Escaping Scam City | The City of Falling Men | 4

Micah is sold to another scam center, bigger and more brutal than the last. Tasers. Dark rooms. So-called “suicides,” and co-workers who simply disappear. He’s close to giving up, when he stumbles upon a person on the internet, who might be his last hope of escape.

PLUS: We ask transnational crime expert - and show producer - Jacob “Jake” Sims (an American) why governments in Southeast Asia aren’t doing much to stop forced scamming.

Show website: fightofmylifepodcast.com

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Cadence Productions. Unheard. DV Casino, day 53.

Speaker 2:

The leadership at the scamming compound is in flux. Their golden boy, the one that earmarked to run the English department, has betrayed them. The screenshots of Micah's communications are damning. Now, the bosses are scrambling. Micah is locked in an office room alone.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and then he said that, "Okay, I will be asking five people to monitor you, to monitor your action."

Speaker 2:

Through the night?

Speaker 3:

Through the night, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Micah can't sleep. He lies there in the dark. Every muscle tense, mind racing through every possible outcome. None of them are good. Just across the hallway, Ava lies wide awake too, terrified and powerless.

Speaker 4:

I felt like my brain just had a blockage.

Speaker 2:

Late that night, a guard comes into her room and he asks her to follow him. He leads her through the compound into a back room where the boss is waiting. The boss is cold and calculated.

He explains the situation to Ava. Micah's little stunt has cost them. They had to pay off the authorities to cover it up. Now, they need to recover the money. She's told there are options.

Speaker 4:

Your boyfriend has a choice of being sold to the border of Vietnam, or to pay up this 11,000.

Speaker 2:

Ava reiterates that they just don't have that money, but the thought of Micah being sent so far away, it's unthinkable. So she tells him-

Speaker 4:

I can't choose any of this. We don't want any of this.

Speaker 2:

This doesn't come as a surprise to the boss. He nods and then he offers up a third option.

Speaker 4:

"He can be sent to my friend's company that is close by."

Speaker 2:

The boss's friend's company is here in Sihanoukville, but this offer comes with a condition.

Speaker 4:

"But you have to work here forever."

Speaker 2:

Forever?

Speaker 4:

Forever.

Speaker 2:

If Ava wants to keep him safe, she has to stay. The implications of this are staggering. She belonged to them as if to sweeten the deal, he offers her one final thing. If she agrees, they won't hurt him.

Speaker 4:

If you stay here forever, then he wouldn't get beaten up. I didn't believe him, but I felt there was no choice.

Speaker 2:

So you said yes?

Speaker 4:

I said, "I will willingly stay and it's better that he goes to stay with your friend."

Speaker 2:

The deal is made. From Unheard and Cadence Productions, this is season two of The Fight of My Life, Escaping Scam City.

The story of love, real love in a city built on faking it. 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. Episode four, The City of Falling Men.

Speaker 1:

DV Casino, day 22.

Speaker 2:

In the morning, the boss returns to the room where Micah's being held. One last time, Micah pleads with the boss to let him and Ava go home.

Speaker 3:

And he said, "You cannot go home. We will be selling you."

Speaker 2:

Guards take Micah back to his room and watch as he packs his things. He stuffs clothes into his bag, hands shaking. Then he's let out past the rows of desks, the glowing monitors, the place he spent a month longing to leave.

He never imagined he would leave for something unknown, something that might be worse. He never imagined that he would leave without Ava. The guards unlock the door that opens to the hallway. Just before they push Micah through, he sees Ava. Their eyes lock momentarily and Micah wants to run to her to say something, anything.

But before he can, the guards grip his arms and move him along. He is taken down to the casino floor, hurried past the poker tables, and finally, out the door. A car is waiting. The door to the back seat opens and he climbs in. They drive in silence for about 15 minutes. Micah stares out the window watching the world slide by.

They pass a roundabout with two enormous golden lines and then they have left downtown Sihanoukville behind. Now, the view outside his window is Scrubland, red earth, and a herd of grazing goats. And then on the horizon, something rises, a dense cluster of buildings, boxy, uniform, like a small city of its own.

Speaker 3:

That actually was Chinatown. The people there call it Chinatown.

Speaker 2:

The car drives into the heart of Chinatown, then slows and turns toward a massive walled compound.

Speaker 3:

Whole compound was around 25 building and then each building was around third floor. The building was surrounded by wire, like prison wire.

Speaker 2:

It's sinister and imposing. The driver turns to Micah, "Welcome to Kaibo."

Speaker 1:

Kaibo, day one.

Speaker 2:

The operation at Kaibo dwarfs DV.

Speaker 3:

The entrance was very big. It can fit about for two lanes in, two lanes out.

Speaker 2:

There are more buildings, more walls, and more guards.

Speaker 3:

The entrance have around 10 security guard. Them was wearing grey uniform. Some of them have using guns and then got the electric baton.

Speaker 2:

Micah is taken to block five.

Speaker 3:

My block is quite far a bit, so need to walk around 10 minutes to arrive my block. Once I arrive, my block was around 12th.

Speaker 2:

He's given a tour of sorts of his building. DV's operations, work and sleep, were contained on the fourth floor, but the operation at Kaibo spreads over multiple floors.

Speaker 3:

Working level was second and fourth. Second and fourth, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So on the second through the fourth levels, how many different offices would there be?

Speaker 3:

It was a lot.

Speaker 2:

These two work floors on level two and four each have five conference rooms.

Speaker 3:

Each room can fit around 50 person.

Speaker 2:

Micah's bedroom is on the seventh floor and he shares it with nine other men.

Speaker 3:

When I arrived the seventh floor, I saw my room was very tiny room and five bunk bed and just only a balcony, a room and a small toilet.

Speaker 2:

There is one floor that he isn't shown.

Speaker 3:

Floor three, so we can't go to that floor.

Speaker 2:

Micah gets a brief moment to speak with a local, an air conditioning repair man who's been in the compound before. Micah asks him if he knows what's on the third floor. The man is reluctant to answer but then drops his voice to a whisper, "The third floor," he says, "It's the punishment floor."

Speaker 3:

And then I just asked him, "Did you saw a lot of people being beaten or something like that?" He said that it's very normal. "It's very normal." He said.

Speaker 2:

Micah's heart sinks. If escaping DV had seemed difficult, escaping Kaibo looks to be impossible. The night after we visited DV, we went back out into Sihanoukville this time to find Kaibo. During the day, the city is quiet, grey, a little drab, kids and stray dogs run around in the streets. But at night, the city comes alive.

Everywhere I looked, I saw neon lights, video billboards, luxury cars blasting music. On the main beach road, couples and young families crowded the boardwalk. We took a left and then a right and then suddenly, we were in a much quieter street.

Dara, remember, he's the Cambodian journalist who was showing us around, instructed our driver to park the car and we all hopped out. During his time inside, Micah had secretly taken a photo of an illustrated map of Kaibo and that's what we were using to guide us. So can you show me?

Speaker 3:

So here, this is where we are now.

Speaker 2:

So we're walking up here?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. This is the road here.

Speaker 2:

The road we walked down ran alongside a high compound wall.

Speaker 4:

There's guards everywhere.

Speaker 2:

What's that?

Speaker 4:

There's guards everywhere.

Speaker 2:

These guards in grey uniforms looked up at us as we passed. Their stares were sharp, watchful, and it really did feel like we didn't belong, like we shouldn't be there.

Speaker 3:

It's starting to feel touchy. We pull in [inaudible 00:11:49].

Speaker 4:

It is.

Speaker 2:

We passed a huge metal gate tightly shut. As Micah said, two lanes in, two lanes out. The gate was manned by more guards, at least five of them, their hands resting on holstered guns.

Speaker 5:

So yeah, so this is the entrance over there and then this is the road here.

Speaker 2:

Dara led us to a kind of alley that bordered the compound. It felt like we were walking around a walled city. Inside was about 25 buildings. Based on what Micah told us about the building make up, it means that in this complex, there's between 12,000 and 30,000 people working at any given time. And yet from where we were from the outside, it felt like a ghost town.

Speaker 5:

So we're going to come around to the back of building five.

Speaker 2:

Building five, that was where Micah had been held. And over the compound wall, we could see it clearly. So that was his building, the one in the corner there? Yeah. Bars all over everything.

We were within metres of the place where Micah had endured some of the darkest days of his life and suddenly it all felt so disturbingly real. Most of the upper floors were dark. But draped across the balconies, laundry hung out to dry. There was something quietly devastating about it, a sign that there were people, lots of them, still living in those rooms.

Whatever business was being run out of Kaibo was very clearly still going on. Without us Realising, Dara had gone to talk to one of the security guards roaming the perimeter and now he came back.

Speaker 5:

I talked to the guard here. He told me like, sometime we arrested back, recapture the people who have escaped. Some people die falling down, some can survive.

Speaker 2:

I know the audio wasn't great in that last clip. Basically what he was saying was that the guard had often arrested people that were escaping and often seen people fall and die, although some do survive.

Speaker 5:

Jesus. He's seen that. He's seen that with the guard. So I talked to the guard.

Speaker 2:

Oh, boy. It's horrible to think about, isn't it? Are the people trapped in scamming compounds really so desperate to escape that they're willing to jump out of the buildings or is it some kind of punishment?

What Dara said next was chilling. He said that on average, every week there was a report of at least one person in Sihanoukville falling to their death. Sometimes several people died in a week. He told us he remembered one week where a death was reported every single day.

Indeed, the very next morning we saw a local report made that just an hour before we were there, a person had jumped and died. And in Jake's experience-

Speaker 6:

Yeah, it's really just the ones that can't be covered up that make it into the news.

Speaker 2:

I understand now why locals have given Kaibo a deeply disturbing nickname, The City of Falling Men.

Speaker 1:

Kaibo, day two.

Speaker 2:

Micah waits until the room is clear. Quietly, he reaches beneath his thin mattress on the top bunk, pulls out his hidden phone and powers it on. Thankfully, even after everything that happened at DV, the phone was never discovered. It's his only remaining link to Ava. He must use it with great caution.

Speaker 3:

The whole building was got the CCTV.

Speaker 2:

There's a new message from Ava. What are we going to do? And this time, Micah has no answer.

Speaker 1:

Kaibo, day three.

Speaker 2:

The head boss in Kaibo is quite young Chinese and in his mid-30s. He's very tall with yellow teeth from chewing tobacco. He doesn't shout or swear, but there's something about him that Micah finds terrifying.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I worry about making him angry. I really worry about that. So I scared. I just keep in silence in front of him.

Speaker 2:

Today, for the first time, the boss approaches Micah. He says that Micah owes him $11,000, the amount the boss had to pay to purchase Micah from DV. Micah won't receive a salary or any money at all until he works off that debt and the boss knows that the reason Micah was sold was because he asked for help. He warns Micah not to even think about doing something like that again.

Speaker 3:

If you're asking to help, we will be sold you to the Myanmar, he told me that before you go to Myanmar, we will be like electric shot and then beaten you first and we will lock you to the dark room until the day you've been sold.

Speaker 1:

Kaibo, day five.

Speaker 2:

Days at Kaibo follow the same bleak routine.

Speaker 3:

We wake up at 9:00 AM and going down to the ground floor to eat our breakfast. And then once we arrive to the office, we need to sing a song first to energise our full day to wake up our body.

Speaker 2:

The song is chosen each morning by a supervisor and failure to sing it has consequences.

Speaker 3:

If we didn't sing loudly, we will make the push-up around 10 times.

Speaker 2:

Similar punishments are imposed for yawning.

Speaker 3:

Each day, who was yawning three times and saw by the supervisor, it will be cut $50 from your salary.

Speaker 2:

The work day officially starts at 10:00 AM.

Speaker 3:

Each day we need to touch the new person around 10 until 15 person, the new people.

Speaker 2:

And the work continues without a pause until five PM.

Speaker 3:

Five PM, we need to go to the ground floor to eat our lunch. And then six PM, we start working until 9:30. So we're going down again to eat our dinner. If the people who didn't achieve the target after 9:30, after we eat the dinner, we will be go back to the office to work until we achieve the target until 12 midnight.

Yeah, 12 midnight if we didn't achieve the target.If we achieve the target, we just eat the dinner and then go back to the room to sleep.

Speaker 1:

Kaibo, day seven.

Speaker 2:

Micah's first Saturday in Kaibo and today, the routine is different. He and the other workers are allowed to leave block five and go down to the central area of the compound.

Speaker 3:

Just allowed at the Saturday night inside the compound only, we can move around, but we cannot move to another building. We cannot go to another building. We're just only at the middle of the compound, which was the supermarket, the barber shop, the massage shop, something like that.

Speaker 2:

With shops and restaurants inside the main compound walls, Kaibo is designed to be entirely self-sufficient.

Speaker 3:

Everything inside.

Speaker 1:

So you never have to leave?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, correct.

Speaker 2:

Micah needs toothpaste and a toothbrush, but since he doesn't earn a salary, the purchases simply added to his debt. The workers are given 30 minutes to run their errands before the supervisor rounds them up again. It's time for the weekly team dinner.

Speaker 3:

So the boss will treat us, treat all of the company to eat at there and then drink some beer at there.

Speaker 2:

So he takes you out for Saturday night drinks, well done.

Speaker 3:

Only inside the compound.

Speaker 2:

It's designed to feel normal. Going out to dinner, having a beer with colleagues. But Micah has never felt so alone.

Speaker 3:

I didn't make any friends because I can't trust anyone inside there.

Speaker 1:

Kaibo, day 24.

Speaker 2:

One of Micah's roommates, the one sleeping directly below him, has angered the boss. In a sort of surprise attack, the boss and one of the guards, storm their room and pull the man to his feet. They handcuff him to the bed frame and then-

Speaker 3:

Using the electric shock at my eyes, two, not one, two.

Speaker 2:

So you got tasered by two tasers at one time?

Speaker 3:

The boss take one, the Cambodian security take one.

Speaker 2:

And you had to watch this?

Speaker 3:

I just closed my blanket and then... Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Speaker 2:

Micah's roommate is held in the dark room for five days given no food and only a single bottle of water. At the end of the five days, he doesn't come back to work. Micah thinks he's been sold to another compound, but he can't be sure. Workers who have been in Kaibo for longer tell him that far worse things have happened to people who step out of line.

Speaker 3:

From my experience, they'll be selling to the black market to sell the organ or something like that, which I heard about that. If you can't be sold, you'll be burned, thrown into the sea or something else. He have said that.

Speaker 2:

Up until now, one of the only silver linings to life in Kaibo has been that Micah has a view of the sea from the tiny balcony in his room, but after his roommate disappears, he stops looking at the water.

Speaker 1:

Kaibo, day 29.

Speaker 2:

Micah doesn't know how much longer he can survive. So far, his language abilities have made him useful to the boss, but he can't bring himself to scam people.

He sits at his computer and pretends to work, but he's not hitting his targets and it's only a matter of time until the boss grows tired of his excuses. He's slowly but surely being drained of hope.

Speaker 3:

I really think that I never be came out again. I think I might die at there because in my mind I keep thinking that I don't want to scam any innocent people. Yeah, sorry. I really think I might be dead in there.

Speaker 2:

Micah makes the decision to try to escape one more time. The outer wall of the massive compound where Micah was held isn't just made of concrete. It's also built from a long row of retail shops, gyms, hairdressers, restaurants.

But when we went there, almost everything looked closed and almost everything seemed shut off to the outside. I say almost everything because right by the gated entrance was yet another casino. While everything else was dark and lifeless, its lights blazed in the night and its doors were wide open. Perhaps somewhat foolishly, we assumed it must be open to the public.

So we walked inside and what we found was bizarre. While DV casino, back in the heart of Sihanoukville, was packed and bustling, this place was completely empty. No customers, just 30 or 40 casino workers sitting at their tables. Cards neatly laid out waiting for a game that wasn't coming. The moment we stepped inside, every head turned toward us. As Carrie Anne later put it-

Speaker 1:

It was like a record scratch moment.

Speaker 2:

A record scratch moment. It was probably the most unsettled I felt the entire trip and we got out of there as quickly as possible. This whole visit to Kaibo left me shaken. It was also obvious what was taking place. I could understand how the scamming operation at DV could get away with it.

Operating an illegal business from the fourth floor of a casino was one thing, but Kaibo was another beast entirely. It was a 20,000 person open air prison and every week, people in that prison died. Why wasn't the Cambodian government stepping in? The answer is disturbing.

Speaker 7:

In Southeast Asia where you have industrial scale scam syndicates, there are elites in all of these countries that are directly partnering with the Chinese crime groups, with the Chinese mafia groups to make all of this happen.

Speaker 2:

That's the voice of Jason Tower, a fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and an expert with over 20 years of experience on peace and security issues in Southeast Asia.

Speaker 7:

And I think of all countries in the region, Cambodia is one of the most egregious in that it actually has given advisory positions and official titles to individuals that are effectively criminal kingpins.

You also see where direct relatives of the ruling family are involved in the ownership of some of the compounds, the ownership of some of the financial tools that are used to launder and move the money.

Speaker 2:

This is not exactly a secret either. In fact, in May of 2024, just two weeks before I travelled to Sihanoukville, there was a rather ironic story in the press. The United Nations had to reschedule the launch of an anti-human trafficking project in Cambodia.

And the reason? Because it turned out that the hotel where the launch was to be held was owned by a Cambodian senator with strong ties to human trafficking in particular, guess what? Forced scamming operations.

Speaker 6:

The rabbit hole here goes on and on and on all the way to the bottom, or we should say all the way to the top of this government.

Speaker 2:

Of course, forced scamming is not just a Cambodian issue. Over the past few years, these large scale scamming factories, it's hard to know what else to call them, have popped up in Myanmar, Laos, the Philippines, Dubai, Africa, the list goes on and on. But in Cambodia, well-

Speaker 6:

So experts today estimate that in Cambodia alone, scamming is at least a $12 billion a year industry, and that's approaching what would be equivalent to half the country's GDP.

Speaker 8:

A landmark report has accused Cambodia's ruling party of actively running what could be the world's most powerful criminal network, fueling a multi-billion dollar cyber scam industry built on human trafficking and state protection.

The US government funded study warns that South East Asia's scam economy centred in Cambodia now rivals the scale of entire national economies. And given how lucrative and powerful they've become, the crime syndicates are now almost too big to fail.

Speaker 2:

That little audio grab is from Australia's ABC National News aired in May of 2025 just before this podcast was launched. And the landmark report they're referencing, it was authored by none other than Jacob Sims, Jake.

This is Jake's area of deep expertise and we are lucky to have a front row seat to some of his latest findings. I asked Jake to walk us through what he's been working on and what he's uncovered.

Speaker 6:

So the report is titled Policies and Patterns, and it's a deep dive into the emergence and drivers of this exact criminal industry in Cambodia. And it's also an exploration about what can be done by people around the world who care about it and are impacted by it.

And as a part of the study, I spoke to over 50 of the world's leading experts on what we might call the state crime nexus in Cambodia. And one of the key contributions of this report is the first ever comprehensive mapping of the really vast array of mechanisms of support provided by the Cambodian government for this industry.

Speaker 2:

I asked Jake how this came to be.

Speaker 6:

So when you look at the history going back for four decades, this is a regime that was formed out of Civil War and brutality in very, very limited economic opportunities. And emerging from that context, the ruling party has specialised from day one in really predatory, extractive, often outright criminal industries.

And so up to this point, we know that the government has been able to retain control over the various security services of the country, the military, the police, law enforcement because of how much money they've been able to consistently and reliably provide them through these predatory and criminal industries. And effectively when scamming came along, it's supercharged all of this.

Speaker 2:

Now, just as a reminder, Jake spent several years in Cambodia on the ground doing counter trafficking work. And during that time, there were real wins and the work was getting done in partnership with the Cambodian government.

Speaker 6:

It is absolutely the case that there have been ways over the years of working with the government on certain issues like human trafficking, at least to some degree of reasonable closeness.

Speaker 2:

But when it came to the issue of forced scamming, what Jake encountered was something entirely different.

Speaker 6:

From day one. The government was highly combative to any efforts to approach them with cases of what we now call forced scamming or forced criminality into the cyber scam industry.

And their primary mode of responding to this issue was to deny the existence to the issue, to obscure its reality or to just outright repress the activists who are responding to it. And trafficking groups, human rights, civil society groups, journalists, embassies, you name it, we were all told and actually are still being told, this isn't trafficking. Stay in your lane.

Speaker 7:

And this is across the board. It doesn't really matter which country is coming in or which international agency is coming in to raise these issues with Cambodia. It doesn't matter if it's the United Nations, if it's ASEAN, if it's Thailand, if it's China, if it's the US, whoever does it is going to get the full wrath of the Cambodian government.

Speaker 2:

It was around the time that Micah and Ava found themselves stuck in Cambodia that a growing community of NGO workers, reporters and activists, Jake among them, first started digging further into the issue. What they began to see was chilling.

Speaker 6:

Basically, the evidence was starting to emerge that what was going on there was more than just your garden variety corruption. This is more than just a few bad actors high up in the government involved in some sort of racket. This industry, scamming, had become likely the government's biggest source of revenue.

This is the primary way that the ruling elite were supporting themselves, propping up their ruling strategy. And in a very real sense, this is the thing that was keeping them in power.

Speaker 2:

And that's still the case?

Speaker 6:

This is absolutely still the case. It's easily the largest, most lucrative industry in the entire country, and that is way beyond the mandate of my former NGO or any other NGO for that matter. It is totally uncharted territory.

Speaker 2:

It's a lot to take in, isn't it? As we walked away from Kaibo with the luxury of being able to leave it all behind, I noticed a Pakistani restaurant as one of the options laid out for the men and women inside the compound.

Do you remember Amir from episode two? The Pakistani man we met on the plane? He had sent me a text couple of days later and it was a good reminder of the human cost at the bottom of all these dynamics of governments and systems. Here's what it said.

And remember, English is definitely not his first language. "Hi, how are you?" He wrote, I replied that I was well and asked how he was. "I am not well," he said, accompanied with that pensive face emoji. My stomach dropped. "Oh no, why not?" I asked. He replied with the words, on work and then a broken heart emoji. I asked, "Is the job not what you were told it was?" And then he replied with this. "What to do? This is our life."

Speaker 1:

Kaibo, day 33.

Speaker 2:

Once again, Micah is planning his escape. First thing in the morning before his roommates wake up and last thing at night after they fall asleep, he searches for someone who can help then immediately deletes his search history. He Googles Cambodia NGO scamming. He Googles fake job, trap, help.

Eventually, he finds an interview that someone has given online. An American man working in Cambodia and speaking out against forced scamming. Micah doesn't have a phone number for this man. He has to think of another way.

One night, he instals Twitter. The download feels like it takes forever, but at last, the app opens Micah types into the search box looking for the man. The first few results aren't right, but there, halfway down the page, is the person he's looking for.

The man is the Cambodia country director for a major global NGO. And on Twitter he calls out the evils of forced scamming. He knows about the torture, the threats, the deaths, all the things that Micah has seen in the past terrible months, the things he thought perhaps nobody outside that compounds knew about, this man is saying out loud.

As Micah scans the man's posts, he feels an unexpected connection. He's no longer invisible. Here, he thinks, is somebody who understands. He decides to send the man a message. The man's name is Jacob Sims, or as we know him, Jake.

Speaker 6:

The message I received on Twitter read like this, "We are being forced to work as scammers in KB Chinatown, in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. Please rescue us and save us, them Chinese kidnapped, electronic shock, human trafficking, beating, imprisonment. We don't want work with. Them force us work as scammer. Rescue us as soon. Help us."

Speaker 2:

For Jake, everything about this message, the way it came in, the disjointed language, it all feels suspicious, like maybe he's being baited.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, everyone at this point was getting a little bit paranoid.

Speaker 2:

He'd never been contacted directly like this before, and his instinct is to hit delete. The Fight of My Life is brought to you by Cadence Productions in partnership with Unheard. This series, Escaping Scam City, was written by Carvio Viswanathan, Nicky Florence Thompson, and me, your host, Rich Thompson.

The series producers, a Lydia Bowden, Jake Sims, Ben Field, Carianne Tilson, Carvio Viswanathan, and Rich Thompson. Our theme song is See Me Fly by Rosa. Our incredible translator is Corinne Powell. Thank you so much, Corinne. Additional sound design by Brynn and Ridley.

Unheard's advocacy and 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, Dane 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.

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 first-hand 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 appreciated. We'll see you on the next episode.