Supercharging Global Anti-Scam Organization

Fundraising campaign by Jan Santiago
  • US$10,750
    Donated So Far
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Project: META-SEA (Mitigating Emerging Threat Actors from Southeast Asia)


Prevention, Protection, Prosecution, Partnership

Prevention

Website, social media, and media presence in both English and Chinese. GASO publishes the latest uncovered fraud sites, cybercrime trends, and cases of HT and deceptive recruitment. The GASO website has a live chat team that helps current and potential scam victims, as well as HT victims and their family members. GASO translates Chinese news, articles and social media on job scams and produces original anti-fraud content. Within 10 months, GASO has garnered 60+ TV and print media impressions around the world e.g., Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Nikkei Asia, South China Morning Post, Strait Times, and Kwong Wah (Malaysia), with many citing the HT involved. However, awareness among the English-speaking public of HT in SEA and how it affects their online experience is still severely lacking. Our objective is to reduce both victims of cybercrime and potential victims of HT. We propose:

  • To build up our social media presence in English, which is well behind its Chinese counterpart
  • To increase our frontline live chat staff to deal with ever-increasing queries from scam victims, HT victims and their families
  • To have media liaisons of rescued HT victims of scam companies to raise awareness on both the online scams they were doing and the way they got trafficked into these work.
  • To have researchers on the field in SEA to collect data, conduct interviews, and advocate effective solutions to policy makers (e.g., stricter border control and interventions at the airport).

Protection

GASO verifies the identities of HT victims and provides them with temporary shelter in Cambodia in a safe house that can accommodate approximately 35 people. Victims who cannot afford to fly home can stay there until they can raise enough money. The shelter provides two meals a day, and GASO works with restaurants owners in Phnom Penh to employ HT victims so they can earn their way home. Currently, all support and food come from public donations by Cambodians and local Chinese. The owner of the safe house is a GASO volunteer currently taking loans from banks to support these victims. Rescue operations typically take ~2 weeks of interviewing, verifying, assessing, and planning, not counting police or embassy response times and final debriefing. For their time, GASO rescue specialists:

  • Verify the sincerity and authenticity of a scam company worker asking for help
  • Find, relay messages, and connect human trafficking victims with their families so that their families can report their kidnapping
  • Liaise with authorities, embassies of trafficked victims and local partners
  • Strategizes plans and ideas for exfiltration from guarded compounds
  • Authenticate ransom demands, resist extortions, and work with informants
  • Properly document to ensure court-admissibility of any findings

We propose:

  • Funding for more sustainable shelter(s)
  • Financial grants to cover travel costs of eligible HT victims who are handicapped and are unable to return home
  • Emergency aid for victims: one who escaped the crime syndicate compound by jumping off from the third level; one woman who was sexually assaulted to seek treatment; and one woman who was raped with no protection and gave birth to children in the scam compound
  • Legal aid to help negotiate with the immigration office of Cambodia to provide visa extension for HT victims who are continually fined for overstaying

Prosecution

Through the Rescue Division of the Mitigating Emerging Threat Actors in Southeast Asia (META-SEA) project, GASO is able to obtain crucial leads on scams companies and HT syndicates, information that has been appreciated by authorities in various countries – FBI task forces, the Commercial Affairs Department of the Singapore Police Force, the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Taiwan, and the Malaysian Embassy in Cambodia. As such, GASO has formed direct relationships with these four bodies. GASO was recently invited as a keynote panel speaker in an anti-HT workshop held by Winrock International and USAID on June 7th, 2022 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. To help dismantle HT networks and end their profitability from online scams, GASO proposes an intelligence team to:

  • Work alongside rescue division in debriefing, documenting, and organizing the information streams coming from all scams and HT victims, which yield evidence connecting specific fraud schemes to a given criminal company
  • Monitor websites that are suspected fronts for scam companies and IT developers
  • Research businesses and legal entities supporting the scam dens to identify their principal backers and beneficiaries
  • Cultivate informants and infiltrate Chinese messaging channels of scam industry workers
  • Guide and work with investigative reporters

As of August 2022, GASO has rescued over 53 victims in the span of 7 months. Rescues have led to the arrest of a crime syndicate in Taiwan.

Partnership

GASO has joined forces with local Chinese volunteers working to end HT, in particular Lu Xiang Ri who used to run the now-closed Chinese-Cambodia Charity Team. GASO had also established working relationships with International Justice Mission (IJM) Cambodia branch office and United Nations of Cambodia branch as well as Chinese law enforcement and embassy personnel working on HT cases of Chinese citizens, in addition to our existing connections with authorities of other countries for matters of HT and/or cybercrime. Just recently, Taiwanese authorities issued a press release announcing that they are opening a direct window with GASO to work on rescuing their citizens. Informally, GASO has established a relationship with the Malaysian embassy in Cambodia for Malaysian HT victims. In order to execute rescues faster and keep up with the increasing cases of HT brought to GASO, we propose to expand partnerships with:

  • Mainland Chinese authorities to help Chinese HT victims and potentially bridge the gap between US and Chinese law enforcement in the HT area
  • Companies in social media, regulation technology and cybersecurity to combat fraudulent profiles and misleading job advertisements


Fundraising Team

  • Zhu Wansui
  •  
  • Media and Fundraising
  • Accounts Gaso
  •  
  • Accounting
  • April Zeng
  •  
  • campaign manager
  • Jan S
  •  
  • manager

Donors

  • Anonymous
  • Donated on Sep 18, 2022
$10.00
  • Anonymous
  • Donated on Sep 09, 2022
$80.00
  • Anonymous
  • Donated on Aug 24, 2022
  • I’m Malaysian who is living at taipei….Thanks for helping those people from the scam company

$20.00

No updates for this campaign just yet

Donors & Comments

82 donors
  • Anonymous
  • Donated on Sep 18, 2022
$10.00
  • Anonymous
  • Donated on Sep 09, 2022
$80.00
  • Anonymous
  • Donated on Aug 24, 2022
  • I’m Malaysian who is living at taipei….Thanks for helping those people from the scam company

$20.00
  • Gary Patch
  • Donated on Aug 23, 2022
  • You helped me get a friend of mine out of a really bad Chinese scam operation in Cambodia. Thank You

$35.00
  • Nicolette Wong
  • Donated on Aug 21, 2022
$10.00
  • andy teng
  • Donated on Aug 21, 2022
  • make a difference

$10.00
  • Guest
  • Donated on Aug 20, 2022
$6.00
  • Guest
  • Donated on Aug 20, 2022
$100.00
  • Sandy
  • Donated on Aug 15, 2022
  • Thank you for saving so many people and Taiwanese. Sincerely.

$200.00
  • chia lin ho
  • Donated on Aug 15, 2022
  • Please save more people and bring them back to their family

$500.00
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Followers

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US$10,750
Donated So Far

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