Escaping Scam City | Selling a Dream | 3

Conditions in the compound worsen as the scammers are forced to extract more money from victims. An emotional encounter with a victim leaves Ava shaken and depressed. Micah’s escape plan backfires terribly: he’s been caught.

PLUS: we speak to an American who lost his life savings, and break down just how “pig butchering” scams work – and why they’re so effective.

Show website: fightofmylifepodcast.com

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Cadence Productions.

Unheard.

AVA:

Hi, my name is Ava. I'm 28 years old. I have three children. My first is a daughter, she's 12 years old. She's a teenager, so she doesn't quite, you know how teenagers are. So, I see her once a week. I don't live close to her, but that's her. And then, my second child is a boy. He's eight years old. He's sweet, and happy, and very good at studying. And, my third is a boy. He's seven years old, and he's in the naughty. He's a naughty boy.

My dream is to become a nurse because I grew up with elderly people and I see them go to the doctors all the time, and I just feel like when I'm older I want to be able to take care of them. So, I want to be a nurse.

RICH THOMPSON:

We've talked a little before about Ava's life, how her parents separated when she was young and then abandoned her, leaving Ava to be raised by her grandmother.

AVA:

And, the conditions were very hard. We were very poor and if I wanted anything, I had to work myself. So right after school, I would go pack traditional snacks. I would go wash cars, and I started that when I was 14. And, that's also the year that I left home.

RICH THOMPSON:

Ava had a series of relationships with unfortunately, quite abusive men, and by the age of 24, was supporting three young children. She worked long hours in factories doing everything she could to save money to give her children a better life, but often she felt hopeless.

AVA:

At that point in my life, I felt like a robot. I was a robot to find money to satisfy the needs of others, my grandma and the children. So I had no hope in life, and I just wanted to go make money.

RICH THOMPSON:

As part of this pursuit, in January of 2020, Ava took an admin job at a casino, a legitimate one, just over the Thai border in Cambodia, and every dollar she earned was sent back to her grandma, back to the children. It was tough going, but Ava was determined and focused, no distractions. She was certainly not looking for another relationship with a man. But a few weeks in, she noticed one of her co-workers, a Malaysian man of Chinese descent, shyly watching her. Her co-workers could see a potential romance blooming, but she shut it down.

AVA:

I said, "I don't like Chinese men."

RICH THOMPSON:

But then, he began leaving little gifts of fruit on her desk. It was a good move.

AVA:

All my life, I've never received gifts and when I started getting flowers and little gifts, I felt like, "Wow, all these gestures made me feel that I had value."

RICH THOMPSON:

Eventually, one day in the laundry room of the hostel where they were staying, he introduced himself. His name he said, was Micah. Ava wasn't easily won over, but Micah persisted. Each day he'd find a reason to talk with her. He asked about her day, he made her laugh. He'd buy her favourite foods when she was ill, small things, but they made him different from any man Ava had ever known.

AVA:

He'd take note of the small details in my life, which I felt no one had ever done before.

RICH THOMPSON:

So I mean, he can't speak Thai, right? So, how are you communicating at this point?

AVA:

So in the beginning, we used our phone to translate. So he would translate, and I would translate into our own mother tongue. But, I just got really frustrated at some point. So I just started talking to him in Thai, and he would take note and ask if this was right. And I just continued doing that, and he just continued taking notes and learning Thai. So now, he speaks Thai fluently.

RICH THOMPSON:

Ava began to trust Micah. She began the long, slow slide into love. And in February of 2020, despite barely speaking each other's languages, they made their relationship official.

AVA:

So on Valentine's Day, I had a friend and Micah went to buy flowers with my friend and said, they're actually going out to buy some food. And when he came back, there was a whole big bouquet of flowers, about 50 to a 100, I'm not sure how many, but it was a big bouquet and he asked me to be his girlfriend.

RICH THOMPSON:

For a brief moment in time, Ava is happy, perhaps even hopeful about the future, but then March and Covid hits, the casino goes into lockdown. Ava and Micah are separated, and confined to their dorms. Soon after that, Ava's grandmother passes away and her children are without a carer. Ava has no choice, but to go home to Thailand. Micah goes with her. They move into the small wooden hut with Ava's two little boys.

It's a big adjustment for Micah, but they are together. Over the next few months as Covid stretches on and on and on, they spend what little was saved during the time working at the casino. Work opportunities are pretty much non-existent in the village, and having enough money to keep them and the children housed and fed becomes a major problem. With no other option, Ava sits down with her neighbour asking if they would be willing to care for the kids if she and Micah found work outside the village. Ava would send money back.

The neighbour agrees, and that's when Ava sees it, the posting on Facebook. Here, she thinks is the chance to build a better future, a chance to earn enough to pay for her son's education, to perhaps even afford to go back to school herself and study nursing, and to do it all with Micah, the boy she had come to love. There was simply no way she could have known that a decision made out of love would pull her into a world built on the counterfeit of it, a world where love was no longer something you gave, it was something you weaponized.

AVA:

I had the feeling of going to a bookstore and buying a book about doing good and morals, and then when I opened the book, it's pornography. It was shocking to me. It wasn't what I had expected at all.

AUDIO:

Open your eyes.

What can you see around?

RICH THOMPSON:

From unheard and Cadence Productions, this is season two of the Fight of My Life: Escaping Scam City.

AUDIO:

See me fly.

You know they'll never catch me for it.

See me fly.

The way I put my finger on it.

RICH THOMPSON:

The story of love, real love in a city built on faking it.

AUDIO:

With the wrong guy.

RICH THOMPSON:

This is the story of Micah and Ava thrown into the fight of their lives, and of those who have chosen to come alongside them and make it their fight too.

AUDIO:

Then, try to tell me.

You got the wrong guy.

RICH THOMPSON:

Episode Three, The Dance.

AUDIO:

Mm, mm, well.

SHAI PLONSKY:

So, it started on a Facebook dating app. My name is Shai Plonsky and for the last 23 years, I have been a teacher and a practitioner of Thai massage. I've written several books on the subject. I have taught all over the world to many thousands of students. I actually love my work, and I live in California about an hour and a half north of San Francisco.

RICH THOMPSON:

In 2022, the year Ava was trapped in the scamming compound, Shai, a world away was a single dad focused on growing his business and raising his young daughter, navigating life after a difficult divorce.

SHAI PLONSKY:

I wasn't even really that interested in online dating at the time, which is why I poked around on the Facebook dating app because I know from someone else who had told me about it that it was free. And it was during the holidays, the Christmas holidays, and I just happened to have a week of time where I didn't have my kid and I just kind of had no work, and a little bit of time.

RICH THOMPSON:

He matched with Sandy, an attractive Asian woman whose profile said that she lived in San Francisco, not far from where Shai was living at the time. Shai remembers that Sandy messaged him first.

ERIN WEST:

What we see is the romance scam begins in one of four ways.

Speaker 1:

That's the voice of Erin West. Just a reminder, she's the former Californian prosecutor and now founder of Operation Shamrock, an organisation dedicated to fighting pig butchering scams. Erin's going to walk us through how these scams unfold, the delicate, devastating dance between people like Ava forced to deceive, and people like Shai hoping to believe.

ERIN WEST:

It will either show up as a text message that comes to someone's phone and appears to be a misdirected text message, something like, "I'm here at the airport to get you, where are you located?" So they'll show up as a text message, or they'll show up in three different other ways. One, will be somewhere on the meta platform, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp, LinkedIn, or dating apps. So, those are the primary four that we see this starting from.

AVA:

So, every day was the same. I got up in the morning, and then the first thing I was asked to do was open up Tinder and then like and match.

RICH THOMPSON:

On Tinder, Ava's profile picture was of a young Chinese woman. Ava describes her as being as beautiful as a fairy.

AVA:

And every day was like this, I had to get at least five people on Tinder to have a conversation with me on Line.

RICH THOMPSON:

Line is an encrypted messenger service like WhatsApp or Telegram, and Ava and the other workers at DV Casino were instructed to get their targets to use it because it was subject to less oversight, whereas Tinder, Facebook and LinkedIn often blocked suspicious profiles. Conversations on Line were able to continue with almost no scrutiny.

ERIN WEST:

So there's certain ways that always happens, when they're going to meet and then they're going to move from that platform to a encrypted message site, that's a hallmark.

SHAI PLONSKY:

And that person, I can say "she," and in all likelihood it probably wasn't a she, very quickly took us, suggested that we continue talking, but instead of doing it in Facebook, we would do it in WhatsApp.

AVA:

So on my computer screen, there was Line, there was Tinder, and there was WeChat, and there was a script on WeChat, and there was someone next to me who was telling me and teaching me what to do. Then, the job online was to make them love me. It's not easy actually to make someone love you.

ERIN WEST:

The scammer is going to spend a significant amount of time and energy making the victim feel as though they are in their dream relationship, and they do that by using scripts. They're using tried and true methodology. They've been honing their craft for five years now with literally no friction from anyone. They know what works, and what doesn't work.

SHAI PLONSKY:

And, there was just something about the way that person wrote that I found appealing. There was sort of like a poetic way to the way that person seemed to communicate that I liked, and it just started with a couple of little messages going back and forth.

AVA:

Every morning it'd be, "Hello, good morning. Have you had your coffee," and then a picture of a coffee cup.

RICH THOMPSON:

Coming out of Covid, Shai had grown, used to developing and sustaining relationships over text message. So not meeting Sandy didn't feel abnormal at first. And by this point, Sandy had told him quite a lot about herself. She was from Hong Kong but had gone to school in New York, and then had eventually moved to California. She was out of town for the holidays, but when she got back, she hoped they could meet in person. She worked in real estate, but she also did some investing on the side.

SHAI PLONSKY:

We were communicating several times a day. It's just somehow the kinds of questions she would ask me about what's going on in my life and the kind of responses she might give about when I would ask her questions or whatever it would be, yeah, very quickly you could feel what felt like an authentic connection between us developing. And so for sure, there was just bubbling feelings of, "Wow, this could be really good, it could turn into something." Again, I am not so naive to think that I've met the person of my life or something so quickly. I don't know that, but I know that it felt really good to connect with her.

AVA:

When we talk to someone, we call it grooming, and we usually groom for a month before they can go on [inaudible 00:15:45].

RICH THOMPSON:

By the way, these days, this grooming process is incredibly sophisticated. You can be on a video call seeing and hearing what looks like a young woman speaking to you, but behind the screen there may be a male scammer using deep fake technology to manipulate both face and voice in real time. It's a chilling evolution of the con, blurring the line between reality and illusion and making it even harder for victims to know who, or what they're falling for.

SHAI PLONSKY:

It didn't have anything to do with money at the beginning, and it just had to do with getting to know each other. She took an interest in me and in my life. I took an interest in hers.

ERIN WEST:

Courtship is happening, and while it's happening, our scammer is showing pictures to make our victims believe that they are living a very nice lifestyle. So they're showing vacations, leisure activities, high-end car. And so when they suggest to our victim, "Do you know how I afford this? I afford this because I invest in cryptocurrency."

SHAI PLONSKY:

And then at some point I said to her, "Oh, well maybe eventually you could teach me a thing or two about investing." And she said, "That would be cool," and I can teach her a thing or two about what it is that I do sort of thing. And, that's kind of how that door got opened.

ERIN WEST:

So there's that trust building, that relationship building. The second thing they're doing during that time period is they are scoping out exactly how much money that victim has and where it's located.

RICH THOMPSON:

Shai told Sandy that a year earlier he'd been paid for some work in cryptocurrency, and the money had just been sitting in an account.

SHAI PLONSKY:

I just had this money kind of sitting there, and I had communicated that. So I had a little bit of experience with cryptocurrency, and I had money that had just been losing money. So I'm like, "Well, what do I really have to lose to take some of that money, and see what comes of it?"

AVA:

And when they liked me enough to talk about trade, then someone else would be the one to talk to them about trading.

RICH THOMPSON:

At this point, Ava handed over the victim to a different department to handle the financial side of things. In some other scam compounds, the victim stays talking to the same person or the same group of people throughout. But either way, what happens next is almost always the same.

ERIN WEST:

So what happens next is, "Okay, you know what? You should try it. You should just put a little bit of money in," and they'll know what is a little money, whether it's a $1000 or $10,000, but a little bit of money to that victim.

RICH THOMPSON:

Sandy sent shy a link to join a particular crypto exchange. He submitted his personal information and set up an account, and put a few thousand dollars in.

SHAI PLONSKY:

So she tells you how much to invest, and exactly when to put it into, when to buy the crypto. And then yes, then you would get a positive return, so making 10%. So that first night, I think we did three trades. I made a $100 or $200 and it felt really good obviously, to get a return like that.

ERIN WEST:

And so, our victim thinks it's going into this account. The reality is it is moving down the blockchain money mule, by money mule, by money mule, and it's gone. It's now stolen. Our victim sees their $5,000. They see a dashboard that shows their $5,000 is now $6800, $7500, now it's $10,000.

SHAI PLONSKY:

And then a few days pass, a week passed, I think, before we did another round of trades. And in the meanwhile, we're just mostly, we're not talking about the finances at all. We're just continuing to get to know each other.

RICH THOMPSON:

Sandy suggested that if Shai really wanted to profit, he should put more money into his crypto account. He put a little more in, and then they did two or three more trades.

SHAI PLONSKY:

They were successful, and all of a sudden I'd probably made a couple of thousand dollars or something. When you start compounding 10% returns, it grows quite quickly.

ERIN WEST:

And they think, "Great," and the scammer will even say, "Why don't you take a thousand dollars out and treat yourself to something?" And, they will. They'll let them have their thousand dollars, and it seems like this whole thing works and it's all on the up and up.

SHAI PLONSKY:

Early on after I'd made money, she was like, "Oh, congratulations, that's so awesome," and, "you should just take some out and go celebrate, maybe buy your daughter something special." And, I had done that. So that was again, one of the early things that I'd done. Of course, if I was putting money in the exchange, I wanted to make sure I could take money out of the exchange.

RICH THOMPSON:

And then, Sandy suggested that Shai take the next step.

ERIN WEST:

And that's when the scammer will now say, "Well, my uncle says there's a really great trading opportunity coming up, but it's going to be $200,000." And our victims will say like, "Oh, that's a lot more than I was thinking." And they'll say, "I know, I know, but you know," and they'll give them all this nonsense about how you have to spend money to make money, blah, blah, blah, blah.

SHAI PLONSKY:

Yeah. The question that she put to me was like, "Do I want to put more money in?" And then, it was really more going into my real savings account to do that. I don't make that much money. I also am a single dad. I am very careful with my money, but I had built up savings slowly but surely over literally, I said, 23 years of working.

RICH THOMPSON:

Shai carefully weighed everything up. It was no small decision, but on balance it seemed to be the smart play. He decided to go for it. He withdrew his life savings, and put them into the crypto exchange. Sandy told him how to invest, and again and again, the investments were successful.

SHAI PLONSKY:

Yeah, all told, in those five or six weeks, according to what it said in the account, I think I'd probably made about $45,000, or something like that. And, that to me was life-changing money. That was a real opportunity to take that money, and pay for my daughter's university. I could take that, and that's where my mind was thinking of how I could use that money. Maybe I could hire another employee in my business to help me grow my business, things like that.

So, it all felt pretty real and pretty good that I had met this person that had cared enough about me to think that I was worthy of this opportunity. Not to mention, just building, it was the start of what felt like a good relationship, and as well having this money to build a little bit more of a nest egg and invest in my daughter's future, and things of that nature.

ERIN WEST:

And you think, "Oh my God," and all the hormones in their brain are, I'm in love. I'm in love with a rich, beautiful woman and she loves me, and this is so great. And PS, I'm also going to be wealthy. This person was sold a dream. They really had it in their mind that their life was going a certain way, and it was something that they'd kind of always hoped for. And, are we bold enough to think that we could actually have that moment in time, that we'd have someone that really loved us and we'd be financially comfortable? And then it gets ripped off them, and the effects are devastating.

RICH THOMPSON:

I just want to pause briefly to acknowledge the bravery of Shai. We actually found him on YouTube sharing his story to help others avoid the same trap. Now, Ava told us that most of the people they targeted were men, but if you look online, you'll find very few male victims of pig butchering scams speaking out, especially not with the kind of emotional honesty that Shai is showing. Maybe for some it's all too raw, but maybe they want to keep silent because they fear being judged, and maybe you're thinking after hearing all this, "I'd never fall for that." Just know that's what almost everyone says.

ERIN WEST:

I have never had a call with a victim who didn't say, "Erin, I need you to know I'm a smart person. I'm a really smart person, and I don't want you to think I'm stupid." People that we accept as smart people, like doctors, lawyers, business people, all of them, somebody in finance, they've all been hit with this same scam.

RICH THOMPSON:

A new and slightly terrifying saying has emerged in the scamming world, there's no such thing as an unscammable person, just the wrong script. Perhaps that's right, perhaps we're all susceptible given the wrong circumstances.

ERIN WEST:

It hits your neighbour and your cousin, and that's the commonality, that it hits everybody.

RICH THOMPSON:

So, I just wanted to call that out. Thank you, Shai. It's only because of people like you willing to be vulnerable and speak up, that the rest of us can be better prepared to spot the tactics. Let's get back to it.

ERIN WEST:

Then, how did it fall apart?

SHAI PLONSKY:

So it fell apart because a week or so later, I was staying at a friend's house and we were talking about it. And then they started Googling though, they're like, "Is this almost too good to be true?" And I'm like, "I know I've had the same thoughts about it," and I had Googled the exchange to see if that was fraudulent. I had Googled this kind of investing to see if this was a real way of investing. But I don't know that I Googled, I don't remember the exact terms that they used, but they came up, a search term came back that was called Pig Butchering. And so, there was an article about it and it was a fairly detailed article, and I read the article and I'm like, "Wow, this is actually really exactly what has been happening to me."

RICH THOMPSON:

Shai took the obvious next step. He tried to withdraw his money.

AVA:

And now they think, "I'm ready. I'm going to cash out," and they go to cash out. And when they go to cash out, that's when taxes are due, and taxes are going to be 25%. And they're going to say, "I did not sign up for this." And they're going to say, "Well, that's what it is." "Okay, take it out of my gains." "No, it can't come out of your gains. It has to be new money."

SHAI PLONSKY:

At that point, I was already pretty sure that the whole thing was a scam and there was no way I was going to get any of my money back, but that's what I tried to do. And then, I got a message from the crypto exchange basically telling me my account had been flagged. And they were like, "In order to get your money, you have to put in another $10,000 to make sure that you are truly a human being."

When I got that message, I basically went back to the original person who was the woman that I thought was a real person, and basically told them what was happening. And I was like, "Well, you have all this money. Maybe you can lend me $10,000," so that I can get my money out. And she was like, "Well, I can't," and I already had told her I'd already put all my money into it. I didn't have any money left. And she was like, "Well, maybe you want to borrow some money to get it," but I certainly was not comfortable to do that.

RICH THOMPSON:

There's a reason the scam is called pig butchering, and it's not done yet. As crazy as it might sound, Shai is one of the lucky ones. He lost his life savings, but he stopped there. Unfortunately, most people don't stop where Shai did. Instead, they do borrow money convinced by the scammers that just one more payment will unlock their promised returns. It's the final fattening of the pig before the slaughter.

ERIN WEST:

That's when our victims are literally getting a 38% loan. They're getting a home equity line. People end up losing their houses that they've had for 32 years over this. It is ghastly.

Now, they've wiped out everything they have. Now, they've gotten a loan. Now, they've involved friends and family that they've borrowed from, and then they realise this whole thing was a scam. And then, some of them are still in it. Then they think, "But, at least I'm in love with this person."

And so then they're calling us and they're like, "Hey, this portal took all my money. My girlfriend and I have our money in this," and we'll be like, "There's no girlfriend, there's no portal, there's no money," and it is gut-wrenching. And so by the time I see people, they are suicidal and they cannot believe that they've lost everything they had, and that the person that they've been talking to four hours a day texting was responsible.

SHAI PLONSKY:

And it felt like being stabbed in the heart and like a poison, like a dark, dark poison was spreading in me of, "What have I done? What am I going to do?"

AVA:

When they have lost their money, they will tell me, "Oh, I don't want to live anymore." All I can say is, "Stay calm." You have to understand at that point, I felt like a dog locked in a small cage, and I was forced to wake up and greet people, and do things that I believe if someone had done to me it would be horrible. I felt at that point it was eight sides of darkness surrounding me. I didn't want to do these things, but there was no way out. I wanted to leave, but I couldn't leave. I just felt like there was no hope. There were thoughts, "Should I just commit suicide? Is this what I should do?"

RICH THOMPSON:

Ava and Shai are two people from completely different backgrounds living on opposite sides of the world, but they both had dreams for their lives. They both hoped to create better futures for themselves and their children, and both their hopes and dreams were crushed by this industry.

Speaker 7:

We know scamming is a multi-billion dollar industry and something this massive is always going to make a few people rich, but this industry is clearly defined far more by the loss and the countless others it exploits and destroys than by what it produces. On one side, the loss of savings you thought would change your life, the loss of trust in the systems that are there to protect you and perhaps most painful of all, the loss of someone you might have even believed truly loved you.

On the other side, it's the loss of freedom, of agency, of the ability to make your own moral choices about what you do in your job. It's the loss of hope, the connection to loved ones as you're forced to lie to them as well. And for those who resist, it gets even worse. The cost is way, way higher. It's the loss of health, of physical safety, and for far too many people, most tragically of all, the loss of life.

Speaker 8:

DV Casino, day 53.

RICH THOMPSON:

It's late at night, nearing the end of another long, grinding day. Ava has been at her desk for nearly 15 hours. She's hit her quota today, but the achievement gives her no satisfaction.

AVA:

It was very hurtful and painful, and so I'd go to the bathroom six to seven times a day just to take a break.

RICH THOMPSON:

She stares unseeing the blue light of her monitor, one more hour to endure before she can return to her room. There she'll be allowed to call home and speak to her children. Even these calls are monitored though, and only last a few minutes.

AVA:

We have to talk in front of the workers there. There's nothing that I could say because the workers were guarding me when I was on the phone.

RICH THOMPSON:

Ava will take any opportunity she can to hear her children's voices, but in some ways these calls are hurtful, a reminder of everything she has lost.

AVA:

It was very painful for me to be watching and talking to them, thinking, "Will I ever go back and meet them."

RICH THOMPSON:

At night, after she speaks to her children, she usually sees Micah. Some evenings, the hallway where they typically meet is too crowded to talk, but anytime they have a moment of privacy, Micah reassures her that he'll find a way out. He says that he has a plan.

AVA:

When Micah said he had a plan, I believed he truly had a plan because he's someone like that. If he has a will to do something, he believes there's a way, that's just him.

RICH THOMPSON:

sitting at her desk pretending to click through the profiles on Tinder, Ava allows herself to hope. If there's anyone who can find a way to get them out of there, it's Micah. And these past few days, he's been quieter than usual. Maybe he's working on something, soon, maybe even tonight, he'll have good news to share. She imagines getting out of the compound, going back to Thailand and seeing her children again, and together she and Micah can start over once more.

Then the door to the workroom opens, and the Chinese boss comes in. Immediately, all the workers straighten and refocus on their computers. They keep their heads down, and stare at their screens. Nobody wants to draw the boss's attention. Ava does the same, but when she risks a glance up, she sees the boss is walking straight towards her. In the month she's been in the compound, he has never singled her out for attention, which is exactly how she wants things to stay. At first, she thinks that he must be looking for someone else, but his footsteps slow at her row and then stop.

She looks up and he is watching her. "You," he says, and beckons with a hand that's missing a finger. Her heart catches in her throat. Slowly, she stands trying to stop herself from shaking. What could have happened. What could she have done wrong? The boss ignores all her questions, he leads her down the hallway and into a small unused office. Micah is in there, and she can tell from his face that something is horribly wrong.

Ava moves toward him, but the boss steps in between. He shows Ava his phone. "Have you seen these," he demands. She reads the messages on the screen once, and then again. At first, they don't make any sense, and then she understands. Micah has asked for help, and now he's been caught.

AVA:

I was very scared. I was crying. I was really scared because I had seen the Vietnamese and the Thai people being hurt, and I didn't want to die.

RICH THOMPSON:

"Did you really think we wouldn't find out," the boss asks.

AVA:

They basically told me there's no way out, whoever you try to report this to, we've paid them all.

RICH THOMPSON:

Ava is frantic. She's terrified of what might happen next. She looks over at Micah still believing and still hoping that even now he might have a plan.

AVA:

Micah was crying and he said, "Please let us go. How much can I pay you?"

RICH THOMPSON:

The boss says that to be released, they'll each need to pay $20,000 US dollars. Neither Micah, nor Ava, nor anyone in their orbit has that kind of money. They tell the boss they cannot pay.

AVA:

Micah just said, sorry profusely, but he told me afterwards that he wasn't sorry at all. He was just so angry actually, because it felt like it was hell on Earth.

RICH THOMPSON:

The boss then tells Ava to go back to work. "I'll have to think about what to do with you," he says to Micah. Ava and Micah only have seconds left together. They hug quickly. Ava is crying.

AVA:

And I asked him, "What if they hurt you? What if they kill you?" And he said, "If they hurt me, if they kill me, then so be it, because this is like being dead anyways." And then they said, "Don't hold your hopes up high of ever seeing each other again."

RICH THOMPSON:

The Fight of My Life is brought to you by Cadence Productions in partnership with Unheard. This series, Escaping Scam City was written by Kaavya Viswanathan, Florence Thompson, and me, your host, Rich Thompson. The series producers are Lydia Bowden, Jake Sims, Ben Field, Kaavya Viswanathan, and Rich Thompson. Our theme song is See Me Fly by Roza.

Our incredible translator is Corinne Powell. Thank you so much, Corinne. Additional sound design by Brendan Ridley. Unherd's Advocacy in support for this project was led by Lydia Bowden, Carianne Tilson, and Laura Entwistle, with a massive thanks to their generous community of supporters, and with a special shout-out to Wen, Dain, and Val. We're so grateful for all the various contributors to this series, and of course, any views and opinions expressed by individuals are their own.

AUDIO:

See me fly.

You know they'll never catch me for it.

See me fly.

The way I put my finger on it.

RICH THOMPSON:

This series is based on the true story of Micah and Ava, whose names have been changed to protect their identities. Every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of their experiences. In some cases, events have been edited, condensed, or reordered for clarity, safety, or narrative flow. While we've worked hard to verify details, as with all firsthand testimonies, some elements can be difficult to independently confirm.

We are so thankful to Micah and Ava for telling their story, and elevating this issue on behalf of countless other survivors. And finally, we're thankful to you for choosing to come on this journey with us. If you get a second to rate and review the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. We'll see you on the next episode.

AUDIO:

Mm, mm. Well-