New FMV Game Spotlights Asia’s Scam Compound Crisis (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I started playing this video game, and it is wild. In the trailer for the new Chinese full motion video game, Blood Money Lethal Eden, you're a victim of a scam center. You have a cloth put on your face, you wake up in a cage, hands tied, there's a gang kingpin in a white suit, and somebody's about to be executed. And that is just in the first few minutes. The goal is to survive, and every decision that you make sends the game in a new direction. But this isn't just fiction. This is an intense reflection of a huge problem here in Asia. There are giant criminal scam centers, sometimes looking like fortresses, found across Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and a growing number of countries around the world. People are often duped or tricked by gangs, and under the threat of torture, they're forced to call, email, text, and scam people out of their money. Why choose this topic? It's an issue increasingly showing up in successful entertainment offerings. The Chinese blockbuster No More Bets, which follows characters trying to navigate their way out of a scam center, made more than half a billion dollars at the global box office, a potential gauge of how powerfully the crisis is resonating.

[00:01:24] Speaker 2: At present, you have over 300,000 people that are effectively trapped inside of large-scale compounds.

[00:01:32] Speaker 1: China has made strides in prosecuting gang kingpins, and countries globally have gotten involved in combating the problem. But it may be too late, as experts say scam compounds have spread from Southeast Asia to countries in Africa, the Middle East, and into the Pacific.

[00:01:46] Speaker 2: You hear senior African diplomats based in countries like Thailand talking about this as crimes against humanity, because the level of torture, the extreme conditions in which a lot of these victims are being subject to, I mean, it really is that.

[00:02:04] Speaker 1: This game was developed by a small Chinese startup, and its developer says this is a careful balancing act between real suffering and fictional elements of entertainment with huge commercial appeal.