Imagine a financial scam where the victim and the scammer are both being exploited. This is that story. Chinese gangs in Southeast Asia are kidnapping and trafficking desperate international workers and turning them into forced labor. The Wall Street Journal highlights a man named Billy from Ethiopia, where the crumbling economy forced him to look for jobs internationally. When he got a job offer in Thailand, he was stoked. But when he arrived, the criminal organization took his passport and smuggled him across the border to Myanmar. He gets beaten and tortured until he agrees to pretend to be a rich woman named Alicia to scam men into sending him money. And if he didn’t generate enough sales leads, he was punished. In some cases, he scammed rich men, but in other cases, he took the life savings of the poor, and that caused a lot of guilt and psychological trauma. Billy’s family ultimately had to pay $7,000 for his freedom. This article is heartbreaking, but shows why financial cyber security is so important. It’s not enough for us to not send money to strangers online, but we have to educate the older people in our lives who didn’t grow up on the internet not to do that either. If fewer people fall victim to these scams, the scammers themselves won’t be exploited in the first place.