As Elon Musk’s DOGE team continues to rampage through United States federal agencies, Trump administration efforts to eliminate the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) seem to be furthest along. The impacts of the agency’s dismantling on humanitarian relief, public health, and human rights work, combined with the wider 90-day State Department pause on foreign aid payments, are already far-reaching and severe around the world. Sources tell WIRED that the situation is also impacting anti-human-trafficking work targeted at addressing forced labor compounds that fuel digital fraud like investment scams.
The funding cuts and pauses have immediately made it harder for people to safely escape scam compounds, according to half a dozen sources working to combat scams and trafficking. The cuts have also shrunk services that house and care for human trafficking victims and are limiting investigatory work into criminal groups. After just days of funding disruptions, sources say that the cuts have caused “chaos” for staff working to help survivors on a daily basis. Some organizations have already gone dark, and relief workers add that the withdrawal of services could embolden the criminal groups behind the fraud.
“It is a really, really bad situation,” says one person working in the antiscam sector in Southeast Asia. The individual, as with several sources in this story, requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the work and ongoing changing situation. They say small grassroot organizations, which may only have a handful of staff each but help identify and work with trafficking victims, have been widely affected. “This pause will mean that organizations that essentially shifted their work from different forms of trafficking to looking at scamming compounds will cease to exist,” they say.
USAID and the US State Department did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED about the situation.
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Over the last five years, dozens of “scam compounds” have been constructed in Southeast Asia, particularly within Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Run by organized crime groups, which often have links to Chinese nationals, more than 200,000 people from 100-plus countries have been trafficked into the compounds—often under the pretense of getting a legitimate job. These people are often held captive, beaten and tortured, and forced to work long shifts running online scams targeting people around the world, including in the United States. While the compounds engage in a range of fraudulent activity, so-called pig butchering scams have been the predominant focus, with global losses estimated at $75 billion or more.
Law enforcement efforts in Southeast Asia to tackle scam compounds and the criminal organizations heavily profiting from them have sometimes made progress, but have also been widely criticized for corruption and failing to comprehensively deal with the problem. However, a patchwork of NGOs, charities, and anti-trafficking organizations have been attempting to fill the gaps, helping victims escape and get access to legal advice, health care, and other resources. A US State Department webpage details more than $272 million in funding provided to fight human trafficking around the world, with Southeast Asia programs that include investigative efforts, survivor protection, and more. And USAID directly funds humanitarian groups in the region.
Julia Macher, the CEO of Freedom Collaborative, a network that has been impacted by the freezes and works with grassroots groups fighting scam compounds, says the repercussions of the drastic changes at USAID have been “instantaneous.”
“Our partners say that for some survivors they are in touch with inside the scam centers, even if they can somehow manage to get out, they then have no place to put them. Then, the survivors have no money for a flight home and no place to go, so they get re-recruited into the centers as they do not have any real alternative options,” Macher says. “Some survivors have injuries like broken bones from jumping out the window to escape, and now the organizations have no money to put them into the hospitals, and without medical care, the survivors could become paralyzed.”
Multiple sources tell WIRED that organizations that have relied on funding have had to stop or reduce work and lay off staffers. Macher, who has been running working groups with members of her network over the last week, says some survivors of scam compounds are being given assistance to return home; however, shelters that temporarily house them and provide care have been impacted. “Without a safe and dependable shelter to house them after their escape, some survivors opt to return to their exploitative work inside the scam centers despite knowing the risks,” Macher says.
“There are shelters in neighboring countries like Cambodia and Myanmar for people who’ve just been rescued, and there are helplines and so on that have now lost all of their funding overnight,” says Michael Brosowski, the founder of Blue Dragon, an impacted charity that has rescued more than 1,700 trafficking victims, including keeping people from being trafficked into brothels connected to online scamming.
Brosowski says Blue Dragon has been working to reduce the worst of the harm caused by the funding freezes. “We’ve been scrambling to work out what we can cut, how can we scale back, without losing the most direct work,” Brosowski says. For example, training programs for social workers who aid survivors of trafficking may have to be cut, Brosowski says.
Even if some funding does return—the State Department’s freeze is currently set to be in place for 90 days—organizations supporting victims may never be the same as staffers are forced to get other jobs or move away from the areas where they have been working locally with survivors. This loss of expertise will be extremely detrimental to the relief efforts, sources say.
“They’ve damaged relationships with local partners or authorities with whom they used to be working regularly to address these issues,” say two researchers at a global think tank who have had their work on policy recommendations on tackling scam compounds to the US government disrupted.
Aside from humanitarian efforts, the funding pauses are likely to allow, even temporarily, criminal organizations to further flourish. Some of the funding cuts impact programs designed to help identify potential criminals and assist local law enforcement efforts, according to one government affairs official at an international NGO with multiple US grants.
“Identifying criminal networks, identifying the bad actors, sending the information to the National Security Council. Everything that should be going on is stopped,” add the two global think tank researchers.
Ultimately, all of this means that trafficking victims will be trapped working in unimaginable conditions while more people in the US and around the world will be at risk of becoming victims in the ongoing fraud run from the compounds.
“These scam compounds, they scam people who are in the USA,” Brosowski, of Blue Dragon, says. “The US government might save hundreds of millions of dollars from cutting these sorts of programs, but the scammers are going to take billions.”