The dark tentacles of a romance scam stretch from Asia to Sebastopol
PART 1: A new podcast explores a fast-growing form of modern slavery—trafficked workers forced to work in online scam centers—and the experience of a Sebastopol man who was one of their victims
I had a strange experience this week. I was driving to work and listening to an Australian true crime podcast called “The Fight of My Life, Season 2: Escaping Scam City,” about how romance scams are fueling a boom in modern slavery.
I rarely listen to true crime podcasts—they depress me—but this seemed intriguing, and soon I found myself engrossed in the story of a young Southeast Asian couple who found themselves ensnared by labor traffickers and imprisoned in an office-like prison complex. Once there, they were forced, under threat of violence, to perpetrate internet romance scams, luring unsuspecting people to fall in love with them and ultimately fleecing them of all—and I do mean all—of their money. It’s a scam known, distastefully, as “pig butchering.”
The organizations that perpetuate these schemes, often linked to the Chinese Mafia, lure struggling jobseekers from underdeveloped countries with the promise of legitimate employment. Workers are smuggled across national borders, their passports are confiscated, and they’re forced to work up to 15 hours a day in heavily guarded, high-rise prisons. If they resist or attempt to seek help, they are beaten and sometimes killed. Some resort to suicide. The only way to escape this situation is to “repay” their captors by working off the cost of their capture by becoming successful scammers.
At one point, the podcasters interviewed a victim of one of these scams, a man they identified as Shai Plonski from Northern California. My mouth dropped open. It’s an unusual name, and I recognized him immediately as a subscriber to the Sebastopol Times.
I reached out to Plonski, who was kind enough to talk to me about his experience. He’s open about what happened to him because he wants to prevent others from falling into the same trap—he even put out a YouTube video about it.
Plonski, a practitioner and teacher of Thai Massage, who has written 17 books on the subject, said talking about what he experienced is part of his own healing from what he calls “one of the hardest experiences of my life.”
It all started in 2022, just after Plonski had moved to Sonoma County. It was the Christmas holidays, and Plonski had a week to himself. As a lark, he decided to check out the dating section of Facebook.
“Essentially, that’s how it started,” he said.
He “liked” a woman’s profile, and she—assuming the person behind the profile was actually a she—had “liked” his back. They started messaging through Facebook and then switched to WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging app, as their main way of communicating.
The woman said she lived in San Francisco, where she worked in real estate. She also said she did a little investing on the side. This piqued Plonski’s interest.
“At some point in the conversation, it was actually me who said to her, ‘Oh, maybe you can teach me a thing or two about investing,’ because it was something that I was actively trying to educate myself about. I had literally just bought a course on investing a couple of months before.”
Slyly, the woman didn’t push it. In fact, she didn’t bring up investing at all for several days. Instead, they texted frequently, multiple times a day, over the next week, building what Plonski felt was a promising relationship.
After a while, she suggested she could teach him how to invest using a cryptocurrency trading app. This was actually a fake app, one designed for scamming, but it looked real to Plonski. At first, on her instructions, he made small trades—a hundred dollar here, a hundred dollars there—and seemed to be getting a good return.
He even googled the kind of trading they were doing, and from what he found, it seemed like a legitimate thing.
Their relationship seemed to be deepening as well. They talked about investments once a week or so, but the rest of the time they just talked about their lives. Well, Plonski talked about his life. The scammer talked about the life of the persona they were playing—a persona that came complete with details, scripts and photos that they’d been given by their captors to make the scam seem realistic.
When Plonski asked if they could meet in person, the woman said she was travelling over the holidays—to visit family in LA and Hong Kong. Actually, they had never even talked in person on the phone—though once they exchanged voice messages.
Plonski knows how this sounds.
“I know, because I’ve been public about the story a lot, and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback, like, ‘How could you believe this to be a real thing? Especially since you hadn’t talked to her.’ And I get that, of course, but what I will say is that, at least in my situation, the timing was somewhat perfect because during the pandemic, I had had a long-distance relationship with someone where a lot of our relationship was built through chatting and using WhatsApp to talk and share and grow closer.”
Plonski said he believed he would eventually meet this interesting new woman from SF, “but in the meanwhile, chatting and getting to know her online for a few weeks, that felt real because of my previous experience.”
Over the several weeks, Plonski invested more and more money into the scam’s cryptocurrency trading app, and the number in his so-called account, visible on the app, kept climbing. Plonski had worked hard to build his nest egg, and now he felt he was finally growing it—building a future for himself and his young daughter.
At one point, the woman he was messaging with suggested that he withdraw some of the money to treat himself and his daughter. He did so, and being able to withdraw money reassured him that this was all on the up and up.
And then, about six weeks in, the bubble burst.
“I was at a friend's house in San Francisco, and I was telling them about what was going on with both the relationship and the financial side. This windfall that was coming my way just felt like such a blessing. And they were happy for me, but they were also somewhat skeptical,” he said.
One of them started googling.
“They must have used different search terms than I had because they found out about this kind of scamming that's called the pig butchering scam. There was an article about pig butchering that I read while I was with them, and that’s when I felt my heart sink, and my life just completely shattered because what it described was very similar to what this person was doing to me.”
He tried to withdraw some of the money from his account on the app, but it didn’t work.
“I got a message that said, “Taking out this much money has been flagged, and you may be a fraudulent person. In order to prove that you're not, you have to deposit 10,000 more dollars.”
“I knew that it was a scam at this point,” he said.
He reached out to the woman he’d been messaging, someone with whom, until that moment, he thought he had a loving relationship with. She declined to help.
“So I just had to accept that it [his money] was going to be gone, and that was just my new reality and it was intense. It was one of, if not the hardest thing I've had to go through in my life,” he said.
Plonski declined to say exactly how much he lost. “What I would say is that I did lose my entire life savings, and that was very devastating on both the financial level and on the emotional level.”
He was in such shock—and so emotionally devastated—that it took him about a month to report the crime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. He never heard back from them. He also reported it to globalantiscam.org, an international organization for victims of scams.
He never got any of his money back.
In the podcast, “Escaping Scam City,” this is where Plonski’s story ends. Most of the podcast—it’s a seven-part series and it’s gripping—revolves around the young couple’s increasingly desperate attempts to escape their imprisonment in the scam center.
That wasn’t the end of the story for Plonski, of course, “Recovering from this has been a big part of my life over the last three years,” he said.
In Part 2 of this article, Plonski talks about his recovery and how you can protect yourself from scams like this.
It takes great courage to open up publicly about a most painful scenario like this. So grateful to Shai for spreading awareness that will surely spare others from the terrible scam he experienced.