Burmese labour activist Jimmy can't help but find it ironic when he receives scam calls from unrecognisable Australian numbers.
The people on the other end of the line are entrapped by dangerous gangs who drove his family to seek asylum to Australia.
Jimmy, who has only provided his first name for safety reasons, recounted how being called by powerful Chinese mafia gangsters for his work in rescuing hundreds of migrant workers from enslavement in scam factories was chilling.
"I've received threatening calls about the people I've rescued. I've been followed while driving my car and have had to move houses four times," he told AAP.
He has not received direct threats since arriving in Melbourne as a humanitarian entrant four months ago, but still has to maintain a low profile as he works clandestinely with staff in charities he set up in Thailand and Myanmar.
He estimates there are 77,000 migrant workers in Myanmar from more than 25 nations including Ethiopia, Morocco and Uganda who are lured on the promise of working in the tech sector in Thailand.
They end up being duped to scam people around the world for money via text messages, phone calls, emails and social media.
He said cyber criminals had become extremely sophisticated in their recruitment methods.
"There's always been lot of trafficking and people smuggling between Thailand and Myanmar before the scam gangs took over my country after the military coup in 2021," he explained.
They have also become extremely savvy in training their employees in romance scams known as pig-butchering schemes, where they string victims along for months to cough up their savings, using everything from chatbots to voice-altering software.
The federally-funded National Anti-Scam Centre estimates more than $40 million was lost in Australia to romance baiting scams in 2023.
"With the emergence of new technologies, Scamwatch continues to see growing sophistication in scam approaches and is alert to the risks artificial intelligence presents," a national centre spokesperson said.
"We have received reports of scammers employing AI in the form of 'chatbots' on social media sites ... the bots are used to give the impression that many other real people are interested in the product and are receiving financial benefit from the scam."
In recent years, the porous Thai-Myanmar border has become an active construction hub for nondescript grey compounds that house thousands of workers forced to work up to 20 hours a day with unachievable quotas of gathering millions of dollars for their overlords.
That rapid growth has been enabled by corrupt elements of Myanmar's military, especially the Border Guard Forces (BGF) who get kickbacks from the profits amassed by Chinese gangs.
The activist in his mid-thirties, who is from the Nepali-speaking Gurka minority in Myanmar, has hit the ground running in Melbourne studying and trying to find paid work with the aid of resettlement agency AMES Australia.
He said the top gangsters live in Singapore, where billions of dollars are laundered, funding their lavish lifestyles from fast cars to palatial mansions.
But it is on the account of those busy worker bees inside those compounds.
He described the ugly reality of being a bonded servant as detailed to him time and time again by victims he rescued.
"If you are trapped inside in the scam centre, you get a lot of different punishments, a lot of electrocution and sometimes they put you in a dark room and you don't see anyone for days, a lot of beating and a lot of torture."
"Some of them got broken arms, some of them got broken ribs and some of them got really hot water poured on their faces and bodies," he said, referring to photos and videos he receives of the decrepit conditions that AAP has seen.
"They (the migrant workers) cannot leave, so basically they are really desperate and sometimes they kill themselves because they don't know what to do."
He said women were sometimes forced into prostitution and the ruthless gangs even blackmailed families of compromised workers by sending them pornographic material of their daughters.
That has been corroborated in a report published in December by the ASEAN-Australia Counter-Trafficking program.
One of the report's co-authors, Lisa Denney, said labour migrants with marketable IT skills were vulnerable to getting trafficked and caught up in these scam centres.
"They're often very poor, but they're not necessarily the poorest people in their countries," said Dr Denney, deputy director of the Centre for Human Security at La Trobe University.
"What we found was that women, for instance, might be sold into sex trafficking because often the scam centres are attached to casinos. So if you're not good at making money in the scam centre, then you are forced to become a prostitute.
"They kind of sign up for what they think is a somewhat more legitimate job that promises these great conditions and good pay, and then get duped into these scam centres that essentially enslave them."
Breaking those shackles has become Jimmy's obsession. He negotiates with sympathetic soldiers from the rebel Democratic Karen Buddhist Army providing them exact co-ordinates and passport details to rescue victims.
"It's a lot of risk for myself. They can kill me anytime they want because I'm a troublemaker to them. They're still men with guns and bullets."
In early July, he was involved in the rescue of more than 20 Moroccans held by the digital mafias with the aid of embassies and the Thai army.
"I don't have any capacity like any governments or any power ... but sometimes if I have the tool, the connection, the channel that could help, I do it," he said, vowing to push on.
"It's simple for me because the people inside are helpless."
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