Help GASO Fight the Fraud Factories in Southeast Asia

Cybercrime is NOW a multi-billion dollar industry in Southeast Asia (SEA), ruining tens of thousands of lives around the world. With powerful backers and protected havens in SEA, the 'fraud factories' there have spawned a secondary industry of human trafficking (HT) to feed their labor-intensive criminal enterprises. 

Supercharge our mission against the multi-billion dollar SEA cybercrime syndicates!

Funds will be used for prevention, protection and prosecution. Empower GASO to better defend forward --to seek out, learn, report, and disrupt the SEA cybercrime industry.

Prevention

Awareness of developments in cyber scams in Asia and how human trafficking is affecting YOUR online experience is still low, due to language barrier, embarrassment of victims, ignored reports

Driving public awareness

• Website, social media, and media
• Interviewing victims, researching, translating for GASO's reporting
• Social media campaigns to include English
• Expose latest online scams and job scams leading to HT to scams companies
• Helping news media to penetrate more of the SEA cybercrime industry

Fraud site blacklist 

• Updating and verifying each entry of GASO's web-searchable list of the latest reported fraud sites. It is now at 14,000+ fraud sites, with 10-30 added daily.

Live Chat

• To keep up with increasing queries from scam victims, HT victims and media (already at 8 - 12 reporters a week)
• In more than a dozen instances their direct intervention has prevented victims from sending millions of dollars to fraudsters

Translators

• Needed more for website articles, social media, news, and for human trafficking rescuers on the ground.

Protection

For protecting the physical lives of HT victims enslaved by SEA cybercrime syndicates.

GASO volunteer rescuers:

• Verify the sincerity and authenticity of a scam company worker asking for help
• Find, relay messages, and connect HT victims with their families so that their families can report their kidnapping
• Liaise with authorities, embassies of HT victims and local partners
• Strategize plans and ideas for exfiltration from guarded compounds
• Resist ransom demands and extortion; work with informants
• Properly document to ensure court-admissibility of any findings
• One rescue operation typically take ~2 weeks of interviewing, verifying, assessing, and planning, not counting police or embassy response times and final debriefing.

Temporary safehouse in Cambodia

• For approximately 35 HT victims. 
• Victims who cannot afford to fly home yet can stay there
• Provides 2 meals a day 

Financial Aid

• For travel costs of handicapped and other deserving HT victims 
• Emergency aid for victims injured when escaping from cyberscams compounds (e.g. jumping off from the third level) or rape victims (one carried to term while still trapped)
• 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

Law enforcement everywhere is simply overwhelmed and overmatched. Outside China, none of the principal beneficiaries of SEA scams and HT have been prosecuted, and no victim have been made whole. The current state of affairs is unacceptable continuing indefinitely. 

Group case consolidation

• Victims of same scam company are highly dispersed worldwide. We group them together and show to law enforcement. It has been done.
• Police generally do not / cannot investigate "small" cases
• Database management and security

Cryptocurrency tracing & freezing 

• Law enforcement do not have enough personnel trained to trace for every crypto case, while lawyers & private investigators are not affordable, scalable and appropriate for a societal problem.
• Incoming reports to GASO will be traced by volunteer certified crypto investigators, who will immediately alert law enforcement for immediate freezing orders, at no cost to victims, except for a copy of a report.
• We have hotlines to FBI field offices, Secret Service, Dept of Homeland Security, California prosecutor Erin West, the CIB in Taiwan, CAD in Singapore, police in mainland China, and 2 major cryptocurrency exchanges.
• Cryptocurrency tracing tools have monthly costs (~$1,000/mo.)

Digital forensics

• Typing scam websites and apps
• Monitoring for changes and their suspected scam IT developers in Chinese

Scam compound entity research

• Research company registries, public documents and other open sources in Chinese, English and other languages
• Narrowed the search for law enforcement by "connecting the dots" between scam compound operators/owners and online fraud cases.

Intelligence Gathering

• Properly documenting criminal evidence from HT victims of SEA scam companies
• Cultivating industry insiders informants and monitoring public chats
• Scam baiting - Because most victims do not have complete evidence, post facto data by scam-baiting team can complete the chain of evidence. This also uncovers new tactics, tricks, websites, bank accounts, cryptocurrency addresses for fraud.

So far GASO has been getting by being self-funded and run by volunteers and victims. GASO, registered under Neosultancy Inc (EIN 88-1052652), is 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity and all donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. If you find GASO's work valuable, please help sustain our momentum.