A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for “willfully turning a blind eye” to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will “provide humanitarian assistance to persons in or from the [People’s Republic of China] who have been imprisoned in the PRC for exercising their freedom of speech.”
This ends a long fight for accountability stemming from decisions by Yahoo, starting in the early 2000s, to turn over information on Chinese internet users to state security, leading to their imprisonment and torture. After the actions were exposed and the company was publicly chastised, Yahoo created the Yahoo Human Rights Fund (YHRF), endowed with $17.3 million, to support individuals imprisoned for exercising free speech rights online.
But in the years that followed, its chosen nonprofit partner, the Laogai Research Foundation, badly mismanaged the fund, spending less than $650,000—or 4%—on direct support for the dissidents. Most of the money was, instead, spent by the late Harry Wu, the politically connected former Chinese dissident who led Laogai, on his own projects and interests. A group of dissidents sued in 2017, naming not just Laogai and its leadership but also Yahoo and senior members from its leadership team during the time in question; at least one person from Yahoo always sat on YHRF’s board and had oversight of its budget and activities.
The defendants—which, in addition to Yahoo and Laogai, included the Impresa Legal Group, the law firm that worked with Laogai—agreed to pay the six formerly imprisoned Chinese dissidents who filed the suit, with five of them slated to receive $50,000 each and the lead plaintiff receiving $55,000.
The remainder, after legal fees and other expense reimbursements, will go toward a new fund to continue YHRF’s original mission of supporting individuals in China imprisoned for their speech. The fund will be managed by a small nonprofit organization, Humanitarian China, founded in 2004 by three participants in the 1989 Chinese democracy movement. Humanitarian China has given away $2 million in cash assistance to Chinese dissidents and their families, funded primarily by individual donors.
This assistance is often vital; political prisoners are frequently released only after years or decades in prison, sometimes with health problems and without the skills to find steady work in the modern job market. They continue to be monitored, visited, and penalized by state security, leaving local employers even more unwilling to hire them. It’s a “difficult situation,” Xu Wanping, one of the plaintiffs, previously told MIT Technology Review—“the sense of isolation and that kind of helplessness we feel … if this lawsuit can be more effective, if it could help restart this program, it is really meaningful.” As we wrote in our original story,
“Xu lives in low-income housing in his hometown of Chongqing, in western China. He Depu, another plaintiff, his wife, and an adult son survive primarily on a small monthly hardship allowance of 1,500 RMB ($210) provided by the local government as collateral to ensure that he keeps his opinions to himself. But he knows that even if he is silent, this money could disappear at any point.”
The terms of the settlement bar the parties from providing more than a cursory statement to the media, but Times Wang, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, previously told MIT Technology Review about the importance of the fund. In addition to the crucial financial support, “it is a source of comfort to them [the dissidents] to know that there are people outside of China who stand with them,” he said.
MIT Technology Review took an in-depth look at the case and the mismanagement at YHRF, which you can read here.
Temu and Shien have slashed their U.S. advertising spend in response to tariffs and the end of the de minimis tariff exception for orders under $800. The actions could elevate prospects for American shops and brands.
Google Shopping
Tinuiti, a marketing agency, shared data with Practical Ecommerce showing that Temu dramatically reduced — and eventually stopped — spending on Google Shopping ads between April 9 and 12, 2025. Shein is following a similar pattern, having cut its Google Shopping ads investment on April 15, according to Tinuiti.
Moreover, Temu and Shein announced that they will raise prices effective April 25 in response to U.S. tariffs and the May 2 end of the de minimis exception for goods originating from China and Hong Kong.
Impact and Opportunity
Temu and Shein have impacted U.S. retailers. For example, in December 2022, Temu had a 17% share of the U.S. discount market, according to Reuters, citing data from Earnest Analytics.
The marketplaces also created opportunities. Temu had recently launched its U.S. Seller Program, enabling direct-to-consumer brands and other sellers to list products on the platform.
Assuming Temu’s and Shein’s advertising and price behavior foretells a lesser U.S. role, a question now is, “Who benefits?”
Unfortunately, the answer is unclear, although three groups are likely pleased: ad buyers, discount retailers, and ecommerce SMBs.
Ad buyers
It might seem like plummeting demand from two large advertisers would lower CPMs or CPCs for other businesses and drive additional shopping traffic.
Some in the industry believe that Temu’s advertising goal was to buy market share and reduce competition. If true, those competitors could benefit.
Yet Tinuiti’s research director, Mark Ballard, suggests the impact is not likely widespread. Ballard told Practical Ecommerce that many advertisers continue to bid for Google Shopping impressions, and that any change would be “indistinguishable from noise.”
Discount retailers
Discount retail chains might enjoy a competition respite. For example, a February 2025 Eurweb article cited sources estimating upwards of 15,000 U.S. retail locations would close in 2025, partly owing to price competition from Shein and Temu.
Certainly those retailers could benefit from less competition, but a few factors could foil it.
First, many discount products are made in China. So, while they might face fewer competitors, the retailers are not immune to tariffs.
Moreover, Temu and Shien are not the only threats. Removing China-based marketplaces may change competition, but not eliminate it. Amazon, Walmart, and Target will remain, as will a segment of ecommerce sellers.
Ecommerce SMBs
That segment — the third group potentially benefiting from Shein and Temu exiting the U.S. market — is small-and-midsized ecommerce sellers competing in the low-cost market or just above it.
Selling low-cost items could become easier, assuming China is not the source of the inventory. And goods priced just above the discount range could become a viable alternative.
Retail grocery volume will grow modestly in Northern and Southern Europe through 2030 while declining in Central and Eastern regions. That’s according to a new report by McKinsey & Company titled “The State of Grocery Retail Europe 2025.”
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In 2025 McKinsey surveyed approximately 14,500 consumers across 13 countries in Europe. According to the report, 42% of Gen Z consumers and 37% of Millennials buy ready-to-eat meals at least weekly.
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Additionally, respondents across all age categories plan to purchase fewer environmentally sustainable grocery products (locally sourced and socially responsible) in 2025 compared to 2024.
Conflict is seemingly inescapable, from business colleagues disagreeing over growth strategy to siblings contesting a will to a couple sparring over who cleans the dishes. Sadly, such difficult conversations can be so stressful that we tend to avoid them, which makes matters worse.
Bordone teaches negotiation and mediation at Harvard Law School and consults on high-stakes conflicts in the U.S. and abroad. Salinas is an associate professor of neurology at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and an entrepreneur.
The authors go beyond the classics on negotiating tactics such as “Getting to Yes,” reject win-lose and even win-win thinking, and build a strong case for engaged dialogue, even when it is unlikely to resolve a conflict.
They assert in the introduction that “despite the pervasiveness of conflict, our ability to handle it has atrophied” and that reluctance at all levels of society to address disagreement constructively has negative consequences for individuals, institutions, and the world and contributes to increasing polarization and intolerance. They argue persuasively that learning to tolerate discomfort to listen authentically and speak assertively has benefits with or without an agreement.
The authors call their approach “conflict resilience,” defined as “the ability to genuinely sit with and grow from conflict.”
3 Parts
They organize the book according to their resilience framework: Name, Explore, and Commit.
Part One, “Name (and Dig Deep),” covers self-assessment, underlying feelings, tolerance, and inner conflicts affecting one’s approach to disagreements.
Part Two, “Explore (and Be Brave),” addresses in-depth (i) how to “listen deeply” to understand an opposing view and (ii) how and when to assert your own view.
Part Three, “Commit (and Own the Conflict),” provides advice on (i) the setting and conditions for a successful dialogue (including deciding how you’ll define “success”), (ii) formal and informal processes and structures for facilitating conversations, (iii) when to engage and when to walk away, and (iv) trauma and its consequences. The final chapter suggests ways individuals can build a culture of conflict resilience in their families, organizations, workplaces, and communities — regardless of position.
Upbeat, Empathetic
The book’s tone is upbeat and empathetic even when addressing today’s thorniest issues, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict. The writing is direct, understandable, and authoritative, offering clear explanations and descriptions and comparing conflict resilience to physical fitness.
Recent scientific research — the Notes section cites 300 sources — and the authors’ experiences support the key concepts and principles. Relatable stories illustrate multiple scenarios, from minor relationships to polarizing political differences.
While acknowledging the challenge, the authors emphasize the need for compassion and insist on the possibility of growth and change. Many core ideas reappear throughout the text, but such repetition is not unusual in books that aim to both advocate change and teach practical techniques for bringing it about.
Overall, the book is an excellent resource that offers inspiration, confidence, and actionable advice for executives who negotiate with suppliers and partners, manage employees, or navigate professional relationships.
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.
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.
This “Ecommerce Conversations” episode continues my masterclass series on entrepreneurship. Last week I addressed tactics to increase ecommerce profits amid a slump for many businesses.
This week I focus on branding. Most people think of branding as logos or design elements. But those items are components, not the essence. A brand is synonymous with a company’s mission and purpose.
My full audio narration is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.
Mission
A founder’s outlook drives the brand. What does she or he want to achieve? For me, it’s freedom — creating my own path. If unsure, reflect on why you exist and your purpose in life. Then shape your business around it.
A common struggle of entrepreneurs is feeling trapped in a business they don’t love. That happens when there’s no mission. My mission at Beardbrand is to help men live the life of their dreams through grooming. We want men to feel proud of the person in the mirror. When a man invests in himself, he gains the confidence to better his family and community — making the world a more loving place.
Values
Core values are essential. Beardbrand’s are freedom, hunger, and trust. I prefer single-word values because they’re easier to remember. If you can’t recall your core values, they don’t exist. At Beardbrand, everyone knows our core values because they are clear and concise.
We boiled ours down to three concepts working in harmony. For instance, too much freedom might reduce trust, while too much hunger could limit freedom. These checks and balances are critical for us. However, a fast-growing startup might focus on hunger to survive and conquer a market. Core values should reflect personal beliefs extended into business.
Core values guide decisions amid uncertainty. For instance, we look for vendors that share our worldview. Our best relationships have been with companies that align with our values.
Communication
Communication should be consistent across an entire company — internal discussions, customer interactions, ads, emails, and websites. Many people default to formal, grammatically correct language, thinking it’s the right way. But, to me, it’s boring and lifeless.
Communication should have passion, character, and conviction. There’s often a tendency to play it safe, especially when advised by lawyers. However, playing it safe isn’t always the right approach. Sometimes, breaking the rules — such as using informal or edgy language — can make your brand stand out without alienating an audience.
Customer support should be human. Too often, support teams attempt to defuse situations by being robotic, which worsens the problem. Human interactions help resolve issues with greater ease.
At Beardbrand, we talk to our customers the way we talk to friends. We avoid formal language because authenticity is key to building trust, one of our core values.
Customer support must align with the type of product you offer. A premium product demands top-tier support, while a lower-priced item might not.
Many brands overlook typography, a form of communication. Fonts can tell a lot about a brand and how much it cares about design. Most smaller brands stick to safe fonts like Arial or Helvetica, which makes them blend in with everyone else.
Others will shape your brand if you aren’t intentional with fonts, logos, colors, and photography.
Fonts can create consistency. Without consistency, your brand’s identity can become unclear, leading to mixed messages.
Impact
A brand is an extension of its founders and staff and how they want to impact the world. Philip Jackson, the founder of Future Commerce, says commerce is culture. Companies that succeed know this.
Entrepreneurs make the world a better place through their businesses. Branding reflects that mission. It’s more than a logo.
In the ever-evolving world of health care, the role of technology is becoming increasingly crucial. From improving patient outcomes to streamlining administrative processes, digital technologies are changing the face of the industry. However, for startups developing health tech solutions, breaking into the market and scaling their products can be a challenging journey, requiring access to resources, expertise, and a network they might not have. This is where health tech accelerator programs come in.
Health tech accelerator programs are designed to support early-stage startups in the health technology space, providing them with the resources, mentorship, and funding they need to grow and succeed. These programs are often highly competitive, and startups that are selected gain access to a wealth of opportunities that can significantly accelerate their development. In this article, we’ll explore five key benefits of participating in a health tech accelerator program.
1. Access to mentorship and expertise
One of the most valuable aspects of health tech accelerator programs is the access they provide to experienced mentors and industry experts. Health tech startups often face unique challenges, such as navigating complex health-care regulations, developing scalable technologies, and understanding the intricacies of health systems. Having mentors who have firsthand experience in these areas can provide critical guidance.
These mentors often include clinicians, informaticists, investors, health-care professionals, and thought leaders. Their insights can help startups refine their business strategies, optimize their digital health solutions, and navigate the health-care landscape. With this guidance, startups are better positioned to make informed decisions, avoid common pitfalls, and accelerate their growth.
2. Funding and investment opportunities
For many startups, securing funding is one of the biggest hurdles they face. Health tech innovation can be expensive, especially in the early stages when startups are working on solution development, regulatory approvals, and pilot testing. Accelerator programs often provide startups with seed funding, as well as the opportunity to connect with venture capitalists, angel investors, and other potential backers.
Many accelerator programs culminate in a “demo day,” where startups pitch their solutions to a room full of investors and other key decision-makers. These events can be crucial in securing the funding necessary to scale a digital health solution or product. Beyond initial funding, the exposure gained from being part of a well-known accelerator program can lead to additional investment opportunities down the road.
3. Networking and industry connections
The health-care industry is notoriously complex and fragmented, making it difficult for new players to break in without the right connections. Health tech accelerator programs offer startups the opportunity to network with key leaders in the health-care and technology ecosystems, including clinicians, payers, pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and potential customers.
Through structured networking events, mentorship sessions, and partnerships with established organizations, startups gain access to a wide range of stakeholders who can help substantiate their products, open doors to new markets, and provide feedback that can be used to refine their offerings. In the health tech space, strong industry connections are often critical to gaining traction and scaling successfully.
4. Market validation and credibility
The health tech industry is highly regulated and risk-averse, meaning that customers and investors are often wary of new technologies. Participating in an accelerator program can serve as a form of market validation, signaling that a startup’s offering has been vetted by experts and has the potential for success.
The credibility gained from being accepted into a prestigious accelerator program can be a game-changer. It provides startups with a level of legitimacy that can help them stand out in a crowded and competitive market. Whether it’s attracting investors, forging partnerships, or securing early customers, the reputation of the accelerator can give a startup a significant boost.
Additionally, accelerator programs often have ties to major health-care institutions and organizations. This can provide startups with opportunities to pilot their products in real-world health-care settings, which can serve as both a test of the product’s viability and a powerful proof of concept for future customers and investors.
5. Access to resources and infrastructure
Another significant benefit of accelerators is the access to resources and infrastructure that startups might not obtain otherwise. These resources can include everything from access to clinical data for model building and testing, legal and regulatory support, and technology infrastructure to deploy and scale. For early-stage health tech companies, these resources can be a game-changer.
Conclusion
Health tech startups are at the forefront of transforming health care, but navigating the challenges of innovation, regulation, and market entry can be daunting. Health tech accelerator programs offer invaluable support by providing startups with the mentorship, funding, networking opportunities, credibility, and resources they need to succeed.
Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate is a 30-week accelerator program from Mayo Clinic Platform focused on helping startups with digital technologies advance their solution development and get to market faster. Learn more about the program and the access it provides to clinical data, Mayo Clinic experts, technical resources, investors, and more at https://www.mayoclinicplatform.org/accelerate/.
This content was produced by Mayo Clinic Platform. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
Whether you’re looking to up your sales game, launch a business, or build a team, the first quarter of 2025 delivers inspiring and practical books to guide your efforts.
The luxury fashion mogul and activist aims to help other entrepreneurs, especially women, conquer fear and face challenges to achieve their goals by telling her own story of succeeding through perseverance and resolve.
Magness, an athlete, coach, and author of the bestseller “Do Hard Things,” makes a compelling case that we can pursue excellence and personal fulfillment without sacrificing one for the other. He advocates shifting from a survival mentality to one of thriving and offers personal experience, guiding principles, and practical tips. Reviewers call the book “wise, entertaining” and “a breath of fresh air.”
Brodsky is a management professor at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin and an expert in workplace technology, communication, and productivity. This new guide helps readers avoid misunderstandings and communicate effectively online by choosing the appropriate channel — email, text, videoconference — in hybrid work settings.
B2B sales pro Vardy shows founders his real-world strategies to grow their businesses via a compelling value proposition, outbound sales, partnerships, and inbound marketing.
Apparel retailer Lululemon is known for its strong brand and rapid growth. As its founder, Wilson admits to mistakes and missed opportunities. He credits the brand’s success to a business model and company culture that allowed him to step back and get out of the way of employees “who choose to be great.”
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How have giant retailers such as Walmart and Amazon come to dominate and alter consumer capitalism? Thelen contrasts the U.S. regulatory environment with those in the U.K. and the E.U. and provides a historical perspective on how the current economic climate evolved. According to reviews, it’s a “pathbreaking study that provides insight into not only the past but also the future of online retail.”
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Many ecommerce businesses are struggling. Profit margins are thin; cash is low.
As the host of “Ecommerce Conversations,” I typically interview entrepreneurs and executives. But I’ll depart for this episode, sharing lessons from running Beardbrand, my company, for over a decade.
What follows are my tips for adding margins to an ecommerce business. My entire audio narrative is embedded below. The transcript is condensed and edited for clarity.
Clarify Goals
I believe in bootstrapped businesses, prioritizing freedom over money. My decisions differ from those of Sean Frank at wallet-maker Ridge, who aims to build a billion-dollar company. My goal is to create a lifestyle that allows me to do what I want.
Having a clear goal facilitates focus. Chasing a billion-dollar business means thinking about a broad market, but focusing on a niche can result in a high-margin, low-stress company that’s lean and manageable, even at just one or two million of annual revenue.
Think about your products and how you communicate with customers and prospects. Are you speaking to a specific value proposition or in broad generalities? A 90% gross margin — revenue less cost of goods — allows flexibility to offer discounts or bundles. Creativity comes from starting with high margins versus struggling with products that cost too much.
Improve Operations
Shipping costs are significant. If you’re not comparing rates annually from FedEx, UPS, and DHL, you’re leaving money on the table. If you use a third-party fulfillment provider, ask what they’re doing to lower shipping costs. As a steward of your business, your job isn’t to serve vendors. It’s to ensure the best prices and value for your customers.
Think about what’s unnecessary in your business. For example, at Beardbrand, we sell directly to consumers (not in physical stores), which means we can use minimal packaging to lower costs.
Shrinkflation — reducing the size or quality of an item — is another option. There’s a reason brands have used it for decades. For instance, Montana Knife Company can fit two more knives per sheet of steel by slightly reducing blade length — adding inventory without increasing costs.
Consider manufacturing improvements. Dealing directly with the manufacturer can offer savings, as can manufacturing in-house. Josh Paulson of Quality Cage builds chinchilla cages in-house, giving him a competitive advantage and keeping costs low since he produces on demand.
In-house manufacturing can reveal optimizations vendors might overlook.
Upgrade Marketing
Many businesses create a website, run some ads, and call it a day. But there’s so much more you can do. At Beardbrand, we help men love the person in the mirror. To support that, we’ve done style consulting, where customers send photos, and we advise on hairstyles and products. Offering more expertise can build loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals.
Adding small notes of gratitude or sending birthday cards encourages repeat sales. We use PostPilot to send birthday cards to our top 1,000 customers, often including Yeti mugs with our logo. A $20 gift for someone who’s spent thousands goes a long way in maintaining relationships.
Limited edition drops for top customers can create loyalty. Hosting exclusive events promotes community and excitement around your brand. Instead of spending $5,000 on ads, put on a memorable event and get far more value from the connections and energy.
Elevate the Brand
The design and appearance of an ecommerce site impact conversions. Elevate your brand by upgrading photography, layout, colors, and fonts. These details matter. Consider if warm or bright lighting works best for your product, and ensure everything — from look-and-feel to human models — aligns with your brand and target audience.
Premium brands sometimes avoid publishing reviews, focusing instead on their products and services. It’s a bold move, but it elevates their image.
Superior materials can also help, especially in niches where customers will pay for the best.
Enhance the Checkout
Offer a premium return experience. For instance, you can add a “white glove” option at checkout, similar to premium shipping choices. ReturnLogic, for example, automates the return process, helping customers and brands. Other options include offering a $1 or $2 upsell for no-questions returns or priority support.
Additionally, consider offering high-margin accessories at checkout. At Beardbrand, we add quality tweezers for $10 that cost us $1. This strategy mimics grocery stores that place small, high-margin items near the point-of-sale station.
