About Those "Hi, how are you?" Texts

Where human trafficking meets cyber scams

It’s a simple, thoughtful question. It feels good when a friend or acquaintance asks earnestly. But these days, it often comes in the form of an SMS text from an unknown number, and it hits differently. This is “smishing” – SMS based phishing. We sigh, we groan, we’re annoyed, we delete it, and we move on.

Maybe you’ve wondered what’s behind these texts, but most of us (me included) don’t give it much of a second thought. To the extent I did, I assumed it was automated, probably an AI bot. But recently a friend clued me in that it’s far more than that, far more sinister. Like, the kind of stuff you learn that you wish you could un-know. Too often, it’s a person on the other end of that text, someone being held in what is effectively a cyberscam slave camp (this is, sadly, not hyperbolic). That “how are you “ text is part of an global criminal enterprise with lines of business that range from those scammy texts to highly targeted long-play cons known as “pig butchering.”

These are the not the happy scammers in the high-tech boiler room in the Bee Keeper; it’s human trafficking, locked and guarded compounds, even torture for missed quotas. You can read more about it here, here, and here. It even reportedly played a role in a border skirmish between Thailand and Cambodia. It is nasty, nasty shit.

There is, sadly, not a lot that most of us can directly do to help the victims of these scams (whether those forced to conduct the scams or those conned out of their life savings). We can pressure our governments to make this part of their engagement with other nations, and we can support law enforcement in its effort to disrupt these gangs. We can protect ourselves against the scams – the basic security stuff I’ve written about in the past. And we can make sure we stay alert to scams and maintain a healthy dose of paranoia; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

However, this is one area where well-intentioned government policies can make it worse – where governments can make it easier for these scams to succeed, which in turn incentivizes criminals to traffic more victims into those slave camps. Some of these scams involve convincing victims to download malicious apps, whether fake crypto or sketchy dating apps. Yet governments are enacting policies that make it easier to download this sort of malware unknowingly, and some litigants are trying to prevent companies from warning consumers when they venture into dangerous online neighborhoods.

Obviously, governments are not doing this to help criminals. Rather, they are doing it in the name of competition, and they make some reasonable arguments about opening up the online marketplace by allowing direct-to-phone purchases outside the major app stores (so-called “sideloading,” such as via a direct hyperlink). But they frequently ignore the security implications of these policies, dismissing counterarguments as bad faith. Moreover, some open market advocates dismiss on-phone security warnings about sideloading as “scare screens.” This makes no sense: we need to give consumers more information when they make choices, not less.

Obviously, there are plenty of safe, fun apps that you could sideload to your phone, but there is also a lot of bad, dangerous stuff out there – and you run a higher risk when you leave the major, moderated app stores. Criminals take advantage of this, as some of the crypto-related smishing scams direct you to download realistic looking “trading” apps.

So whether you love sideloading for the competition it brings or worry about it for the security risk that comes with it, know that there are trade-offs. And when governments require sideloading, they should acknowledge the risk and build in reasonable steps to mitigate it. This should include, at minimum, on-device warnings so consumers can make informed choices. None of this will stop smishing or online scams, nor will it prevent human trafficking. But the fact that we can’t stop it all doesn’t mean we should make it easier.