Duong hails from a long line of farmers, but he knew from an early age that he wanted to be a hairdresser.
Money was always going to be the issue.
Like many others, Duong — who asked to use a pseudonym — struggled to find a job after the COVID pandemic, so he was intrigued when he heard about a job through an acquaintance from his province in northern Vietnam.
The job promised a decent salary — money he could put towards studying and bringing him one step closer to his goal.
He was offered a six-month contract in Thailand and he was told the work would involve using a computer and typing.
But when he arrived, the situation quickly unravelled. Duong had been deceived.
He found himself enslaved in a remote corner of war-torn Myanmar, forced to carry out online cryptocurrency scams.
"When I worked it was forced," he said.
"I just wanted to leave and go home but I couldn't.
"I was afraid they would beat me."
Such scams — sometimes called "pig-butchering" for the way they metaphorically "fatten up" a target for "slaughter" — are a growing problem globally and affect thousands of Australians each year.
According to the National Anti-Scam Centre database, Australians have lost more than $1 billion in investment scams in the past five years, and more than $190 million in romance scams.
But what unsuspecting targets often don't realise is that their scammer in many cases is a victim too, often of a much more serious crime; human trafficking.
"[If you] get that call from a scammer and you hang up angrily on them … you're absolutely right to be annoyed," said Michael Brosowski, the founder of anti-trafficking organisation Blue Dragon in Vietnam.
"And yet the person who's making that call may well be a victim of a terrifying crime."
Lured and trapped
It was almost a month before Duong realised he was not in Thailand at all, but neighbouring Myanmar.
During that time he was forced to create online profiles, posing as women to scam unsuspecting victims all over the world.
"We were pretending to be women, talking to men, trying to get to know them," he said.
By developing a relationship with these online targets, often by following a script, Duong and others could lure them into investing in a fake cryptocurrency platform.
Blue Dragon's Mr Brosowski said his organisation had rescued almost 400 victims from forced scamming — a number he said was ticking up every other day, dozens of whom were children.
"There's that terrifying realisation that they've been deceived and now they're in really big trouble," he said.
"They can't leave."
Often the only way out was for a victim's family to pay a ransom of between $US5,000 and $US10,000 (about $8,000-$16,300) — a prohibitive amount for many in Vietnam, where the average monthly salary is around $600.
Abuse rife in cyber slavery
The threat of physical beatings and starvation made Duong feel like he had no choice but to engage in the scams.
He said he was essentially starved for 15 days, offered only occasional scraps of food, for failing to meet a scam quota.
Cyber slaves are routinely trapped and subjected to abuses, according to Ngô Minh Hi?u, a former hacker who served time in a US prison.
Mr Ngô now runs the non-profit cybersecurity organisation ChongLuaDao and works with the National Cyber Security Centre in Vietnam to combat the global scam industry.
"If the bosses [in] these scam compounds know that you want to try and get out or escape, or you want to contact the police, you will get beat up. So [it's] very scary."
Mr Brosowski said in some cases, female victims were stripped and sexually assaulted on camera, with a threat that the video would be sent to their family or posted online.
"Terror is one of the tools of these traffickers," he said.
Tech making it easier to scam
Mr Brosowski said the COVID pandemic had inflamed the situation.
"It's really remarkable how rapidly this forced scamming has evolved. I mean, it seems to have come out of nowhere," he said.
The fact that so many were looking for work and connection via the internet left them ripe for exploitation, Mr Ngô said.
"For lots of people, their first computer is a smartphone."
Mr Ngô said the cyber slave scam industry had expanded in recent years.
"[They are] taking advantage of high tech, like AI, deepfakes, and along with that … they [are] also doing malware scams and phishing as well."
He said some were using technology to virtually "undress" their victims, some of whom were underage, for blackmail purposes.
"They only need one picture."
Another popular tool was AI-run tech that translated between languages in real time, meaning scammers didn't need to speak the language of their targets to dupe them.
Some scammers also set up fake websites that mimicked legitimate Vietnamese government institutions.
In late 2023, the National Anti-Scam Centre warned the Vietnamese community in Australia about a spate of scams targeting them, with criminals falsely claiming to represent Vietnamese authorities.
"This type of scam is highly sophisticated and convincing because it involves multiple perpetrators who play on their victim's fears by threatening them with jail time or the lie that they cannot return to Vietnam."
Duong said most of the victims he was compelled to target were Vietnamese people like himself.
A report from the Global Anti Scam Alliance on the state of scams in Vietnam in 2023 found citizens lost 3.6 per cent of the nation's GDP, or more than $US16 billion ($25.5 billion), and last year the country remained in the top 10 countries for percentage of GDP lost to scams.
Scammers continue to thrive
Duong knows little about the machinations behind the scheme he found himself trapped in — only that his manager was Vietnamese, and he suspected the owner of the syndicate was Chinese.
Chinese criminal syndicates have been behind a deluge of similar scams in the region, notably in Cambodia.
The immense scale of the fraud and human trafficking has prompted several embassies in Asia to warn their citizens of the practice.
In February, Thailand announced it would be cutting power off from Myanmar's lawless borderlands in an effort to curb the crisis.
That followed from a high-profile case where Chinese actor Wang Xing was abducted and sent to a cyber fraud centre. He was quickly rescued after a social media campaign.
Mr Brosowski said Australians who were targeted in scams should report the matter to police and help them build a picture of the problem.
Mr Ngô said one way to disrupt the global scam industry was to prevent personal data being sold online.
"If there is no identity data, there is no scam," he said, adding pig-butcher fraudsters couldn't connect with their victims without a phone number or email address.
He said there was also a need to combat human trafficking to prevent criminal syndicates from amassing a workforce to carry out their scam operations.
Mr Ngô said while he had assisted authorities to arrest about 70 perpetrators, they were often low-level workers.
He said it was difficult to work with "corrupted" authorities to target the kingpins.
When one scam compound was shut down, another would soon pop up in its place, he said, meaning young people like Duong continued to be at risk.
In order to protect his identity and safety, Duong could not divulge details of how he got out — only that when he finally did escape, it was alongside other compatriots after an arduous journey on foot.
For Duong, it was an emotional moment when he finally returned to Vietnam.
His mother embraced him, both of them in tears.
Duong is now working his dream job as a hairdresser, although the trauma of his ordeal still lingers.
"I was happy when I was able to come back home to Vietnam," he said.
"I know I have a happy future ahead."
