Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple’s carbon neutral goal

We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest. 

The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a wall of bare trunks that rose 100 feet or so before concluding with a burst of thick foliage near the top. The rows of trees ran perhaps the length of a New York City block and fell away abruptly on either side into untidy fields of dirt and grass. The vista recalled the husk of a failed condo development, its first apartments marooned when the builders ran out of cash.

Standing there against the setting sun, the trees were, in their odd way, also rather stunning. I had no service out here—we had just left a remote nature preserve in southwestern Brazil—but I reached for my phone anyway, for a picture. The concern on the face of my travel partner, Clariana Vilela Borzone, a geographer and translator who grew up nearby, flicked to amusement. My camera roll was already full of eucalyptus.

The trees sprouted from every hillside, along every road, and more always seemed to be coming. Across the dirt path where we were stopped, another pasture had been cleared for planting. The sparse bushes and trees that had once shaded cattle in the fields had been toppled and piled up, as if in a Pleistocene gravesite. 

Borzone’s friends and neighbors were divided on the aesthetics of these groves. Some liked the order and eternal verdancy they brought to their slice of the Cerrado, a large botanical region that arcs diagonally across Brazil’s midsection. Its native savanna landscape was largely gnarled, low-slung, and, for much of the year, rather brown. And since most of that flora had been cleared decades ago for cattle pasture, it was browner and flatter still. Now that land was becoming trees. It was becoming beautiful. 

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Others considered this beauty a mirage. “Green deserts,” they called the groves, suggesting bounty from afar but holding only dirt and silence within. These were not actually forests teeming with animals and undergrowth, they charged, but at best tinder for a future megafire in a land parched, in part, by their vigorous growth. This was in fact a common complaint across Latin America: in Chile, the planted rows of eucalyptus were called the “green soldiers.” It was easy to imagine getting lost in the timber, a funhouse mirror of trunks as far as the eye could see.

The timber companies that planted these trees push back on these criticisms as caricatures of a genus that’s demonized all over the world. They point to their sustainable forestry certifications and their handsome spending on fire suppression, and to the microphones they’ve placed that record cacophonies of birds and prove the groves are anything but barren. Whether people like the look of these trees or not, they are meeting a human need, filling an insatiable demand for paper and pulp products all over the world. Much of the material for the world’s toilet and tissue paper is grown in Brazil, and that, they argue, is a good thing: Grow fast and furious here, as responsibly as possible, to save many more trees elsewhere. 

But I was in this region for a different reason: Apple. And also Microsoft and Meta and TSMC, and many smaller technology firms too. I was here because tech executives many thousands of miles away were racing toward, and in some cases stumbling, on their way to meet their climate promises—too little time, and too much demand for new devices and AI data centers. Not far from here, they had struck some of the largest-ever deals for carbon credits. They were asking something new of this tree: Could Latin America’s eucalyptus be a scalable climate solution? 

On a practical level, the answer seemed straightforward. Nobody disputed how swiftly or reliably eucalyptus could grow in the tropics. This knowledge was the product of decades of scientific study and tabulations of biomass for wood or paper. Each tree was roughly 47% carbon, which meant that many tons of it could be stored within every planted hectare. This could be observed taking place in real time, in the trees by the road. Come back and look at these young trees tomorrow, and you’d see it: fresh millimeters of carbon, chains of cellulose set into lignin. 

At the same time, Apple and the others were also investing in an industry, and a tree, with a long and controversial history in this part of Brazil and elsewhere. They were exerting their wealth and technological oversight to try to make timber operations more sustainable, more supportive of native flora, and less water intensive. Still, that was a hard sell to some here, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of pasture are already in line for planting; more trees were a bleak prospect in a land increasingly racked by drought and fire. Critics called the entire exercise an excuse to plant even more trees for profit. 

Borzone and I did not plan to stay and watch the eucalyptus grow. Garden or forest or desert, ally or antagonist—it did not matter much with the stars of the Southern Cross emerging and our gas tank empty. We gathered our things from our car and set off down the dirt road through the trees.

A big promise

My journey into the Cerrado had begun months earlier, in the fall of 2023, when the actress Octavia Spencer appeared as Mother Nature in an ad alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook. In 2020, the company had set a goal to go “net zero” by the end of the decade, at which point all of its products—laptops, CPUs, phones, earbuds—would be produced without increasing the level of carbon in the atmosphere. “Who wants to disappoint me first?” Mother Nature asked with a sly smile. It was a third of the way to 2030—a date embraced by many corporations aiming to stay in line with the UN’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels—and where was the progress?

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Cook was glad to inform her of the good news: The new Apple Watch was leading the way. A limited supply of the devices were already carbon neutral, thanks to things like recycled materials and parts that were specially sent by ship—not flown—from one factory to another. These special watches were labeled with a green leaf on Apple’s iconically soft, white boxes.

Critics were quick to point out that declaring an individual product “carbon neutral” while the company was still polluting had the whiff of an early victory lap, achieved with some convenient accounting. But the work on the watch spoke to the company’s grand ambitions. Apple claimed that changes like procuring renewable power and using recycled materials had enabled it to cut emissions 75% since 2015. “We’re always prioritizing reductions; they’ve got to come first,” Chris Busch, Apple’s director of environmental initiatives, told me soon after the launch. 

The company also acknowledged that it could not find reductions to balance all its emissions. But it was trying something new. 

Since the 1990s, companies have purchased carbon credits based largely on avoiding emissions. Take some patch of forest that was destined for destruction and protect it; the stored carbon that wasn’t lost is turned into credits. But as the carbon market expanded, so did suspicion of carbon math—in some cases, because of fraud or bad science, but also because efforts to contain deforestation are often frustrated, with destruction avoided in one place simply happening someplace else. Corporations that once counted on carbon credits for “avoided” emissions can no longer trust them. (Many consumers feel they can’t either, with some even suing Apple over the ways it used past carbon projects to make its claims about the Apple Watch.)

But that demand to cancel out carbon dioxide hasn’t gone anywhere—if anything, as AI-driven emissions knock some companies off track from reaching their carbon targets (and raise questions about the techniques used to claim emissions reductions), the need is growing. For Apple, even under the rosiest assumptions about how much it will continue to pollute, the gap is significant: In 2024, the company reported offsetting 700,000 metric tons of CO₂, but the number it will need to hit in 2030 to meet its goals is 9.6 million. 

So the new move is to invest in carbon “removal” rather than avoidance. The idea implies a more solid achievement: taking carbon molecules out of the atmosphere. There are many ways to attempt that, from trying to change the pH of the oceans so that they absorb more of the molecules to building machines that suck carbon straight out of the air. But these are long-term fixes. None of these technologies work at the scale and price that would help Apple and others meet their shorter-term targets. For that, trees have emerged again as the answer. This time the idea is to plant new ones instead of protecting old ones. 

To expand those efforts in a way that would make a meaningful dent in emissions, Apple determined, it would also need to make carbon removal profitable. A big part of this effort would be driven by the Restore Fund, a $200 million partnership with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International, a US environmental nonprofit, to invest in “high quality” projects that promoted reforestation on degraded lands.  

Profits would come from responsibly turning trees into products, Goldman’s head of sustainability explained when the fund was announced in 2021. But it was also an opportunity for Apple, and future investors, to “almost look at, touch, and feel their carbon,” he said—a concreteness that carbon credits had previously failed to offer. “The aim is to generate real, measurable carbon benefits, but to do that alongside financial returns,” Busch told me. It was intended as a flywheel of sorts: more investors, more planting, more carbon—an approach to climate action that looked to abundance rather than sacrifice.

Apple markets its watch as a carbon-neutral product, a claim based in part on the use of carbon credits.

The announcement of the carbon-neutral Apple Watch was the occasion to promote the Restore Fund’s three initial investments, which included a native forestry project as well as eucalyptus farms in Paraguay and Brazil. The Brazilian timber plans were by far the largest in scale, and were managed by BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank. 

Busch connected me with Mark Wishnie, head of sustainability for Timberland Investment Group, BTG’s US-based subsidiary, which acquires and manages properties on behalf of institutional investors. After years in the eucalyptus business, Wishnie, who lives in Seattle, was used to strong feelings about the tree. It’s just that kind of plant—heralded as useful, even ornamental; demonized as a fire starter, water-intensive, a weed. “Has the idea that eucalyptus is invasive come up?” he asked pointedly. (It’s an “exotic” species in Brazil, yes, but the risk of invasiveness is low for the varieties most commonly planted for forestry.) He invited detractors to consider the alternative to the scale and efficiency of eucalyptus, which, he pointed out, relieves the pressure that humans put on beloved old-growth forests elsewhere. 

Using eucalyptus for carbon removal also offered a new opportunity. Wishnie was overseeing a planned $1 billion initiative that was set to transform BTG’s timber portfolio; it aimed at a 50-50 split between timber and native restoration on old pastureland, with an emphasis on connecting habitats along rivers and streams. As a “high quality” project, it was meant to do better than business as usual. The conservation areas would exceed the legal requirements for native preservation in Brazil, which range from 20% to 35% in the Cerrado. In a part of Brazil that historically gets little conservation attention, it would potentially represent the largest effort yet to actually bring back the native landscape. 

When BTG approached Conservation International with the 50% figure, the organization thought it was “too good to be true,” Miguel Calmon, the senior director of the nonprofit’s Brazilian programs, told me. With the restoration work paid for by the green financing and the sale of carbon credits, scale and longevity could be achieved. “Some folks may do this, but they never do this as part of the business,” he said. “It comes from not a corporate responsibility. It’s about, really, the business that you can optimize.”

So far, BTG has raised $630 million for the initiative and earmarked 270,000 hectares, an area more than double the city of Los Angeles. The first farm in the plan, located on a 24,000-hectare cattle ranch, was called Project Alpha. The location, Wishnie said, was confidential. 

COURTESY OF BTG

But a property of that size sticks out, even in a land of large farms. It didn’t take very much digging into municipal land records in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where many of the company’s Cerrado holdings are located, to turn up a recently sold farm that matched the size. It was called Fazenda Engano, or “Deception Farm”—hence the rebrand. The land was registered to an LLC with links to holding companies for other BTG eucalyptus plantations located in a neighboring region that locals had taken to calling the Cellulose Valley for its fast-expanding tree farms and pulp factories.  

The area was largely seen as a land of opportunity, even as some locals had raised the alarm over concerns that the land couldn’t handle the trees. They had allies in prominent ecologists who have long questioned the wisdom of tree-planting in the Cerrado—and increasingly spar with other conservationists who see great potential in turning pasture into forest. The fight has only gotten more heated as more investors hunt for new climate solutions. 

Still, where Apple goes, others often follow. And when it comes to sustainability, other companies look to it as a leader. I wasn’t sure if I could visit Project Alpha and see whether Apple and its partners had really found a better way to plant, but I started making plans to go to the Cerrado anyway, to see the forests behind those little green leaves on the box. 

Complex calculations

In 2015, a study by Thomas Crowther, an ecologist then at ETH Zürich, attempted a census of global tree cover, finding more than 3 trillion trees in all. A useful number, surprisingly hard to divine, like counting insects or bacteria. 

A follow-up study a few years later proved more controversial: Earth’s surface held space for at least 1 trillion more trees. That represented a chance to store 200 metric gigatons, or about 25%, of atmospheric carbon once they matured. (The paper was later corrected in multiple ways, including an acknowledgment that the carbon storage potential could be about one-third less.)

The study became a media sensation, soon followed by a fleet of tree-planting initiatives with “trillion” in the name—most prominently through a World Economic Forum effort launched by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Davos, which President Donald Trump pledged to support during his first term. 

But for as long as tree planting has been heralded as a good deed—from Johnny Appleseed to programs that promise a tree for every shoe or laptop purchased—the act has also been chased closely by a follow-up question: How many of those trees survive? Consider Trump’s most notable planting, which placed an oak on the White House grounds in 2018. It died just over a year later. 

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To critics, including Bill Gates, the efforts were symbolic of short-term thinking at the expense of deeper efforts to cut or remove carbon. (Gates’s spat with Benioff descended to name-calling in the New York Times. “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?” he asked.) The lifespan of a tree, after all, is brief—a pit stop—compared with the thousand-year carbon cycle, so its progeny must carry the torch to meaningfully cancel out emissions. Most don’t last that long. 

“The number of trees planted has become a kind of currency, but it’s meaningless,” Pedro Brancalion, a professor of tropical forestry at the University of São Paulo, told me. He had nothing against the trees, which the world could, in general, use a lot more of. But to him, a lot of efforts were riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy. 

Soon after arriving in São Paulo last summer, I drove some 150 miles into the hills outside the city to see the outdoor lab Brancalion has filled with experiments on how to plant trees better: trees given too many nutrients or too little; saplings monitored with wires and tubes like ICU admits, or skirted with tarps that snatch away rainwater. At the center of one of Brancalion’s plots stands a tower topped with a whirling station, the size of a hobby drone, monitoring carbon going in and out of the air (and, therefore, the nearby vegetation)—a molecular tango known as flux. 

Brancalion works part-time for a carbon-focused restoration company, Re:Green, which had recently sold 3 million carbon credits to Microsoft and was raising a mix of native trees in parts of the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest. While most of the trees in his lab were native ones too, like jacaranda and brazilwood, he also studies eucalyptus. The lab in fact sat on a former eucalyptus farm; in the heart of his fields, a grove of 80-year-old trees dripped bark like molting reptiles. 

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Eucalyptus planting swelled dramatically under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s. The goal was self-sufficiency—a nation’s worth of timber and charcoal, quickly—and the expansion was fraught. Many opinions of the tree were forged in a spate of dubious land seizures followed by clearing of the existing vegetation—disputes that, in some places, linger to this day. Still, that campaign is also said to have done just as Wishnie described, easing the demand that would have been put on regions like the Amazon as Rio and São Paulo were built. 

The new trees also laid the foundation for Brazil to become a global hub for engineered forestry; it’s currently home to about a third of the world’s farmed eucalyptus. Today’s saplings are the products of decades of tinkering with clonal breeding, growing quick and straight, resistant to pestilence and drought, with exacting growth curves that chart biomass over time: Seven years to maturity is standard for pulp. Trees planted today grow more than three times as fast as their ancestors. 

If the goal is a trillion trees, or many millions of tons of carbon, no business is better suited to keeping count than timber. It might sound strange to claim carbon credits for trees that you plan to chop down and turn into toilet paper or chairs. Whatever carbon is stored in those ephemeral products is, of course, a blip compared with the millennia that CO₂ hangs in the atmosphere. 

But these carbon projects take a longer view. While individual trees may go, more trees are planted. The forest constantly regrows and recaptures carbon from the air. Credits are issued annually over decades, so long as the long-term average of the carbon stored in the grove continues to increase. What’s more, because the timber is constantly being tracked, the carbon is easy to measure, solving a key problem with carbon credits. 

Most mature native ecosystems, whether tropical forests or grasslands, will eventually store more carbon than a tree farm. But that could take decades. Eucalyptus can be planted immediately, with great speed, and the first carbon credits are issued in just a few years. “It fits a corporate model very well, and it fits the verification model very well,” said Robin Chazdon, a forest researcher at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast.

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Reliability and stability have also made eucalyptus, as well as pine, quietly dominant in global planting efforts. A 2019 analysis published in Nature found that 45% of carbon removal projects the researchers studied worldwide involved single-species tree farms. In Brazil, the figure was 82%. The authors called this a “scandal,” accusing environmental organizations and financiers of misleading the public and pursuing speed and convenience at the expense of native restoration.  

In 2023, the nonprofit Verra, the largest bearer of carbon credit standards, said it would forbid projects using “non-native monocultures”—that is, plants like eucalyptus or pine that don’t naturally grow in the places where they’re being farmed. The idea was to assuage concerns that carbon credits were going to plantations that would have been built anyway given the demand for wood, meaning they wouldn’t actually remove any extra carbon from the atmosphere.

The uproar was immediate—from timber companies, but also from carbon developers and NGOs. How would it be possible to scale anything—conservation, carbon removal—without them?

Verra reversed course several months later. It would allow non-native monocultures so long as they grew in land that was deemed “degraded,” or previously cleared of vegetation—land like cattle pasture. And it took steps to avoid counting plantings in close proximity to other areas of fast tree growth, the idea being that they wanted to avoid rewarding purely industrial projects that would’ve been planted anyway. 

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Brancalion happened to agree with the criticisms of exotic monocultures. But all the same, he believed eucalyptus had been unfairly demonized. It was a marvelous genus, actually, with nearly 800 species with unique adaptations. Natives could be planted as monocultures too, or on stolen land, or tended with little care. He had been testing ways to turn eucalyptus from perceived foes into friends of native forest restoration.

His idea was to use rows of eucalyptus, which rocket above native species, as a kind of stabilizer. While these natives can be valuable—either as lumber or for biodiversity—they may grow slowly, or twist in ways that make their wood unprofitable, or suddenly and inexplicably die. It’s never like that with eucalyptus, which are wonderfully predictable growers. Eventually, their harvested wood would help pay for the hard work of growing the others. 

In practice, foresters have generally preferred to keep things separate. Eucalyptus here; restoration there. It was far more efficient. The approach was emblematic, Brancalion thought, of letting the economics of the industry guide what was planted, how, and where, even with green finance involved. Though he admitted he was speaking as something of a competitor given his own carbon work, he was perplexed by Apple’s choices. The world’s richest company was doing eucalyptus? And with a bank better known locally as a major investor in industries, like beef and soy, that contributed to deforestation than any efforts for native restoration.

It also worried him to see the planting happening west of here, in the Cerrado, where land is cheaper and also, for much of the year, drier. “It’s like a bomb,” Brancalion told me. “You can come interview me in five, six years. You don’t have to be super smart to realize what will happen after planting too many eucalyptus in a dry region.” He wished me luck on my journey westward.   

The sacrifice zone

Savanna implies openness, but the European settlers passing through the Cerrado called it the opposite; the name literally means “closed.” Grasses and shrubs grow to chest height, scaled as if to maximize human inconvenience. A machete is advised. 

As I headed with Borzone toward a small nature preserve called Parque do Pombo, she told me that young Brazilians are often raised with a sense of dislike, if not fear, of this land. When Borzone texted her mother, a local biologist, to say where we were going, she replied: “I hear that place is full of ticks.” (Her intel, it turned out, was correct.)

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What can be easy to miss is the fantastic variety of these plants, the result of natural selection cranked into overdrive. Species, many of which blew in from the Amazon, survived by growing deep roots through the acidic soil and thicker bark to resist regular brush fires. Many of the trees developed the ability to shrivel upon themselves and drop their leaves during the long, dry winter. Some call it a forest that has grown upside down, because much of the growth occurs in the roots. The Cerrado is home to 12,000 flowering plant species, 4,000 of which are found only there. In terms of biodiversity, it is second in the world only to its more famous neighbor, the Amazon. 

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Each stop on our drive seemed to yield a new treasure for Borzone to show me: Guavira, a tree that bears fruit in grape-like bunches that appear only two weeks in a year; it can be made into a jam that is exceptionally good on toast. Pequi, more divisive, like fermented mango mixed with cheese. Others bear names Borzone can only faintly recall in the Indigenous Guaraní language and is thus unable to google. Certain uses are more memorable: Give this one here, a tiny frond that looks like a miniature Christmas fir, to make someone get pregnant.

Borzone had grown up in the heart of the savanna, and the land had changed significantly since she was a kid going to the river every weekend with her family. Since the 1970s, about half of the savanna has been cleared, mostly for ranching and, where the soil is good, soybeans. At that time, even prominent ecologists, fearing total destruction of the Amazon, advocated moving industry here, invoking what Brazilians call the boi de piranha—a myth about casting a cow into infested waters so that the other cows could ford downstream. 

Toby Pennington, a Cerrado ecologist at the University of Exeter, told me it remains a sacrificial zone, at times faring worse when environmentally minded politicians are in power. In 2023, when deforestation fell by half in the Amazon, it rose by 43% in the Cerrado. Some ecologists warn that this ecosystem could be entirely gone in the next decade.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a certain prickliness among grassland researchers, who are, like their chosen flora, used to being trampled. In 2019, 46 of them authored a response in Science to Crowther’s trillion-trees study, arguing not about tree counting but about the land he proposed for reforestation. Much of it, they argued, including places like the Cerrado, was not appropriate for so many trees. It was too much biomass for the land to handle. (If their point was not already clear, the scientists later labeled the phenomenon “biome awareness disparity,” or BAD.)

“It’s a controversial ecosystem,” said Natashi Pilon, a grassland ecologist at the University of Campinas near São Paulo. “With Cerrado, you have to forget everything that you learn about ecology, because it’s all based in forest ecology. In the Cerrado, everything works the opposite way. Burning? It’s good. Shade? It’s not good.” The Cerrado contains a vast range of landscapes, from grassy fields to wooded forests, but the majority of it, she explained, is poorly suited to certain rules of carbon finance that would incentivize people to protect or restore it. While the underground forest stores plenty of carbon, it builds up its stock slowly and can be difficult to measure. 

The result is a slightly uncomfortable position for ecologists studying and trying to protect a vanishing landscape. Pilon and her former academic advisor, Giselda Durigan, a Cerrado ecologist at the Environmental Research Institute of the State of São Paulo and one of the scientists behind BAD, have gotten accustomed to pushing back on people who arrived preaching “improvement” through trees—first from nonprofits, mostly of the trillion-trees variety, but now from the timber industry. “They are using the carbon discourse as one more argument to say that business is great,” Durigan told me. “They are happy to be seen as the good guys.” 

Durigan saw tragedy in the way that Cerrado had been transformed into cattle pasture in just a generation, but there was also opportunity in restoring it once the cattle left. Bringing the Cerrado back would be hard work—usually requiring fire and hacking away at invasive grasses. But even simply leaving it alone could allow the ecosystem to begin to repair itself and offer something like the old savanna habitat. Abandoned eucalyptus farms, by contrast, were nightmares to return to native vegetation; the strange Cerrado plants refused to take root in the highly modified soil. 

In recent years, Durigan had visited hundreds of eucalyptus farms in the area, shadowing her students who had been hired by timber companies to help establish promised corridors of native vegetation in accordance with federal rules. “They’re planting entire watersheds,” she said. “The rivers are dying.” 

Durigan saw plants in isolated patches growing taller than they normally would, largely thanks to the suppression of regular brush fires. They were throwing shade on the herbs and grasses and drawing more water. The result was an environment gradually choking on itself, at risk of collapse during drought and retaining only a fraction of the Cerrado’s original diversity. If this was what people meant by bringing back the Cerrado, she believed it was only hastening its ultimate disappearance. 

In a recent survey of the watershed around the Parque do Pombo, which is hemmed in on each side by eucalyptus, two other researchers reported finding “devastation” and turned to Plato’s description of Attica’s forests, cleared to build the city of Athens: “What remains now compared to what existed is like the skeleton of a sick man … All the rich and soft soil has dissolved, leaving the country of skin and bones.” 

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After a long day of touring the land—and spinning out on the clay—we found that our fuel was low. The Parque do Pombo groundskeeper looked over at his rusting fuel tank and apologized. It had been spoiled by the last rain. At least, he said, it was all downhill to the highway. 

The road of opportunity

We only made it about halfway down the eucalyptus-lined road. After the car huffed and left us stranded, Borzone and I started walking toward the highway, anticipating a long night. We remembered locals’ talk of jaguars recently pushed into the area by development. 

But after only 30 minutes or so, a set of lights came into view across the plain. Then another, and another. Then the outline of a tractor, a small tanker truck, and, somewhat curiously, a tour bus. The gear and the vehicles bore the logo of Suzano, the world’s largest pulp and paper company.

After talking to a worker, we boarded the empty tour bus and were taken to a cluster of spotlit tents, where women prepared eucalyptus seedlings, stacking crates of them on white fold-out tables. A night shift like this one was unusual. But they were working around the clock—aiming to plant a million trees per day across Suzano’s farms, in preparation for opening the world’s largest pulp factory just down the highway. It would open in a few weeks with a capacity of 2.55 million metric tons of pulp per year. 

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The tour bus was standing by to take the workers down the highway at 1 a.m., arriving in the nearest city, Três Lagoas, by 3 a.m. to pick up the next shift. “You don’t do this work without a few birds at home to feed,” a driver remarked as he watched his colleagues filling holes in the field by the light of their headlamps. After getting permission from his boss, he drove us an hour each way to town to the nearest gas station.

This highway through the Cellulose Valley has become known as a road of opportunity, with eucalyptus as the region’s new lifeblood after the cattle industry shrank its footprint. Not far from the new Suzano factory, a popular roadside attraction is an oversize sculpture of a black bull at the gates of a well-known ranch. The ranch was recently planted, and the bull is now guarded by a phalanx of eucalyptus. 

On TikTok, workers post selfies and views from tractors in the nearby groves, backed by a song from the local country music duo Jads e Jadson. “I’m going to plant some eucalyptus / I’ll get rich and you’ll fall in love with me,” sings a down-on-his-luck man at risk of losing his fiancée. Later, when he cuts down the trees and becomes a wealthy man with better options, he cuts off his betrothed, too. 

The race to plant more eucalyptus here is backed heavily by the state government, which last year waived environmental requirements for new farms on pasture and hopes to quickly double its area in just a few years. The trees were an important component of Brazil’s plan to meet its global climate commitments, and the timber industry was keen to cash in. Companies like Suzano have already proposed that tens of thousands of their hectares become eligible for carbon credits. 

What’s top of mind for everyone, though, is worsening fires. Even when we visited in midwinter, the weather was hot and dry. The wider region was in a deep drought, perhaps the worst in 700 years, and in a few weeks, one of the worst fire seasons ever would begin. Suzano would be forced to make a rare pause in its planting when soil temperatures reached 154 °F. 

Posted along the highway are constant reminders of the coming danger: signs, emblazoned with the logos of a dozen timber companies, that read “FOGO ZERO,” or “ZERO FIRE.” 

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In other places struck by megafires, like Portugal and Chile, eucalyptus has been blamed for worsening the flames. (The Chilean government has recently excluded pine and eucalyptus farms from its climate plans.) But here in Brazil, where climate change is already supersizing the blazes, the industry offers sophisticated systems to detect and suppress fires, argued Calmon of Conservation International. “You really need to protect it because that’s your asset,” he said. (BTG also noted that in parts of the Cerrado where human activity has increased, fires have decreased.) 

Eucalyptus is often portrayed as impossibly thirsty compared with other trees, but Calmon pointed out it is not uniquely so. In some parts of the Cerrado, it has been found to consume four times as much water as native vegetation; in others, the two landscapes have been roughly in line. It depends on many factors—what type of soil it’s planted in, what Cerrado vegetation coexists with it, how intensely the eucalyptus is farmed. Timber companies, which have no interest in seeing their own plantations run dry, invest heavily in managing water. Another hope, Wishnie told me, is that by vastly increasing the forest canopy, the new eucalyptus will actually gather moisture and help produce rain. 

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That’s a common narrative and one that’s been taught in schools here in Três Lagoas for decades, Borzone explained when we met up the day after our rescue with Marine Dubos-Raoul, a local geographer and university professor, and two of her students. Dubos-Raoul laughed uneasily. If this idea about rain was in fact true, they hadn’t seen it here. They crouched around the table at the cafe, speaking in a hush; their opinions weren’t particularly popular in this lumber town.

Dubos-Raoul had long tracked the impacts of the waves of planting on longtime rural residents, who complained that industry had taken their water or sprayed their gardens with pesticides. 

The evidence tying the trees to water problems in the region, Dubos-Raoul admitted, is more anecdotal than data driven. But she heard it in conversation after conversation. “People would have tears in their eyes,” she said. “It was very clear to them that it was connected to the arrival of the eucalyptus.” (Since our meeting, a study, carried out in response to demands from local residents, has blamed the planting for 350 depleted springs in the area, sparking a rare state inquiry into the issue.) In any case, Dubos-Raoul thought, it didn’t make much sense to keep adding matches to the tinderbox.

Shortly after talking with Dubos-Raoul, we ventured to the town of Ribas do Rio Pardo to meet Charlin Castro at his family’s river resort. Suzano’s new pulp factory stood on the horizon, surrounded by one of the densest areas of planting in the region. 

PABLO ALBARENGA

PABLO ALBARENGA

With thousands of workers arriving, mostly temporarily, to build the factory and plant the fields, the sleepy farming village had turned into a boomtown, and developed something of a lawless reputation—prostitution, homelessness, collisions between logging trucks and drunk drivers—and Castro was chronicling much of it for a hyperlocal Instagram news outlet, while also running for city council. 

But overall, he was thankful to Suzano. The factory was transforming the town into a “a real place,” as he put it, even if change was at times painful. 

His father, Camilo, gestured with a sinewy arm over to the water, where he recalled boat races involving canoes with crews of a dozen. That was 30 years ago. It was impossible to imagine now as I watched a family cool off in this bend in the river, the water just knee deep. But it’s hard to say what exactly is causing the low water levels. Perhaps it’s silt from the ranches, Charlin suggested. Or a change in the climate. Or, maybe, it could be the trees. 

Upstream, Ana Cláudia (who goes by “Tica”) and Antonio Gilberto Lima were more certain what was to blame. The couple, who are in their mid-60s, live in a simple brick house surrounded by fruit trees. They moved there a decade ago, seeking a calm retirement—one of a hundred or so families taking part in land reforms that returned land to smallholders. But recently, life has been harder. To preserve their well, they had let their vegetable garden go to seed. Streams were dry, and the old pools in the pastures where they used to fish were gone, replaced by trees; tapirs were rummaging through their garden, pushed, they believed, by lack of habitat. 

PABLO ALBARENGA

They were surrounded by eucalyptus, planted in waves with the arrival of each new factory. No one was listening, they told me, as the cattle herd bellowed outside the door. “The trees are sad,” Gilberto said, looking out over his few dozen pale-humped animals grazing around scattered Cerrado species left in the paddock. Tica told me she knew that paper and pulp had to come from somewhere, and that many people locally were benefiting. But the downsides were getting overlooked, she thought. They had signed a petition to the government, organized by Dubos-Raoul, seeking to rein in the industry. Perhaps, she hoped, it could reach American investors, too. 

The green halo 

A few weeks before my trip, BTG had decided it was ready to show off Project Alpha. The visit was set for my last day in Brazil; the farm formerly known as Fazenda Engano was further upriver in Camapuã, a town that borders Ribas do Rio Pardo. It was a long, circuitous drive north to get out there, but it wouldn’t be that way much longer; a new highway was being paved that would directly connect the two towns, part of an initiative between the timber industry and government to expand the cellulose hub northward. A local official told me he expected tens of thousands of hectares of eucalyptus in the next few years.

For now, though, it was still the frontier. The intention was to plant “well outside the forest sector,” Wishnie told me—not directly in the shadow of a mill, but close enough for the operation to be practical, with access to labor and logistics. That distance was important evidence that the trees would store more carbon than what’s accounted for in a business-as-usual scenario. The other guarantee was the restoration. It wasn’t good business to buy land and not plant every acre you could with timber. It was made possible only with green investments from Apple and others.

That morning, Wishnie had emailed me a press release announcing that Microsoft had joined Apple in seeking help from BTG to help meet its carbon demands. The technology giant had made the largest-ever purchase of carbon credits, representing 8 million tons of CO₂, from Project Alpha, following smaller commitments from TSMC and Murata, two of Apple’s suppliers. 

I was set to meet Carlos Guerreiro, head of Latin American operations for BTG’s timber subsidiary, at a gas station in town, where we would set off together for the 24,000-hectare property. A forester in Brazil for much of his life, he had flown in from his home near São Paulo early that morning; he planned to check out the progress of the planting at Project Alpha and then swing down to the bank’s properties across the Cellulose Valley, where BTG was finalizing a $376 million deal to sell land to Suzano. 

COURTESY OF BTG

Guerreiro defended BTG’s existing holdings as sustainable engines of development in the region. But all the same, Project Alpha felt like a new beginning for the company, he told me. About a quarter of this property had been left untouched when the pasture was first cleared in the 1980s, but the plan now was to restore an additional 13% of the property to native Cerrado plants, bringing the total to 37%. (BTG says it will protect more land on future farms to arrive at its 50-50 target.) Individual patches of existing native vegetation would be merged with others around the property, creating a 400-meter corridor that largely followed the streams and rivers—beyond the 60 meters required by law. 

The restoration work was happening with the help of researchers from a Brazilian university, though they were still testing the best methods. We stood over trenches that had been planted with native seeds just weeks before, shoots only starting to poke out of the dirt. Letting the land regenerate on its own was often preferable, Guerreiro told me, but the best approach would depend on the specifics of each location. In other places, assistance with planting or tending or clearing back the invasive grasses could be better. 

The approach of largely letting things be was already yielding results, he noted: In parts of the property that hadn’t been grazed in years, they could already see the hardscrabble Cerrado clawing back with a vengeance. They’d been marveling at the fauna, caught on camera traps: tapirs, anteaters, all kinds of birds. They had even spotted a jaguar. The project would ensure that this growth would continue for decades. The land wouldn’t be sold to another rancher and go back to looking like other parts of the property, which were regularly cleared of native habitat. The hope, he said, was that over time the regenerating ecosystems would store more carbon, and generate more credits, than the eucalyptus. (The company intends to submit its carbon plans to Verra later this year.)

We stopped for lunch at the dividing line between the preserve and the eucalyptus, eating ham sandwiches in the shade of the oldest trees on the property, already two stories tall and still, by Guerreiro’s estimate, putting on a centimeter per day. He was planting at a rate of 40,000 seedlings per day in neat trenches filled with white lime to make the sandy Cerrado soil more inviting. In seven years or so, half of the trees will be thinned and pulped. The rest will keep growing. They’ll stand for seven years longer and grow thick and firm enough for plywood. The process will then start anew. Guerreiro described a model where clusters of farms mixed with preserves like this one will be planted around mills throughout the Cerrado. But nothing firm had been decided.

PABLO ALBARENGA

This experiment, Wishnie told me later, could have a big payoff. The important thing, he reminded me, was that stretches of the Cerrado would be protected at a scale no one had achieved before—something that wouldn’t happen without eucalyptus. He strongly disagreed with the scientists who said eucalyptus didn’t fit here. The government had analyzed the watershed, he explained, and he was confident the land could support the trees. At the end of the day, the choice was between doing something and doing nothing. “We talk about restoration as if it’s a thing that happens,” he said. 

When I asked Pilon to take a look at satellite imagery and photos of the property, she was unimpressed. It looked to her like yet another misguided attempt at planting trees in an area that had once naturally been a dense savanna. (Her assessment is supported by a land survey from the 1980s that classified this land as a typical Cerrado ecosystem—some trees, but mostly shrubbery. BTG responded that the survey was incorrect and the satellite images clearly showed a closed-canopy forest.) 

As Lucy Rowland, an expert on the region at the University of Exeter and another BAD signatory, put it: “Under no circumstances should planting eucalyptus ever be considered a viable project to receive carbon credits in the Cerrado.” 

Over months of reporting, the way that both sides spoke in absolutes about how to save this vanishing ecosystem had become familiar. Chazdon, the Australia-based forest researcher, told me she too felt that the tenor of the argument over how and where to grow has become more vehement as demand for tree-based carbon removal has intensified. “Nobody’s a villain,” she said. “There are disconnects on both sides.”

Chazdon had been excited to hear about BTG’s project. It was, she thought, the type of thing that was sorely needed in conservation—mixing profitable enterprises with an approach to restoration that considers the wider landscape. “I can understand why the Cerrado ecologists are up in arms,” she said. “They get the feeling that nobody cares about their ecosystems.” But demands for ecological purity could indeed get in the way of doing much of anything—especially in places like the Cerrado, where laws and financing favor destruction over restoration. 

Still, thinking about the scale of the carbon removal problem, she considered it sensible to wonder about the future that was being hatched. While there is, in fact, a limit to how much additional land the world needs for pulp and plywood products in the near future, there is virtually no limit to how much land it could devote to sequestering carbon. Which means we need to ask hard questions about the best way to use it. 

PABLO ALBARENGA

It was true, Chazdon said, that planting eucalyptus in the Cerrado was an act of destruction—it’d make that land nearly impossible to recover. The areas preserved in between them would also likely struggle to fully renew itself, without fire or clearing. She would feel more comfortable with such large-scale projects if the bar for restoration were much higher—say, 75% or more. But that almost certainly wouldn’t satisfy her grassland colleagues who don’t want any eucalyptus at all. And it might not fit the profit model—the flywheel that Apple and others are seeking in order to scale up carbon removal fast. 

Barbara Haya, who studies carbon offsets at the University of California, Berkeley, encouraged me to think about all of it differently. The improvements to planting eucalyptus here, at this farm, could be a perfectly good thing for this industry, she said. Perhaps they merit some claim about greener toilet paper or plywood. Haya would leave that debate to the ecologists.

But we weren’t talking about toilet paper or plywood. We were talking about laptops and smart watches and ChatGPT. And the path to connecting those things to these trees was more convoluted. The carbon had to be disentangled first from the wood’s other profitable uses and then from the wider changes that were happening in this region and its industries. There seemed to be many plausible scenarios for where this land was heading. Was eucalyptus the only feasible route for carbon to find its way here? 

Haya is among the experts who argue that the idea of precisely canceling out corporate emissions to reach carbon neutrality is a broken one. That’s not to say protecting nature can’t help fight climate change. Conserving existing forests and grasslands, for example, could often yield greater carbon and biodiversity benefits in the long run than planting new forests. But the carbon math used to justify those efforts was often fuzzier. This makes every claim of carbon neutrality fragile and drives companies toward projects that are easier to prove, she thinks, but perhaps have less impact. 

One idea is that companies should instead shift to a “contribution” model that tracks how much money they put toward climate mitigation, without worrying about the exact amount of carbon removed. “Let’s say the goal is to save the Cerrado,” Haya said. “Could they put that same amount of money and really make a difference?” Such an approach, she pointed out, could help finance the preservation of those last intact Cerrado remnants. Or it could fund restoration, even if the restored vegetation takes years to grow or sometimes needs to burn. 

The approach raises its own questions—about how to measure the impact of those investments and what kinds of incentives would motivate corporations to act. But it’s a vision that has gained more popularity as scrutiny of carbon credits grows and the options available to companies narrow. With the current state of the world, “what private companies do matters more than ever,” Haya told me. “We need them not to waste money.” 

In the meantime, it’s up to the consumer reading the label to decide what sort of path we’re on. 

PABLO ALBARENGA

Before we left the farm, Borzone and I had one more task: to plant a tree. The sun was getting low over Project Alpha when I was handed an iron contraption that cradled a eucalyptus seedling, pulled from a tractor piled with plants. 

“There’s nothing wrong with the trees,” Borzone had said earlier, squinting up at the row of 18-month-old eucalyptus, their fluttering leaves flashing in the hot wind as if in an ill-practiced burlesque show. “I have to remind myself of that.” But still it felt strange putting one in the ground. We were asking so much of it, after all. And we were poised to ask more.

I squeezed the handle, pulling the iron hinge taut and forcing the plant deep into the soil. It poked out at a slight angle that I was sure someone else would need to fix later, or else this eucalyptus tree would grow askew. I was slow and clumsy in my work, and by the time I finished, the tractor was far ahead of us, impossibly small on the horizon. The worker grabbed the tool from my hand and headed toward it, pushing seedlings down as he went, hurried but precise, one tree after another.

Gregory Barber is a journalist based in San Francisco. 

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, as well as support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there

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.

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.

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.”

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 only expanded 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. 

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 accused of 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 legislative efforts 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.

Additional reporting by Nu Nu Lusan.