech companies have built AI tools for therapy, promising that people can talk with a bot more frequently and cheaply than they can with a trained therapist—and that this approach is safe and effective.
Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shared the vision, noting that fewer than half of people with a mental disorder receive therapy, and those who do might get only 45 minutes per week. Researchers have tried to build tech so that more people can access therapy, but they have been held back by two things.
One, a therapy bot that says the wrong thing could result in real harm. That’s why many researchers have built bots using explicit programming: The software pulls from a finite bank of approved responses (as was the case with Eliza, a mock-psychotherapist computer program built in the 1960s). But this makes them less engaging to chat with, and people lose interest. The second issue is that the hallmarks of good therapeutic relationships—shared goals and collaboration—are hard to replicate in software.
In 2019, as early large language models like OpenAI’s GPT were taking shape, the researchers at Dartmouth thought generative AI might help overcome these hurdles. They set about building an AI model trained to give evidence-based responses. They first tried building it from general mental-health conversations pulled from internet forums. Then they turned to thousands of hours of transcripts of real sessions with psychotherapists.
“We got a lot of ‘hmm-hmms,’ ‘go ons,’ and then ‘Your problems stem from your relationship with your mother,’” said Michael Heinz, a research psychiatrist at Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Health and first author of the study, in an interview. “Really tropes of what psychotherapy would be, rather than actually what we’d want.”
Dissatisfied, they set to work assembling their own custom data sets based on evidence-based practices, which is what ultimately went into the model. Many AI therapy bots on the market, in contrast, might be just slight variations of foundation models like Meta’s Llama, trained mostly on internet conversations. That poses a problem, especially for topics like disordered eating.
“If you were to say that you want to lose weight,” Heinz says, “they will readily support you in doing that, even if you will often have a low weight to start with.” A human therapist wouldn’t do that.
To test the bot, the researchers ran an eight-week clinical trial with 210 participants who had symptoms of depression or generalized anxiety disorder or were at high risk for eating disorders. About half had access to Therabot, and a control group did not. Participants responded to prompts from the AI and initiated conversations, averaging about 10 messages per day.
Participants with depression experienced a 51% reduction in symptoms, the best result in the study. Those with anxiety experienced a 31% reduction, and those at risk for eating disorders saw a 19% reduction in concerns about body image and weight. These measurements are based on self-reporting through surveys, a method that’s not perfect but remains one of the best tools researchers have.
These results, Heinz says, are about what one finds in randomized control trials of psychotherapy with 16 hours of human-provided treatment, but the Therabot trial accomplished it in about half the time. “I’ve been working in digital therapeutics for a long time, and I’ve never seen levels of engagement that are prolonged and sustained at this level,” he says.
Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon, an assistant professor of health ethics at Simon Fraser University who has written about AI therapy bots but was not involved in the research, says the results are impressive but notes that just like any other clinical trial, this one doesn’t necessarily represent how the treatment would act in the real world.
“We remain far from a ‘greenlight’ for widespread clinical deployment,” he wrote in an email.
One issue is the supervision that wider deployment might require. During the beginning of the trial, Heinz says, he personally oversaw all the messages coming in from participants (who consented to the arrangement) to watch out for problematic responses from the bot. If therapy bots needed this oversight, they wouldn’t be able to reach as many people.
I asked Heinz if he thinks the results validate the burgeoning industry of AI therapy sites.
“Quite the opposite,” he says, cautioning that most don’t appear to train their models on evidence-based practices like cognitive behavioral therapy, and they likely don’t employ a team of trained researchers to monitor interactions. “I have a lot of concerns about the industry and how fast we’re moving without really kind of evaluating this,” he adds.
When AI sites advertise themselves as offering therapy in a legitimate, clinical context, Heinz says, it means they fall under the regulatory purview of the Food and Drug Administration. Thus far, the FDA has not gone after many of the sites. If it did, Heinz says, “my suspicion is almost none of them—probably none of them—that are operating in this space would have the ability to actually get a claim clearance”—that is, a ruling backing up their claims about the benefits provided.
Bélisle-Pipon points out that if these types of digital therapies are not approved and integrated into health-care and insurance systems, it will severely limit their reach. Instead, the people who would benefit from using them might seek emotional bonds and therapy from types of AI not designed for those purposes (indeed, new research from OpenAI suggests that interactions with its AI models have a very real impact on emotional well-being).
“It is highly likely that many individuals will continue to rely on more affordable, nontherapeutic chatbots—such as ChatGPT or Character.AI—for everyday needs, ranging from generating recipe ideas to managing their mental health,” he wrote.
Ryan Rouse has a formula for scaling physical retail sales. First penetrate niche markets, he says, then leverage that success into mainstream chains.
He does that with MALK Organics, an Austin, Texas-based plant milk provider. Ryan is MALK’s president, having launched and exited a meal-delivery business and served in executive roles of other consumer brands.
Our recent conversation focused on retail tactics — packaging, pricing, marketing, and more.
The entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Give us a rundown of what you do.
Ryan Rouse: I’m the president of MALK Organics, a plant-based milk company, overseeing sales, marketing, and data. I joined almost a year ago. MALK was founded in 2015 by a woman who began making the product in her home and selling it at farmers’ markets. I saw the potential, so I joined the team.
The plant-based milk category grew with the popularity of brands such as Oatly. Initially, the messaging around plant-based milk was that it’s a healthy alternative to dairy, but if you look at some of the ingredients, they aren’t necessarily good for you. Many companies present plant-based products as inherently healthy, but often that’s not the case.
For MALK, the foundation has always been about organic, clean ingredients. The original premise was to create a healthy and delicious plant-based milk option.
MALK gained traction with health-conscious consumers who appreciated this clean-label approach. Over time, competitors have entered the space, but we’ve stayed committed to our founding principles.
Before MALK, I spent 14 years in finance and then co-founded Factor, a meal delivery company, in 2013. It sold in 2020. I left the day-to-day in 2017 and have since worked with various consumer businesses, mainly in the food and beverage space.
I’ve taken on multiple roles: in-house, as a consultant, and full-time. My most recent position pre-MALK was at HighKey, a keto cookie company, where I was CMO and later CEO.
Bandholz: MALK’s prices are higher than other brands.
Rouse: Pricing comes down to logic versus emotion. Consumers are often emotional about their choices and do not always focus on cost.
For example, we didn’t think it was a big deal when MALK transitioned to natural flavors because the ingredients were still clean. However, some customers felt betrayed. Emotionally, they viewed any change negatively, even though it didn’t affect the quality.
That said, we’re one of the few companies offering a clean-label, organic, plant-based milk. Despite the premium price, we continue to experience high demand and increasing sales.
The plant-based milk category is generally declining, but MALK is growing. Being early to market was key to this growth. Timing is everything. Oatly did a great job of popularizing plant-based milk, but consumers started turning labels around and questioning the ingredients over time. That’s when they found us.
It would be much harder today to gain traction at this price point, especially with other competitors established in the market.
Bandholz: You’ve grown through physical retail channels. How did you build and scale that program?
Rouse: Our approach followed the traditional playbook for better-for-you products. We started with natural-food retailers such as Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Natural Grocers. These stores attract customers willing to pay a premium for healthier products, and their wholesale buyers understand what consumers look for.
We gained traction there with our almond and oat milks and used that success to penetrate conventional retailers such as Kroger, Albertsons, and Target.
Bandholz: What drives your retail sell-through?
Rouse: Packaging is crucial. It might not matter as much in direct-to-consumer, but it’s everything on the shelf. A product’s packaging must stand out and clearly communicate the benefits. Shoppers are walking the aisles with high intent to purchase; packaging needs to catch their eye.
Focusing marketing dollars close to the point of sale is essential for an early-stage brand. Packaging and in-store marketing materials — shelf tags, bottle neck hangers, end-of-aisle displays — grab consumers’ attention when they’re already shopping.
Discounting can boost sales, but it’s often unnecessary. The closer you can get to the point of sale, the better.
Bandholz: How do you approach branding, especially with packaging, to stand out?
Rouse: It depends on the category, how bold you want to be, and how much you want to differentiate from competitors. But above all, your promise must be clear.
Think of it like online conversion rate optimization. It’s not just about changing the button color — there’s more to it. It’s about the headline, the copy, and the main image.
What matters most is your value proposition. If you offer something genuinely different, communicate it instantly.
Then comes packaging design: What other attributes can you highlight that resonate with consumers? What’s your unique promise that sets you apart?
It’s basic copywriting — be clear and concise. If a label or seal conveys the benefits, even better. For example, the organic label is instantly recognizable. Display it prominently on your packaging.
At the recent Search Central Live NYC, Google’s John Mueller discussed the third-party quality raters they use to evaluate changes to Google’s search algorithms. Although it wasn’t stated explicitly, the nuance was implied: keeping a human in the loop remains an important factor in fine-tuning your SEO decisions.
Third Party Quality Raters
Hopefully by now everyone knows that Google employs third-party quality raters to review algorithm changes and provide feedback that can be used to judge the success of various algorithm updates and tests. They don’t actually affect the rankings of individual websites, their judgment are about the effectiveness of the algorithms which themselves affect hundreds of thousands and millions of sites across the Internet.
Ordinarily such judgment calls of whether a site is useful or not are highly subjective (a matter of personal opinion). That’s why Google created a set of guidelines for the quality raters to use so as to standardize the criteria the raters use and make their judgments more objective (like considering facts that are either true or false).
Here is, according to my notes, how John Mueller explained it:
“And one of the ways that we do that is we work together with so-called quality raters. These are external people who review the quality of search results, who review the quality of web pages to let us know, are we in a good place? Are we going in the right direction? Are the changes that we are working on actually making sense and acceptable for you?”
What’s notable about that exchange is that the whole point of judging the algorithms is whether or not they are acceptable to humans.
Mueller next introduced the topic of the quality raters guidelines and how it’s important for SEOs and publishers to read. In fact, he calls it important and encourages anyone concerned about ranking better to at least give it a scan for topics that may be important to the individual.
He continued:
“So we have a set of guidelines that we published for these quality raters, which I think is actually surprisingly important. It’s a gigantic book, something I don’t know, 180 pages long. But it’s a lot of guidelines where we kind of draw out what we think makes sense for quality raters to review with regards to the content. And this is publicly available. You can look at it yourself as well.
I think for most websites it makes sense at least have gone through it, or maybe control F and search through it for keywords that you care about just so that you have a sense of what Google is thinking when they’re making changes.”
The Quality Raters Guidelines Is Not A Handbook Of Ranking Factors
Three are many SEOs who have spread the misinformation that the quality raters guidelines offers a peek into what Google is using for ranking websites. That’s false.
Mueller continues (my paraphrase):
“Obviously quality rater guidelines is not a document that says like, this is how we do ranking, but more just, this is how we review things on the web when we ask for input from these quality raters.
They do a number of different tasks for us and so one of them is page quality where they tell us like, is this a high quality page or not? Another one is to evaluate whether the pages that we show in the search results meet the needs of a user. Which is highly subjective sometimes, but we give them information on what they can do there and the other one is A/B testing, side-by-side testing where we present quality raters with a set of pages before and a set of pages afterwards, and they tell us which one of these is actually better.”
Humans In The Loop
The important takeaway from Mueller’s discussion about the quality raters and the guidelines they use is that how humans react to the search results is at the heart of what Google is doing with their algorithms. Some people tend to think of Google’s algorithms as mechanical machines that are cranking out search results and that’s pretty much what they are but they’re also emulating human judgment about what is and is not spam, what is and is not a high quality search result.
Rote SEO is highly focused on feeding the machine but the machine itself is emulating human judgment. SEO today is more than ever about considering how every choice made about a site affects humans and less about worrying about whether you’ve got enough entity keywords on a page and if the H1 heading is missing.
Human Judgment Is Core to Google’s Algorithm Development
Quality raters are used to judge whether algorithm changes make search results better for people. Algorithms are adjusted based on human reactions, not by machine metrics.
Quality Raters Guidelines Reflect Google’s Values
Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines are not a ranking manual. They define what Google considers useful, high-quality content. They can serve as a mirror that business owners and SEOs can hold up to their own content to see how it aligns with Google’s criteria for high quality.
SEO Today Is About Human Experience
The deeper message buried in what Mueller was talking about is that Google’s algorithms are trying to emulate human judgment, so SEOs should focus on user experience and usefulness, not checklists or busy-work like adding author bios with superfluous information that does nothing for site visitors.
At Search Central Live NYC, Google’s John Mueller revisited the statistic that 15% of search queries Google sees are completely brand new and have never been encountered. He also addressed what impact the advent of AI has had on the number of novel search queries users are making today.
Understanding Language
Understanding language is important to serving relevant search queries. That means Google needs to understand the nuances of what people mean when they search, which could include unconventional use of specific words or complete misuse of words. BERT is an example of a technology that Google uses to understand user queries.
“We see billions of searches every day, and 15 percent of those queries are ones we haven’t seen before–so we’ve built ways to return results for queries we can’t anticipate.
…Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”
Are There More Unknown Search Queries?
In the context of an overview of Google Search John Mueller briefly discussed the statistic of new queries Google search sees and if LLMs have made any impact.
This is, according to my notes, what he said:
“15% of all queries are new every day. This is something that I’m surprised is still the case. I would have thought at some point most of the searches would have been made people just ask the same thing over and over again.
But when when we recalculate these metrics, it’s always around 15%. I imagined maybe with LLM’s and the AI systems that maybe it would be a bit higher in recent years but it’s still hovering around that number..”
He then speculated why that 15% number remains the same, attributing it to things are always changing and that life is not static.
My paraphrase of what Mueller observed:
“It’s fantastic to see because it means to me that people keep going to search and looking for something new… and if people would stop going to search or stop searching new things, and to me that would be a sign that maybe something is wrong here. So this is a great number.”
Curious Outcome
It’s amazing that something as groundbreaking like AI search and the ability to search visually would have added more complex searches that Google has never seen before but that 15% number keeps holding steady.
Every social media platform has their own nuances and it’s important to spend time on the channel to get used to the ‘language’ of interacting. For example, how you would connect and communicate on LinkedIn is very different to TikTok.
However, there are fundamental rules that will help you to engage and gain more followers that work across all social media channels.
Let’s have a look at 15 ways that can help you to get more social media followers and maximise social for your brand.
1. Craft A Purpose-Driven Brand Identity
Your brand identity is the foundation of your social media presence. It should show in everything you post, from images to captions.
Create a clear and consistent personality that matches your values and connects with your audience. For example, the sustainable fashion brand Everlane focuses on transparency and ethics. Their social media posts highlights these values by showcasing factory workers and sharing details about their supply chain, which has built a loyal following.
For B2Bs however, the goal can be simple and concise, focusing on helping the user save time.
Airtable states in theirLinkedIn profile that their platform “empowers people closest to the work to accelerate their most critical business processes.” This is backed up with every post being aligned to teaching the audience how to simplify their workflow, user group virtual meetings, and automation tips. This alignment is helping to build rapport for their 155k+ followers.
Your content should reflect your brand voice in a trustworthy way. Avoid sounding generic or overly sales-focused. Connect emotionally by sharing your mission and the reasons behind what you do.
2. Deliver Value Through Exceptional Content
To attract attention on social media, create high-quality content that educates, inspires, entertains, or solves problems.
Instead of just promoting your products, focus on providing real value.
Use a mix of formats to engage your audience, such as:
Short videos (Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts).
Carousels and infographics.
User-generated content.
Polls and quizzes.
Blog posts and articles.
Behind-the-scenes looks.
Interviews with influencers.
Live videos.
Diversifying your content keeps your feed exciting and meets various audience needs. To extend your reach, repurpose key content across different platforms.
For example, Canva shares relatable behind-the-scenes and quizzes on Instagram that spark lengthy discussions in the comments section, along with engaging visuals, while Notion keeps their Instagram page fresh with product memes and reels that subtly highlight their product.
Diversify your strategy by incorporating both static and video formats across platforms to identify what resonates most with your audience.
3. Be Consistent
To grow on social media, be consistent. Create a reliable posting schedule to keep your audience engaged.
Then, you can adjust your frequency based on your audience’s preferences.
A content calendar helps you stay organized and connect your social media with marketing plans. Plan to coordinate themes and avoid last-minute scrambles.
Automation tools can help with scheduling. Allow flexibility to keep your content authentic and engage with your audience in real time.
4. Engage Proactively With Your Community
Social media is a two-way street. You need to engage with your followers, not just post content.
Respond thoughtfully to comments and questions, even to say thank you. Asking for feedback is a great way to spark conversations.
Spend time each day interacting with others in your field. Like and comment on relevant posts, and share helpful content from various sources.
Participate in groups where your audience is active. Answering questions showcases your expertise and builds relationships.
For example, Wise has a strong online community. Their team replies to every follower with friendly comments, while also addressing product complaints making customers feel valued. This builds loyalty.
Also, provide excellent customer service on social media. Many people turn to these platforms to resolve issues. Respond quickly and show empathy.
5. Embrace Short-Form Video
Short-form video has exploded in popularity, which are 2.5 times more likely to get engagement. These snackable, 15-to 60-second clips are highly engaging and can help your content reach viewers far beyond your existing follower base.
Currently, the leading platforms for short-form video content are TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. You can read our comparison of these platforms here to help you identify where your key vertical will have the greatest impact.
Platform algorithms like Instagram and Facebook prioritize video content, meaning posting Reels can significantly boost your reach and discoverability. Instagram Head Adam Mosseri stated that Reels generates the most content views from accounts the user doesn’t follow.
So, what makes a compelling short video? Storytelling is key. You must immediately grab attention and communicate your message before the viewer scrolls away.
Focus on a single idea and use text overlays, voiceovers, and on-screen captions to enhance the story. Trending audio tracks and filters can help your Reels gain traction.
Potential short-form video ideas for your brand could include:
Quick how-to tutorials.
Product demos or styling tips.
Behind-the-scenes glimpses.
Employee/founder spotlights.
User-generated content.
Influencer takeovers.
For example, West Elm, a home decor retailer, often posts short videos on Instagram with styling tips and DIY ideas.
The content provides value and inspiration to their audience of design lovers while subtly showcasing West Elm products in action.
Authenticity and entertainment should be the focus over a hard sales pitch.
6. Optimize For Search & Discoverability
To boost your social media reach, follow social SEO best practices to leverage relevant keywords to your posts and profile. This will help people searching for topics related to your brand find you.
Include keywords in your captions, and hashtags on visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. For longer content on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, use keywords in your post text, hashtags and alt text for images.
Keywords should reflect your niche, products, brand name, or the problems you solve. Your social analytics can help reveal common search terms.
Hashtags also help with discovery. Find popular hashtags used by your audience and industry influencers. Use a mix of trending and niche-specific hashtags to connect with interested viewers.
To enhance your social SEO, consider these tips:
Complete your profile with a clear bio including keywords that are relevant.
Add relevant alt text to your images.
Use location tags.
Link to your social profiles from your website.
Encourage user engagement through shares, likes, comments, and saves.
Get mentions and backlinks from prominent accounts.
7. Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content (UGC) is a great way to grow your social media presence. UGC includes posts, images, videos, and reviews created by your customers or fans, not your brand.
UGC serves as genuine social proof. When potential customers see others recommending your products, it builds trust. This type of content is often more persuasive than branded messages.
In fact, 56% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after seeing it featured in a positive and relatable way through UGC.
It also provides fresh content for your social media, saving you time and effort. It encourages customer participation and helps spread the word.
To encourage more UGC, you can:
Create a branded hashtag.
Run a contest for sharing photos or videos of your products.
Offer rewards for reviews or content.
Share customer content on your social media and website.
Partner with influencers.
For example, Airbnb’s #AirbnbExperiences hashtag collects a lot of UGC as users share their unique stays.
Airbnb reposts this content, which provides inspiration and social proof while reducing its content needs.
Always credit the original creator and get permission when reposting UGC. Showing appreciation encourages more contributions.
8. Collaborate With Aligned Partners
Partnering with influencers and brands that share your values can help you grow your audience. Collaborations allow you to reach their followers, who may be interested in your products or services.
To find suitable partners, look for those whose audience matches your target customers. For example, a natural skincare brand could collaborate with a wellness influencer.
You can structure collaborations in several ways:
Provide products to influencers in exchange for social media coverage.
Host joint social media giveaways.
Run affiliate programs or discount codes.
Create co-branded content, like a video series.
Write sponsored posts for other brands.
Organize takeovers, where partners post on your account.
Build ongoing relationships with select influencers.
When collaborating, ensure you have a contract that outlines content expectations, timelines, payment, and results.
Review potential partners by checking their engagement, audience demographics, and brand fit.
9. Offer Exclusive Value To Followers
Offering exclusive perks to your social media followers helps encourage them to follow you and stay engaged. When users know they can get valuable content or offers, they’re likelier to hit the follow button.
Here are some follower-only perks you can consider:
Early access to product launches.
Special discount codes.
Exclusive content (guides, templates, webinars).
Giveaways or contests.
Live Q&A sessions.
Sneak peeks of upcoming products.
VIP events.
Private groups.
For example, on LinkedIn, Slack alerts its 2 million followers to new features or alerts them to upcoming webinars and quick key takeaways which creates excitement and makes online professionals feel valued. In this example, they introduce their new Agentforce 2.0, which gathered around 250 reposts.
Promote these offers in your bios and captions. Teaser content can also attract new followers. Just remember to deliver real value.
10. Incorporate Social Media Advertising
While organic strategies are essential for social media, paid ads can help you grow faster.
Social media algorithms make it harder to reach people without spending money, but paid ads ensure that your best content reaches the right audience.
Choose ad types that build brand awareness, like Facebook’s “Brand Awareness” and “Reach” campaigns, which often cost less per click.
Create lookalike audiences based on your best customers to target users with similar interests. You can also run a follower campaign by offering a coupon or free resource in exchange for subscriptions.
Retarget users who have engaged with your organic content, as they’re already familiar with your brand.
For example, Headspace used animated video ads on Instagram to showcase meditation benefits and reached a broader audience by targeting specific customer profiles.
Make sure your ad content is engaging and valuable. Focus on storytelling and boost your top organic posts for greater visibility.
11. Prioritize Social Listening
Listening to your audience is crucial. It helps you understand their feelings and address issues early. Monitor what people say about your brand and industry through mentions, comments, and keywords.
Respond thoughtfully to questions and feedback to build trust. Thank users for positive comments and address complaints quickly.
If you can’t resolve an issue immediately, let customers know you are listening and will investigate.
Follow relevant hashtags and join industry groups to engage with broader conversations in your field. Sharing helpful insights can establish your expertise and attract followers.
Use third-party tools to track mentions, monitor sentiment, and organize messages. They can help you find important messages that need quick replies and better understand your audience.
12. Seize Timely Trends & Events
Connecting social media to cultural events, holidays, and trends can boost your reach and engagement. Social media users enjoy engaging in timely conversations, so find authentic ways to participate.
We recommend updating content about a month before an event to capitalize on search interest. You can also include trending topics or memes if they fit your brand.
Timeliness is key, so a flexible content process is important.
Be cautious about blindly following trends. Joining trends that don’t align with your brand can seem forced. Consider whether the trend matches your audience’s interests. If it doesn’t, it’s best to skip it.
Spotify does it well by providing official playlists to events like the Grammys and Coachella which is highly aligned with its core audience. It creates personalized festival recaps for users based on their listening habits and uses humour in their references to popular shows and music.
13. Embrace New Platforms & Features
To stay ahead and connect with new audiences, explore new platforms, and try innovative features. Early adopters often gain a competitive advantage.
For example, brands that joined TikTok early benefited from its rapid growth and gained extra visibility. Being one of the first to use a new platform helps you establish yourself before the market gets crowded.
However, be thoughtful and selective. Only some new social media apps are worth your time. Check if the platform’s audience matches yours and if its style fits your brand. Observe user interactions and look for marketing opportunities.
Shopify quickly adopted TikTok Shop and launched a shoppable livestream campaign with small business owners. Although exact figures on its success are not publicly available, TikTok Shop has become a key player in retail social commerce, with the industry expected to generate $144 billion in sales by 2025.
By being first to move and embrace what was a new feature, Shopify reached a fresh audience and positioned themselves as an innovative brand.
14. Build Exclusive Communities
Gated social media communities, such as private Facebook groups, Slack workspaces, or Discord channels, help you build stronger relationships with loyal fans. Unlike busy public feeds, these groups allow for focused conversations.
When customers feel valued, they are more likely to remain loyal and promote your brand.
For example, you might create a private Slack group for top customers and offer exclusive product launches and events. And, with over 20% of global social media users citing Livestreaming as their primary reason for engaging online, it plays a crucial role in building community.
Livestreaming is particularly important for brands in the APAC region, where research by GMI shows that APAC social media shoppers are more inclined to endorse brands that provide live shopping experiences.
So, look to build a community that works best in your region, and invite your most engaged customers, email subscribers, or social media followers to join. To encourage sign-ups, offer promotions such as free trials or discounts.
Over time, your community can provide valuable insights, beta testers for new products, and generate word-of-mouth marketing.
15. Analyze & Refine Your Strategy
Tracking your social media performance is crucial for long-term growth. Use the analytics tools on each platform to check key metrics like:
Follower growth rate.
Reach and impressions.
Post views.
Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares).
Click-through rate.
Popular content topics.
Audience demographics.
Look for trends. Do certain content types get more engagement? Are specific days or times better for activity? What do your best posts share in common?
Use these insights to improve your strategy. Make data-based decisions, but also try new ideas. Social media is constantly changing, so adapt your approach as needed.
According to CMI, 55% of B2B content marketers find it a challenge to drive conversions through content. So, ensure your content team is equipped with the tools needed to create, optimize, and track content on social media.
Consider investing in paid tools to compare your performance with competitors. Learning from successful leaders can inspire new ideas and help you set achievable growth goals.
It’s Time To Build A Strong Social Media Presence
Focus on authentic branding, quality content, community engagement, and data-driven improvements to build a successful social media presence.
To grow an engaged audience, use short-form videos, partner with suitable influencers, and offer exclusive benefits.
As you develop your social media, remember to:
Stay true to your brand values.
Provide real value, not just promotions.
Listen to your community to build trust.
Measure and adjust your tactics based on data.
Explore new platforms and features.
Be patient and consistent. Building loyalty takes time, but these relationships will support your brand’s success. Keep refining your strategy to maximize your social media impact.
Google’s Search Liaison answered a question at Google Search Central Live NYC about whether Google prefers brands. Sullivan took that as an opportunity to affirm that Google is working to show more independent sites and also offered insights into how independent sites can improve their search performance.
Google Wants Good Independent Sites To Rank
Someone at the Search Central Live NYC event submitted a question asking whether Google was focusing on just showing a smaller set of sites from the Internet that’s limited to big brand sites. Danny Sullivan, aka Google Search Liaison, immediately responded, no. He responded that he understands that there’s a sense that big brands always rank well on Google and that many people say that Google only wants to show big brands.
Google Search Central Live New York City
Sullivan acknowledged that this is a valid concern from small independent sites because there are many who are doing good work who aren’t ranking as well as they should be and explained that they were working on it.
The following is a paraphrase based on my notes:
“And we’ve been spending a lot of time (and we’re going to continue to spend a lot of time) to understand how can we do a better job on better understanding and perhaps guiding some of the smaller creators and small independent sites so they can be successful. It has been like a huge chunk of my time over the past year. And I’m not alone in it.
We were just in Zurich last week. We were just out there and we were looking at a bunch of real queries from small creators, independent sites and sitting with the ranking team and going through them and what’s happening here and …we made a note that you know, we have done some changes that we think help and we have done some changes that have helped. We also anticipate working through the whole rest of the year.”
Why Changes Are Incremental
Danny explained that independent sites and their topic areas vary widely which complicates applying a single algorithmic solution to help them all. That explains why Google keeps saying they’re making incremental changes.
According to my notes, he said:
“One of the things I would say is I don’t expect you’re going to suddenly see one day we do a big huge, ‘And here is the independent small site update’ type of thing. I think it’s going be these incremental things that we do, in part because these kinds of sites are not monolithic.”
That Thing You Need To Know About Brands
Danny discussed how serious they are about finding solutions for independent publishers and eventually began speaking of more tangible things that publishers can do to help themselves, specifically about becoming memorable to site visitors.
This is something that I’ve been doing for over twenty years. I never rolled out an affiliate or AdSense site that didn’t have a carefully planned domain name, logo and mascot in place. That mascot is super important because it helps make the site memorable to site users. They’ll forget the domain name but they’ll remember that mascot and the site.
Danny said that Google’s systems are not tuned to identify big brands and rank them well. He acknowledged that sites with a lot of branded searches might rank well and this is the point where it felt like okay, am I really hearing this? It’s the kind of information you come to these events for.
This is a paraphrase from my notes of what Danny said:
“And I’ve seen where people do research and say, ‘I’ve figured out that if you have a lot of branded searches…’ That’s kind of valid in some sense.
But it’s not like you have a lot of big branded searchers or small branded searchers or whatever and you’re finding that correlates to your traffic. What it’s saying is that people have recognized you as a brand, which is a good thing. We like brands. Some brands we don’t like, but at least we recognize them, right?
So if you’re trying to be found in the sea of content and you have the 150,000th fried chicken recipe, it’s very difficult to understand which ones of those are necessarily better than anybody else’s out there.
But if you are recognized as a brand in your field, big, small, whatever, just a brand, then that’s important.
That correlates with a lot of signals of perhaps success with search. Not that you’re a brand but that people are recognizing you. People may be coming to you directly, people, may be referring to you in lots of different ways… You’re not just sort of this anonymous type of thing.
So, one thing I would encourage anybody, but especially to smaller and independent ones that are kind of feeling like the big brands are kind of getting it all is, are you making sure that people understand who you are?”
Differentiate Yourself. A Lot.
Danny Sullivan discussed that users submitted over 13,000 sites with feedback about Google’s algorithm and claimed that he’s confident that he’s looked at more sites than any SEO in the audience has. He acknowledged that many of the submissions had valid concerns but he also said he noticed that some sites that were high quality also lacked that extra bit that made them different and better.
What he was referring to, in my words, not Danny’s, was a clear narrative on the page that lets site visitors know who is behind the site. He wasn’t talking about the sidebar with the bio and a photo that travel and recipe sites all have. He was talking about something that goes beyond the generic narrative that many bloggers use.
This is a paraphrase from my notes about what Danny said:
“I can land on a site and have no idea who runs the site, what the site is about. Who’s behind it? That’s not to say that if you put an ‘about us’ link on your site that now you’ll rank better. But people come to websites from Search and they don’t know what they’re getting into.”
He then contrasted social media to search to show how a forum or a social media site offers a carefully curated experience where you know where everything is at, where expectations are managed. He then said that Search is completely different. While Danny didn’t explicitly say this, I believe what he meant to communicate was that the randomness of sites that Google sends people to can be jarring to users who consequently aren’t sure whether to trust a site. It’s a different experience than the carefully curated experience of a forum or social media site and for that reason it’s important to be able to give a sense of who is behind the site.
This is a paraphrase of what Danny said:
“Search is nothing like that. Search is a grab bag. It’s weird. You don’t know what you’re going to get. It’s like I’m feeling lucky. You don’t know what you’re going to end up with.”
And please, I beg you, especially those of you that said that Google wants everything to be the same. That’s not what we want. We don’t want every website to be a cookie cutter site.
We want you to build websites that you think makes sense for your readers.
Anytime you ever have a question about what you should be doing to be successful in Google search and your answer is to ask if it’s a good thing for your readers, if you do that, you are aligning with the things we’re trying to do because we’re trying to send people to satisfying content so that they go, ‘This was great! This is wonderful, I loved it!’
So when they wind up on your website, probably for the first time and they don’t know you from anything and they’re coming from this crazy world where they don’t even know where the profiling for the author is, make it easy for them. Make it easy for them to come into the site and know exactly what you’re about.
I know the travel bloggers, you all have the thing on the side that says, ‘we love travelling the world…’ It’s like, OK, that’s fine and at least people know to expect that from travel bloggers and you’ve got it there.
But help them understand what’s unique or different about you, that makes you a brand. And that is a really good thing.”
Insights From Search Central Live NYC
Google Actively Supports Independent Sites
Danny Sullivan said multiple times that Google is spending a significant amount of time into improving the algorithm so that more independent publishers will attain visibility in search. However these improvements are incremental because of the wide variety of sites and topics makes it so that one change won’t affect all sites equally.
Brand Recognition Drives Search Success
Being recognized as a brand to site visitors is a quality that highly successful sites tend to have. It’s not that cultivating a brand is a ranking factor, but rather that cultivating site users leads to stronger search signals.
Differentiation Is Important
Some high-quality sites fail to stand out because they do what they think they do what everyone else is doing. Site visitors may appreciate more effort to make it clearer who is behind the site. An example of something to consider avoiding are things like rote generic bios in favor of providing a real sense of why the site is important or matters.
Clarity Builds Trust
Recognize that the web has an element of randomness that make some site visitors wary about visiting a site for the first time. Design with this understanding in mind.
Design for the Reader, Not the Algorithm
One of the most common mistakes I see by publishers is that they can list all of the things they did for SEO but very little if anything that they did for their site visitors. Danny Sullivan recommends basing decisions on whether a change is good for the site visitors because that will align it with the kinds of sites Google wants to rank.
Heading north in the dark, the only way Gavesh could try to track his progress through the Thai countryside was by watching the road signs zip by. The Jeep’s three occupants—Gavesh, a driver, and a young Chinese woman—had no languages in common, so they drove for hours in nervous silence as they wove their way out of Bangkok and toward Mae Sot, a city on Thailand’s western border with Myanmar.
When they reached the city, the driver pulled off the road toward a small hotel, where another car was waiting. “I had some suspicions—like, why are we changing vehicles?” Gavesh remembers. “But it happened so fast.”
They left the highway and drove on until, in total darkness, they parked at what looked like a private house. “We stopped the vehicle. There were people gathered. Maybe 10 of them. They took the luggage and they asked us to come,” Gavesh says. “One was going in front, there was another one behind, and everyone said: ‘Go, go, go.’”
Gavesh and the Chinese woman were marched through the pitch-black fields by flashlight to a riverside where a boat was moored. By then, it was far too late to back out.
Gavesh’s journey had started, seemingly innocently, with a job ad on Facebook promising work he desperately needed.
Instead, he found himself trafficked into a business commonly known as “pig butchering”—a form of fraud in which scammers form romantic or other close relationships with targets online and extract money from them. The Chinese crime syndicates behind the scams have netted billions of dollars, and they have used violence and coercion to force their workers, many of them people trafficked like Gavesh, to carry out the frauds from large compounds, several of which operate openly in the quasi-lawless borderlands of Myanmar.
We spoke to Gavesh and five other workers from inside the scam industry, as well as anti-trafficking experts and technology specialists. Their testimony reveals how global companies, including American social media and dating apps and international cryptocurrency and messaging platforms, have given the fraud business the means to become industrialized. By the same token, it is Big Tech that may hold the key to breaking up the scam syndicates—if only these companies can be persuaded or compelled to act.
We’re identifying Gavesh using a pseudonym to protect his identity. He is from a country in South Asia, one he asked us not to name. He hasn’t shared his story much, and he still hasn’t told his family. He worries about how they’d handle it.
Until the pandemic, he had held down a job in the tourism industry. But lockdowns had gutted the sector, and two years later he was working as a day laborer to support himself and his father and sister. “I was fed up with my life,” he says. “I was trying so hard to find a way to get out.”
When he saw the Facebook post in mid-2022, it seemed like a godsend. A company in Thailand was looking for English-speaking customer service and data entry specialists. The monthly salary was $1,500—far more than he could earn at home—with meals, travel costs, a visa, and accommodation included. “I knew if I got this job, my life would turn around. I would be able to give my family a good life,” Gavesh says.
What came next was life-changing, but not in the way Gavesh had hoped. The advert was a fraud—and a classic tactic syndicates use to force workers like Gavesh into an economy that operates as something like a dark mirror of the global outsourcing industry.
The true scale of this type of fraud is hard to estimate, but the United Nations reported in 2023 that hundreds of thousands of people had been trafficked to work as online scammers in Southeast Asia. One 2024 study, from the University of Texas, estimates that the criminal syndicates that run these businesses have stolen at least $75 billion since 2020.
These schemes have been going on for more than two decades, but they’ve started to capture global attention only recently, as the syndicates running them increasingly shift from Chinese targets toward the West. And even as investigators, international organizations, and journalists gradually pull back the curtain on the brutal conditions inside scamming compounds and document their vast scale, what is far less exposed is the pivotal role platforms owned by Big Tech play throughout the industry—from initially coercing individuals to become scammers to, finally, duping scam targets out of their life savings.
As losses mount, governments and law enforcement agencies have looked for ways to disrupt the syndicates, which have become adept at using ungoverned spaces in lawless borderlands and partnering with corrupt regimes. But on the whole, the syndicates have managed to stay a step ahead of law enforcement—in part by relying on services from the world’s tech giants. Apple iPhones are their preferred scamming tools. Meta-owned Facebook and WhatsApp are used to recruit people into forced labor, as is Telegram. Social media and messaging platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, and X, provide spaces for scammers to find and lure targets. So do dating apps, including Tinder. Some of the scam compounds have their own Starlink terminals. And cryptocurrencies like tether and global crypto platforms like Binance have allowed the criminal operations to move money with little or no oversight.
Scam workers sit inside Myanmar’s KK Park, a notorious fraud hub near the border with Thailand, following a recent crackdown by law enforcement.
REUTERS
“Private-sector corporations are, unfortunately, inadvertently enabling this criminal industry,” says Andrew Wasuwongse, the Thailand country director at the anti-trafficking nonprofit International Justice Mission (IJM). “The private sector holds significant tools and responsibility to disrupt and prevent its further growth.”
Yet while the tech sector has, slowly, begun to roll out anti-scam tools and policies, experts in human trafficking, platform integrity, and cybercrime tell us that these measures largely focus on the downstream problem: the losses suffered by the victims of the scams. That approach overlooks the other set of victims, often from lower-income countries, at the far end of a fraud “supply chain” that is built on human misery—and on Big Tech. Meanwhile, the scams continue on a mass scale.
Tech companies could certainly be doing more to crack down, the experts say. Even relatively small interventions, they argue, could start to erode the business model of the scam syndicates; with enough of these, the whole business could start to founder.
“The trick is: How do you make it unprofitable?” says Eric Davis, a platform integrity expert and senior vice president of special projects at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), a think tank in California. “How do you create enough friction?”
That question is only becoming more urgent as many tech companies pull back on efforts to moderate their platforms, artificial intelligence supercharges scam operations, and the Trump administration signals broad support for deregulation of the tech sector while withdrawing support from organizations that study the scams and support the victims. All these trends may further embolden the syndicates. And even as the human costs keep building, global governments exert ineffectual pressure—if any at all—on the tech sector to turn its vast financial and technical resources against a criminal economy that has thrived in the spaces Silicon Valley built.
Capturing a vulnerable workforce
The roots of “pig butchering” scams reach back to the offshore gambling industry that emerged from China in the early 2000s. Online casinos had become hugely popular in China, but the government cracked down, forcing the operators to relocate to Cambodia, the Philippines, Laos, and Myanmar. There, they could continue to target Chinese gamblers with relative impunity. Over time, the casinos began to use social media to entice people back home, deploying scam-like tactics that frequently centered on attractive and even nude dealers.
The doubts didn’t really start until after Gavesh reached Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport. As time ticked by, it began to occur to him that he was alone, with no money, no return ticket, and no working SIM card.
“Often the romance scam was a part of that—building romantic relationships with people that you eventually would aim to hook,” says Jason Tower, Myanmar country director at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), a research and diplomacy organization funded by the US government, who researches the cyber scam industry. (USIP’s leadership was recently targeted by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force, leaving the organization’s future uncertain; its website, which previously housed its research, is also currently offline.)
By the late 2010s, many of the casinos were big, professional operations. Gradually, says Tower, the business model turned more sinister, with a tactic called sha zhu pan in Chinese emerging as a core strategy. Scamming operatives work to “fatten up” or cultivate a target by building a relationship before going in for the “slaughter”—persuading them to invest in a supposedly once-in-a-lifetime scheme and then absconding with the money. “That actually ended up being much, much more lucrative than online gambling,” Tower says. (The international law enforcement organization Interpol no longer uses the graphic term “pig butchering,” citing concerns that it dehumanizes and stigmatizes victims.)
Like other online industries, the romance scamming business was supercharged by the pandemic. There were simply more isolated people to defraud, and more people out of work who might be persuaded to try scamming others—or who were vulnerable to being trafficked into the industry.
Initially, most of the workers carrying out the frauds were Chinese, as were the fraud victims. But after the government in Beijing tightened travel restrictions, making it hard to recruit Chinese laborers, the syndicates went global. They started targeting more Western markets and turning, Tower says, to “much more malign types of approaches to tricking people into scam centers.”
Getting recruited
Gavesh was scrolling through Facebook when he saw the ad. He sent his résumé to a Telegram contact number. A human resources representative replied and had him demonstrate his English and typing skills over video. It all felt very professional. “I didn’t have any reason to suspect,” he says.
The doubts didn’t really start until after he reached Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport. After being met at arrivals by a man who spoke no English, he was left to wait. As time ticked by, it began to occur to Gavesh that he was alone, with no money, no return ticket, and no working SIM card. Finally, the Jeep arrived to pick him up.
Hours later, exhausted, he was on a boat crossing the Moei River from Thailand into Myanmar. On the far bank, a group was waiting. One man was in military uniform and carried a gun. “In my country, if we see an army guy when we are in trouble, we feel safe,” Gavesh says. “So my initial thoughts were: Okay, there’s nothing to be worried about.”
They hiked a kilometer across a sodden paddy field and emerged at the other side caked in mud. There a van was parked, and the driver took them to what he called, in broken English, “the office.” They arrived at the gate of a huge compound, surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire.
While some people are drawn into online scamming directly by friends and relatives, Facebook is, according to IJM’s Wasuwongse, the most common entry point for people recruited on social media.
Meta has known for years that its platforms host this kind of content. Back in 2019, the BBC exposed “slave markets” that were running on Instagram; in 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported, drawing on documents leaked by a whistleblower, that Meta had long struggled to rein in the problem but took meaningful action only after Apple threatened to pull Instagram from its app store.
Today, years on, ads like the one that Gavesh responded to are still easy to find on Facebook if you know what to look for.
Examples of fraudulent Facebook ads, shared by International Justice Mission.
They are typically posted in job seekers’ groups and usually seem to be advertising legitimate jobs in areas like customer service. They offer attractive wages, especially for people with language skills—usually English or Chinese.
The traffickers tend to finish the recruitment process on encrypted or private messaging apps. In our research, many experts said that Telegram, which is notorious for hosting terrorist content, child sexual abuse material, and other communication related to criminal activity, was particularly problematic. Many spoke with a combination of anger and resignation about its apparent lack of interest in working with them to address the problem; Mina Chiang, founder of Humanity Research Consultancy, an anti-trafficking organization, accuses the app of being “very much complicit” in human trafficking and “proactively facilitating” these scams. (Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.)
But while Telegram users have the option of encrypting their messages end to end, making them almost impossible to monitor, social media companies are of course able to access users’ posts. And it’s here, at the beginning of the romance scam supply chain, where Big Tech could arguably make its most consequential intervention.
Social media is monitored by a combination of human moderators and AI systems, which help flag users and content—ads, posts, pages—that break the law or violate the companies’ own policies. Dangerous content is easiest to police when it follows predictable patterns or is posted by users acting in distinctive and suspicious ways.
“They have financial resources. You can hire the most talented coding engineers in the world. Why can’t you just find people who understand the issue properly?”
Anti-trafficking experts say the scam advertising tends to follow formulaic templates and use common language, and that they routinely report the ads to Meta and point out the markers they have identified. Their hope is that this information will be fed into the data sets that train the content moderation models.
While individual ads may be taken down, even in big waves—last November, Meta said it had purged 2 million accounts connected to scamming syndicates over the previous year—experts say that Facebook still continues to be used in recruiting. And new ads keep appearing.
(In response to a request for comment, a Meta spokesperson shared links to policies about bans on content or advertisements that facilitate human trafficking, as well as company blog posts telling users how to protect themselves from romance scams and sharing details about the company’s efforts to disrupt fraud on its platforms, one stating that it is “constantly rolling out new product features to help protect people on [its] apps from known scam tactics at scale.” The spokesperson also said that WhatsApp has spam detection technology, and millions of accounts are banned per month.)
Anti-trafficking experts we spoke with say that as recently as last fall, Meta was engaging with them and had told them it was ramping up its capabilities. But Chiang says there still isn’t enough urgency from tech companies. “There’s a question about speed. They might be able to say That’s the goal for the next two years. No. But that’s not fast enough. We need it now,” she says. “They have financial resources. You can hire the most talented coding engineers in the world. Why can’t you just find people who understand the issue properly?”
Part of the answer comes down to money, according to experts we spoke with. Scaling up content moderation and other processes that could cause users to be kicked off a platform requires not only technological staff but also legal and policy experts—which not everyone sees as worth the cost.
“The vast majority of these companies are doing the minimum or less,” says Tower of USIP. “If not properly incentivized, either through regulatory action or through exposure by media or other forms of pressure … often, these companies will underinvest in keeping their platforms safe.”
Getting set up
Gavesh’s new “office” turned out to be one of the most infamous scamming hubs in Southeast Asia: KK Park in Myanmar’s Myawaddy region. Satellite imagery shows it as a densely packed cluster of buildings, surrounded by fields. Most of it has been built since late 2019.
Inside, it runs like a hybrid of a company campus and a prison.
When Gavesh arrived, he handed over his phone and passport and was assigned to a dormitory and an employer. He was allowed his own phone back only for short periods, and his calls were monitored. Security was tight. He had to pass through airport-style metal detectors when he went in or out of the office. Black-uniformed personnel patrolled the buildings, while armed men in combat fatigues watched the perimeter fences from guard posts.
On his first full day, he was put in front of a computer with just four documents on it, which he had to read over and over—guides on how to approach strangers. On his second day, he learned to build fake profiles on social media and dating apps. The trick was to find real people on Instagram or Facebook who were physically attractive, posted often, and appeared to be wealthy and living “a luxurious life,” he says, and use their photos to build a new account: “There are so many Instagram models that pretend they have a lot of money.”
After Gavesh was trafficked into Myanmar, he was taken to KK Park. Most of the compound has been built since late 2019.
LUKE DUGGLEBY/REDUX
Next, he was given a batch of iPhone 8s—most people on his team used between eight and 10 devices each—loaded with local SIM cards and apps that spoofed their location so that they appeared to be in the US. Using male and female aliases, he set up dozens of accounts on Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, and X and profiles on several dating platforms, though he can’t remember exactly which ones.
Different scamming operations teach different techniques for finding and reaching out to potential victims, several people who worked in the compounds tell us. Some people used direct approaches on dating apps, Facebook, Instagram, or—for those targeting Chinese victims—WeChat. One worker from Myanmar sent out mass messages on WhatsApp, pretending to have accidentally messaged a wrong number, in the hope of striking up a conversation. (Tencent, which owns WeChat, declined to comment.)
Some scamming workers we spoke to were told to target white, middle-aged or older men in Western countries who seemed to be well off. Gavesh says he would pretend to be white men and women, using information found from Google to add verisimilitude to his claims of living in, say, Miami Beach. He would chat with the targets, trying to figure out from their jobs, spending habits, and ambitions whether they’d be worth investing time in.
One South African woman, trafficked to Myanmar in 2022, says she was given a script and told to pose as an Asian woman living in Chicago. She was instructed to study her assigned city and learn quotidian details about life there. “They kept on punishing people all the time for not knowing or for forgetting that they’re staying in Chicago,” she says, “or for forgetting what’s Starbucks or what’s [a] latte.”
Fake users have, of course, been a problem on social media platforms and dating sites for years. Some platforms, such as X, allow practically anyone to create accounts and even to have them verified for a fee. Others, including Facebook, have periodically conducted sweeps to get rid of fake accounts engaged in what Meta calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” (X did not respond to requests for comment.)
But scam workers tell us they were advised on simple ways to circumvent detection mechanisms on social media. They were given basic training in how to avoid suspicious behavior such as adding too many contacts too quickly, which might trigger the company to review whether someone’s profile is authentic. The South African woman says she was shown how to manipulate the dates on a Facebook account “to seem as if you opened the account in 2019 or whatever,” making it easier to add friends. (Meta’s spam filters—meant to reduce the spread of unwanted content—include limits on friend requests and bulk messaging.)
Wang set up a Tinder profile with a picture of a dog and a bio that read, “I am a dog.” It passed through the platform’s verification system without a hitch.
Dating apps, whose users generally hope to meet other users in real life, have a particular need to make sure that people are who they say they are. But Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, ended its partnership with a company doing background checks in 2023. It now encourages users to verify their profile with a selfie and further ID checks, though insiders say these systems are often rudimentary. “They just check a box and [do] what is legally required or what will make the media get off of [their] case,” says one tech executive who has worked with multiple dating apps on safety systems, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak about their work with certain companies.
Fangzhou Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who studies romance scams, ran a test: She set up a Tinder profile with a picture of a dog and a bio that read, “I am a dog.” It passed through the platform’s verification system without a hitch. “They are not providing enough security measures to filter out fraudulent profiles,” Wang says. “Everybody can create anything.”
Like recruitment ads, the scam profiles tend to follow patterns that should raise red flags. They use photos copied from existing users or made by artificial intelligence, and the accounts are sometimes set up using phone numbers generated by voice-over-internet-protocol services. Then there’s the scammers’ behavior: They swipe too fast, or spend too much time logged in. “A normal human doesn’t spend … eight hours on a dating app a day,” the tech executive says.
What’s more, scammers use the same language over and over again as they reach out to potential targets. “The majority of them are using predesigned scripts,” says Wang.
It would be fairly easy for platforms to detect these signs and either stop accounts from being created or make the users go through further checks, experts tell us. Signals of some of these behaviors “can potentially be embedded into a type of machine-learning algorithm,” Wang says. She approached Tinder a few years ago with her research into the language that scammers use on the platforms, and offered to help build data sets for its moderation models. She says the company didn’t reply.
(In a statement, Yoel Roth, vice president of trust and safety at Match Group, said that the company invests in “proactive tools, advanced detection systems and user education to help prevent harm.” He wrote, “We use proprietary AI-powered tools to help identify scammer messaging, and unlike many platforms, we moderate messages, which allows us to detect suspicious patterns early and act quickly,” adding that the company has recently worked with Reality Defender, a provider of deepfake detection tools, to strengthen its ability to detect AI-generated content. A company spokesperson reported having no record of Wang’s outreach but said that the company “welcome[s] collaboration and [is] always open to reviewing research that can help strengthen user safety.”)
A recent investigation published in The Markup found that Match Group has long possessed the tools and resources to track sex offenders and other bad actors but has resisted efforts to roll out safety protocols for fear they might slow growth.
This tension, between the desire to keep increasing the number of users and the need to ensure that these users and their online activity are authentic, is often behind safety issues on platforms. While no platform wants to be a haven for fraudsters, identity verification creates friction for users, which stops real people as well as impostors from signing up. And again, cracking down on platform violations costs money.
According to Josh Kim, an economist who works in Big Tech, it would be costly for tech companies to build out the legal, policy, and operational teams for content moderation tools that could get users kicked off a platform—and the expense is one companies may find hard to justify in the current business climate. “The shift toward profitability means that you have to be very selective in … where you invest the resources that you have,” he says.
“My intuition here is that unless there are fines or pressure from governments or regulatory agencies or the public themselves,” he adds, “the current atmosphere in the tech ecosystem is to focus on building a product that is profitable and grows fast, and things that don’t contribute to those two points are probably being deprioritized.”
Getting online—and staying in line
At work, Gavesh wore a blue tag, marking him as belonging to the lowest rank of workers. “On top of us are the ones who are wearing the yellow tags—they call themselves HR or translators, or office guys,” he says. “Red tags are team leaders, managers … And then moving from that, they have black and ash tags. Those are the ones running the office.” Most of the latter were Chinese, Gavesh says, as were the really “big bosses,” who didn’t wear tags at all.
Within this hierarchy operated a system of incentives and punishments. Workers who followed orders and proved successful at scamming could rise through the ranks to training or supervisory positions, and gain access to perks like restaurants and nightclubs. Those who failed to meet the targets or broke the rules faced violence and humiliation.
Gavesh says he was once beaten because he broke an unwritten rule that it was forbidden to cross your legs at work. Yawning was banned, and bathroom breaks were limited to two minutes at a time.
KATHERINE LAM
Beatings were usually conducted in the open, though the most severe punishments at Gavesh’s company happened in a room called the “water jail.” One day a coworker was there alongside the others, “and the next day he was not,” Gavesh recalls. When the colleague was brought back to the office, he had been so badly beaten he couldn’t walk or speak. “They took him to the front, and they said: ‘If you do not listen to us, this is what will happen to you.’”
Gavesh was desperate to leave but felt there was no chance of escaping. The armed guards seemed ready to shoot, and there were rumors in the compound that some people who jumped the fence had been found drowned in the river.
This kind of physical and psychological abuse is routine across the industry. Gavesh and others we spoke to describe working 12 hours or more a day, without days off. They faced strict quotas for the number of scam targets they had to have on the hook. If they failed to reach them, they were punished. The UN has documented cases of torture, arbitrary detention, and sexual violence in the compounds. We heard accounts of people made to perform calisthenics and being thrashed on the backside in front of other workers.
Even if someone could escape, there is often no authority to appeal to on the outside. KK Park and other scam factories in Myanmar are situated in a geopolitical gray zone—borderlands where criminal enterprises have based themselves for decades, trading in narcotics and other unlawful industries. Armed groups, some of them operating under the command of the military, are credibly believed to profit directly from the trade in people and contraband in these areas, in some cases facing international sanctions as a result. Illicit industries in Myanmar have onlyexpanded since a military coup in 2021. By August 2023, according to UN estimates, more than 120,000 people were being held in the country for the purposes of forced scamming, making it the largest hub for the frauds in Southeast Asia.
Workers who followed orders and proved successful at scamming could rise through the ranks and gain access to perks like restaurants and nightclubs. Those who failed to meet the targets or broke the rules faced violence and humiliation.
In at least some attempt to get a handle on this lawlessness, Thailand tried to cut off internet services for some compounds across its western border starting last May. Syndicates adapted by running fiber-optic cables across the river. When some of those were discovered, they were severed by Thai authorities. Thailand again ramped up its crackdowns on the industry earlier this year, with tactics that included cutting off internet, gas, and electricity to known scamming enclaves, following the trafficking of a Chinese celebrity through Thailand into Myanmar.
Still, the scammers keep adapting—again, using Western technology. “We’ve started to see and hear of Starlink systems being used by these compounds,” says Eric Heintz, a global analyst at IJM.
While the military junta has criminalized the use of unauthorized satellite internet service, intercepted shipments and raids on scamming centers over the past year indicate that syndicates smuggle in equipment. The crackdowns seem to have had a limited impact—a Wired investigation published in February found that scamming networks appeared to be “widely using” Starlink in Myanmar. The journalist, using mobile-phone connection data collected by an online advertising industry tool, identified eight known scam compounds on the Myanmar-Thailand border where hundreds of phones had used Starlink more than 40,000 times since November 2024. He also identified photos that appeared to show dozens of Starlink satellite dishes on a scamming compound rooftop.
Starlink could provide another prime opportunity for systematic efforts to interrupt the scams, particularly since it requires a subscription and is able to geofence its services. “I could give you coordinates of where some of these [scamming operations] are, like IP addresses that are connecting to them,” Heintz says. “That should make a huge paper trail.”
Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, has previously limited access in areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation, after all. Its policies also state that SpaceX may terminate Starlink services to users who participate in “fraudulent” activities. (SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.)
Knowing the locations of scam compounds could also allow Apple to step in: Workers rely on iPhones to make contact with victims, and these have to be associated with an Apple ID, even if the workers use apps to spoof their addresses.
As Heintz puts it, “[If] you have an iCloud account with five phones, and you know that those phones’ GPS antenna locates those phones inside a known scam compound, then all of those phones should be bricked. The account should be locked.”
(Apple did not provide a response to a request for comment.)
“This isn’t like the other trafficking cases that we’ve worked on, where we’re trying to find a boat in the middle of the ocean,” Heintz adds. “These are city-size compounds. We all know where they are, and we’ve watched them being built via satellite imagery. We should be able to do something location-based to take these accounts offline.”
Getting paid
Once Gavesh developed a relationship on social media or a dating site, he was supposed to move the conversation to WhatsApp. That platform is end-to-end encrypted, meaning even Meta can’t read the content of messages—although it should be possible for the company to spot a user’s unusual patterns of behavior, like opening large numbers of WhatsApp accounts or sending numerous messages in a short span of time.
“If you have an account that is suddenly adding people in large quantities all over the world, should you immediately flag it and freeze that account or require that that individual verify his or her information?” USIP’s Tower says.
After cultivating targets’ trust, scammers would inevitably shift the conversation to the subject of money. Having made themselves out to be living a life of luxury, they would offer a chance to share in the secrets of their wealth. Gavesh was taught to make the approach as if it were an extension of an existing intimacy. “I would not show this platform to anyone else,” he says he was supposed to say. “But since I feel like you are my life partner, I feel like you are my future.”
Lower-level workers like Gavesh were only expected to get scamming targets on the hook; then they’d pass off the relationship to a manager. From there, there is some variation in the approach, but the target is sometimes encouraged to set up an account with a mainstream crypto exchange and buy some tokens. Then the scammer sends the victim—or “customer,” as some workers say they called these targets—a link to a convincing, but fake, crypto investment platform.
After the target invests an initial amount of money, the scammer typically sends fake investment return charts that seem to show the value of that stake rising and rising. To demonstrate good faith, the scammer sends a few hundred dollars back to the victim’s crypto wallet, all the while working to convince the mark to keep investing. Then, once the customer is all in, the scammer goes in for the kill, using every means possible to take more money. “We [would] pull out bigger amounts from the customers and squeeze them out of their possessions,” one worker tells us.
The design of cryptocurrency allows some degree of anonymity, but with enough time, persistence, and luck, it’s possible to figure out where tokens are flowing. It’s also possible, though even more difficult, to discover who owns the crypto wallets.
In early 2024, University of Texas researchers John M. Griffin and Kevin Mei published a paper that followed money from crypto wallets associated with scammers. They tracked hundreds of thousands of transactions, collectively worth billions of dollars—money that was transferred in and out of mainstream exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, and Crypto.com.
Scam workers spend time gaining the trust of their targets, often by deploying fraudulent personas and developing romantic relationships.
REUTERS/CARLOS BARRIA
Some scam syndicates would move crypto off these big exchanges, launder it through anonymous platforms known as mixers (which can be used to obscure crypto transactions), and then come back to the exchanges to cash out into fiat currency such as dollars.
Griffin and Mei were able to identify deposit addresses on Binance and smaller platforms, including Hong Kong–based Huobi and Seychelles-based OKX, that were collectively receiving billions of dollars from suspected scams. These addresses were being used over and over again to send and receive money, “suggesting limited monitoring by crypto exchanges,” the authors wrote.
(We were unable to reach OKX for comment; Coinbase and Huobi did not respond to requests for comment. A Binance spokesperson said that the company disputes the findings of the University of Texas study, alleging that they are “misleading at best and, at worst, wildly inaccurate.” The spokesperson also said that the company has extensive know-your-customer requirements, uses internal and third-party tools to spot illicit activity, freezes funds, and works with law enforcement to help reclaim stolen assets, claiming to have “proactively prevented $4.2 billion in potential losses for 2.8 million users from scams and frauds” and “recovered $88 million in stolen or misplaced funds” last year. A Crypto.com spokesperson said that the company is “committed to security, compliance and consumer protection” and that it uses “robust” transaction monitoring and fraud detection controls, “rigorously investigates accounts flagged for potential fraudulent activity or victimization,” and has internal blacklisting processes for wallet addresses known to be linked to scams.)
But while tracking illicit payments through the crypto ecosystem is possible, it’s “messy” and “complicated” to actually pin down who owns a scam wallet, according to Griffin Hotchkiss, a writer and use-case researcher at the Ethereum Foundation who has worked on crypto projects in Myanmar and who spoke in his personal capacity. Investigators have to build models that connect users to accounts by the flows of money going through them, which involves a degree of “guesswork” and “red string and sticky notes on the board trying to trace the flow of funds,” he says.
There are, however, certain actors within the crypto ecosystem who should have a good vantage point for observing how money moves through it. The most significant of these is Tether Holdings, a company formerly based in the British Virgin Islands (it has since relocated to El Salvador) that issues tether or USDT, a so-called stablecoin whose value is nominally pegged to the US dollar. Tether is widely used by crypto traders to park their money in dollar-denominated assets without having to convert cryptocurrencies into fiat currency. It is also widely used in criminal activity.
“There was this one guy I was chatting with, [using] a girl’s profile. He was trying to make a living. He was working in a cafe. He had a daughter who was living with [her] mother. That story was really touching. And, like, you don’t want to get these people [involved].”
There is more than $140 billion worth of USDT in circulation; in 2023, TRM Labs, a firm that traces crypto fraud, estimated that $19.3 billion worth of tether transactions was associated with illicit activity. In January 2024, the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime said that tether was a leading means of exchange for fraudsters and money launderers operating in Southeast Asia. In October, US federal investigators reportedly opened an investigation alleging possible sanctions violations and complicity in money laundering (though at the time, Tether Holdings’ CEO said there was “no indication” the company was under investigation).
Tech experts tell us that USDT is ever-present in the scam business, used to move money and as the main medium of exchange on anonymous marketplaces such as Cambodia-based Huione Guarantee, which has been accusedof allowing romance scammers to launder the proceeds of their crimes. (Cambodia revoked the banking license of Huione Pay in March of this year. Huione, which did not respond to a request for comment, has previously denied engaging in criminal activity.)
While much of the crypto ecosystem is decentralized, USDT “does have a central authority” that could intervene, Hotchkiss says. Tether’s code has functions that allow the company to blacklist users, freeze accounts, and even destroy tokens, he adds. (Tether Holdings did not respond to requests for comment.)
In practice, Hotchkiss says, the company has frozen very few accounts—and, like other experts we spoke to, he thinks it’s unlikely to happen at scale. If it were to start acting like a regulator or a bank, the currency would lose a fundamental part of its appeal: its anonymity and independence from the mainstream of finance. The more you intervene, “the less trust people have in your coin,” he says. “The incentives are kind of misaligned.”
Getting out
Gavesh really wasn’t very good at scamming. The knowledge that the person on the other side of the conversation was working hard for money that he was trying to steal weighed heavily on him. “There was this one guy I was chatting with, [using] a girl’s profile,” he says. “He was trying to make a living. He was working in a cafe. He had a daughter who was living with [her] mother. That story was really touching. And, like, you don’t want to get these people [involved].”
The nature of the work left him racked with guilt. “I believe in karma,” he says. “What goes around comes around.”
Twice during Gavesh’s incarceration, he was sold on from one “employer” to another, but he still struggled with scamming. In February 2023, he was put up for sale a third time, along with some other workers.
“We went to the boss and begged him not to sell [us] and to please let us go home,” Gavesh says. The boss eventually agreed but told them it would cost them. As well as forgoing their salaries, they had to pay a ransom—Gavesh’s was set at 72,000 Thai baht, more than $2,000.
Gavesh managed to scrape the money together, and he and around a dozen others were driven to the river in a military vehicle. “We had to be very silent,” he says. They were told “not to make any sounds or anything—just to get on the boat.” They slipped back into Thailand the way they had come.
KATHERINE LAM
To avoid checkpoints on the way to Bangkok, the smugglers took paths through the jungle and changed vehicles around 10 times.
The group barely had enough money to survive a couple of days in the city, so they stuck together, staying in a cheap hotel while figuring out what to do next. With the help of a compatriot, Gavesh got in touch with IJM, which offered to help him navigate the legal bureaucracy ahead.
The traffickers hadn’t given him back his passport, and he was in Thailand without authorization. It was April before he was finally able to board a flight home, where he faced yet more questioning from police and immigration officials. He told his family he had “a small visa issue” and that he had lost his passport in Bangkok. He has never told them about his ordeal. “It would be very hard for them to process,” he says.
Recent history shows it’s very unlikely Gavesh will get any justice. That’s part of the reason why disrupting scams’ technology supply chain is so important: It’s incredibly challenging to hold the people operating the syndicates accountable. They straddle borders and jurisdictions. They have trafficked people from more than 60 countries, according to research from USIP, and scam targets come from all over the world. Much of the stolen money is moved through crypto wallets based in secrecy jurisdictions. “This thing is really like an onion. You’ve got layer after layer after layer of it, and it’s just really difficult to see where jurisdiction starts and where jurisdiction ends,” Tower says.
Chinese authorities are often more willing to cooperate with the military junta and armed groups in Myanmar that Western governments will not deal with, and they have cracked down where they can on operations involving their nationals. Thailand has also stepped up its efforts to address the human trafficking crisis and shut down scamming operations across its border in recent months. But when it comes to regulating tech platforms, the reaction from governments has been slower.
The few legislativeefforts in the US, which are still in the earliest stages, focus on supporting law enforcement and financial institutions, not directly on ways to address the abuse of American tech platforms for scamming. And they probably won’t take that on anytime soon. Trump, who has been boosted and courted by several high-profile tech executives, has indicated that his administration opposes heavier online moderation. One executive order, signed in February, vows to impose tariffs on foreign governments if they introduce measures that could “inhibit the growth” of US companies—particularly those in tech—or compel them to moderate online content.
The Trump White House also supports reducing regulation in the crypto industry; it has halted major investigations into crypto companies and just this month removed sanctions on the crypto mixer Tornado Cash. In what was widely seen as a nod to libertarian-leaning crypto-enthusiasts, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web marketplace Silk Road and one of the earlier adopters of crypto for large-scale criminal activity. The administration’s embrace of crypto could indeed have implications for the scamming industry, notes Kim, the economist: “It makes it much easier for crypto services to proliferate and have wider-spread adoption, and that might make it easier for criminal enterprises to tap into that and exploit that for their own means.”
What’s more, the new US administration has overseen the rollback of funding for myriad international aid programs, primarily programs run through the US Agency for International Development and including those working to help the people who’ve been trafficked into scam compounds. In late February, CNN reports, every one of the agency’s anti-trafficking projects was halted.
This all means it’s up to the tech companies themselves to act on their own initiative. And Big Tech has rarely acted without legislative threats or significant social or financial pressure. Companies won’t do anything if “it’s not mandatory, it’s not enforced by the government,” and most important, if companies don’t profit from it, says Wang, from the University of Texas. While a group of tech companies, including Meta, Match, and Coinbase, last year announced the formation of Tech Against Scams, a collaboration to share tips and best practices, experts tell us there are no concrete actions to point to yet.
And at a time when more resources are desperately needed to address the growing problems on their platforms, social media companies like X, Meta, and others have laid off hundreds of people from their trust and safety departments in recent years, reducing their capacity to tackle even the most pressing issues. Since the reelection of Trump, Meta has signaled an even greater rollback of its moderation and fact checking, a decision that earned praise from the president.
Still, companies may feel pressure given that a handful of entities and executives have in recent years been held legally responsible for criminal activity on their platforms. Changpeng Zhao, who founded Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, was sentenced to four months in jail last April after pleading guilty to breaking US money-laundering laws, and the company had to forfeit some $4 billion for offenses that included allowing users to bypass sanctions. Then last May, Alexey Pertsev, a Tornado Cash cofounder, was sentenced to more than five years in a Dutch prison for facilitating the laundering of money stolen by, among others, the Lazarus Group, North Korea’s infamous state-backed hacking team. And in August last year, French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, and charged him with complicity in drug trafficking and distribution of child sexual abuse material.
“I think all social media [companies] should really be looking at the case of Telegram right now,” USIP’s Tower says. “At that CEO level, you’re starting to see states try to hold a company accountable for its role in enabling major transnational criminal activity on a global scale.”
Compounding all the challenges, however, is the integration of cheap and easy-to-use artificial intelligence into scamming operations. The trafficked individuals we spoke to, who had mostly left the compounds before the widespread adoption of generative AI, said that if targets suggested a video call they would deflect or, as a last resort, play prerecorded video clips. Only one described the use of AI by his company; he says he was paid to record himself saying various sentences in ways that reflected different emotions, for the purposes of feeding the audio into an AI model. Recently, reports have emerged of scammers who have used AI-powered “face swap” and voice-altering products so that they can impersonate their characters more convincingly. “Malicious actors can exploit these models, especially open-source models, to produce content at an unprecedented scale,” says Gabrielle Tran, senior analyst for technology and society at IST. “These models are purposefully being fine-tuned … to serve as convincing humans.”
Experts we spoke with warn that if platforms don’t pick up the pace on enforcement now, they’re likely to fall even further behind.
Every now and again, Gavesh still goes on Facebook to report pages he thinks are scams. He never hears back.
But he is working again in the tourism industry and on the path to recovering from his ordeal. “I can’t say that I’m 100% out of the trauma, but I’m trying to survive because I have responsibilities,” he says.
He chose to speak out because he doesn’t want anyone else to be tricked—into a scamming compound, or into giving up their life savings to a stranger. He’s seen behind the scenes into a brutal industry that exploits people’s real needs for work, connection, and human contact, and he wants to make sure no one else ends up where he did.
“There’s a very scary world,” he says. “A world beyond what we have seen.”
Peter Guest is a journalist based in London.Emily Fishbein is a freelance journalist focusing on Myanmar.
Glaciers generally move so slowly you can’t see their progress with the naked eye. (Their pace is … glacial.) But these massive bodies of ice do march downhill, with potentially planet-altering consequences.
There’s a lot we don’t understand about how glaciers move and how soon some of the most significant ones could collapse into the sea. That could be a problem, since melting glaciers could lead to multiple feet of sea-level rise this century, potentially displacing millions of people who live and work along the coasts.
A new group is aiming not only to further our understanding of glaciers but also to look into options to save them if things move toward a worst-case scenario, as my colleague James Temple outlined in his latest story. One idea: refreezing glaciers in place.
The whole thing can sound like science fiction. But once you consider how huge the stakes are, I think it gets easier to understand why some scientists say we should at least be exploring these radical interventions.
It’s hard to feel very optimistic about glaciers these days. (The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is often called the “doomsday glacier”—not alarming at all!)
Take two studies published just in the last month, for example. The British Antarctic Survey released the most detailed map to date of Antarctica’s bedrock—the foundation under the continent’s ice. With twice as many data points as before, the study revealed that more ice than we thought is resting on bedrock that’s already below sea level. That means seawater can flow in and help melt ice faster, so Antarctica’s ice is more vulnerable than previously estimated.
Another study examined subglacial rivers—streams that flow under the ice, often from subglacial lakes. The team found that the fastest-moving glaciers have a whole lot of water moving around underneath them, which speeds melting and lubricates the ice sheet so it slides faster, in turn melting even more ice.
The new group is joining the race to better understand glaciers. Arête Glacier Initiative, a nonprofit research organization founded by scientists at MIT and Dartmouth, has already awarded its first grants to researchers looking into how glaciers melt and plans to study the possibility of reversing those fortunes, as James exclusively reported last week.
Brent Minchew, one of the group’s cofounders and an associate professor of geophysics at MIT, was drawn to studying glaciers because of their potential impact on sea-level rise. “But over the years, I became less content with simply telling a more dramatic story about how things were going—and more open to asking the question of what can we do about it,” he says.
Minchew is among the researchers looking into potential plans to alter the future of glaciers. Strategies being proposed by groups around the world include building physical supports to prop them up and installing massive curtains to slow the flow of warm water that speeds melting. Another approach, which will be the focus of Arête, is called basal intervention. It basically involves drilling holes in glaciers, which would allow water flowing underneath the ice to be pumped out and refrozen, hopefully slowing them down.
If you have questions about how all this would work, you’re not alone. These are almost inconceivably huge engineering projects, they’d be expensive, and they’d face legal and ethical questions. Nobody really owns Antarctica, and it’s governed by a huge treaty—how could we possibly decide whether to move forward with these projects?
Then there’s the question of the potential side effects. Just look at recent news from the Arctic Ice Project, which was researching how to slow the melting of sea ice by covering it with substances designed to reflect sunlight away. (Sea ice is different from glaciers, but some of the key issues are the same.)
One of the project’s largest field experiments involved spreading tiny silica beads, sort of like sand, over 45,000 square feet of ice in Alaska. But after new research revealed that the materials might be disrupting food chains, the organization announced that it’s concluding its research and winding down operations.
Cutting our emissions of greenhouse gases to stop climate change at the source would certainly be more straightforward than spreading beads on ice, or trying to stop a 74,000-square-mile glacier in its tracks.
But we’re not doing so hot on cutting emissions—in fact, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose faster than ever in 2024. And even if the world stopped polluting the atmosphere with planet-warming gases today, things may have already gone too far to save some of the most vulnerable glaciers.
The longer I cover climate change and face the situation we’re in, the more I understand the impulse to at least consider every option out there, even if it sounds like science fiction.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there
Gavesh’s journey had started, seemingly innocently, with a job ad on Facebook promising work he desperately needed.
Instead, he found himself trafficked into a business commonly known as “pig butchering”—a form of fraud in which scammers form romantic or other close relationships with targets online and extract money from them. The Chinese crime syndicates behind the scams have netted billions of dollars, and they have used violence and coercion to force their workers, many of them people trafficked like Gavesh, to carry out the frauds from large compounds, several of which operate openly in the quasi-lawless borderlands of Myanmar.
We spoke to Gavesh and five other workers from inside the scam industry, as well as anti-trafficking experts and technology specialists. Their testimony reveals how global companies, including American social media and dating apps and international cryptocurrency and messaging platforms, have given the fraud business the means to become industrialized.
By the same token, it is Big Tech that may hold the key to breaking up the scam syndicates—if only these companies can be persuaded or compelled to act. Read the full story.
—Peter Guest & Emily Fishbein
How to save a glacier
There’s a lot we don’t understand about how glaciers move and how soon some of the most significant ones could collapse into the sea. That could be a problem, since melting glaciers could lead to multiple feet of sea-level rise this century, potentially displacing millions of people who live and work along the coasts.
A new group is aiming not only to further our understanding of glaciers but also to look into options to save them if things move toward a worst-case scenario, as my colleague James Temple outlined in his latest story. One idea: refreezing glaciers in place.
The whole thing can sound like science fiction. But once you consider how huge the stakes are, I think it gets easier to understand why some scientists say we should at least be exploring these radical interventions. Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: How tracking animal movement may save the planet
Researchers have long dreamed of creating an Internet of Animals. And they’re getting closer to monitoring 100,000 creatures—and revealing hidden facets of our shared world.
This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Donald Trump has announced 25% tariffs on imported cars and parts The measures are likely to make new cars significantly more expensive for Americans. (NYT $) + Moving car manufacturing operations to the US won’t be easy. (WP $) + It’s not just big businesses that will suffer, either. (The Atlantic $) + How Trump’s tariffs could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more. (MIT Technology Review)
2 China is developing an AI system to increase its online censorship A leaked dataset demonstrates how LLMs could rapidly filter undesirable material. (TechCrunch)
3 Trump may reduce tariffs on China to encourage a TikTok deal The Chinese-owned company has until April 5 to find a new US owner. (Insider $) + The national security concerns surrounding it haven’t gone away, though. (NYT $)
4 OpenAI’s new image generator can ape Studio Ghibli’s distinctive style Which raises the question of whether the model was trained on Ghibli’s images. (TechCrunch) + The tool’s popularity means its rollout to non-paying users has been delayed. (The Verge) + The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI. (MIT Technology Review)
5 DOGE planned to dismantle USAID from the beginning New court filings reveal the department’s ambitions to infiltrate the system. (Wired $) + Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Wildfires are getting worse in the southwest of the US While federal fire spending is concentrated mainly in the west, the risk is rising in South Carolina and Texas too. (WP $) + North and South Carolina were recovering from Hurricane Helene when the fires struck. (The Guardian) + How AI can help spot wildfires. (MIT Technology Review)
7 A quantum computer has generated—and verified—truly random numbers Which is good news for cryptographers. (Bloomberg $) + Cybersecurity analysts are increasingly worried about the so-called Q-Day. (Wired $) + Amazon’s first quantum computing chip makes its debut. (MIT Technology Review)
8 What’s next for weight-loss drugs Competition is heating up, but will patients be the ones to benefit? (New Scientist $) + Drugs like Ozempic now make up 5% of prescriptions in the US. (MIT Technology Review)
9 At least we’ve still got memes Poking fun at the Trump administration’s decisions is a form of online resistance. (New Yorker $)
10 Can you truly be friends with a chatbot? People are starting to find out. (Vox) + The AI relationship revolution is already here. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“I can’t imagine any professional I know committing this egregious a lapse in judgement.”
—A government technology leader tells Fast Company why top Trump officials’ decision to use unclassified messaging app Signal to discuss war plans is so surprising.
The big story
Why one developer won’t quit fighting to connect the US’s grids
September 2024
Michael Skelly hasn’t learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest. But so far, he has little to show for the effort.
Skelly has long argued that building such lines and linking together the nation’s grids would accelerate the shift from coal- and natural-gas-fueled power plants to the renewables needed to cut the pollution driving climate change. But his previous business shut down in 2019, after halting two of its projects and selling off interests in three more.
Skelly contends he was early, not wrong, and that the market and policymakers are increasingly coming around to his perspective. After all, the US Department of Energy just blessed his latest company’s proposed line with hundreds of millions in grants. Read the full story.
—James Temple
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Severance’s Adam Scott sure has interesting taste in music. + While we’re not 100% sure if Millie is definitely the world’s oldest cat, one thing we know for sure is that she lives a life of luxury. + Hiking trails are covered in beautiful wildflowers right now; just make sure you tread carefully. + This is a really charming look at how girls live in America right now.
