While grazers can cause considerable damage to their victims, they often also suffer from exploitative working conditions.
In the midst of all the benefits brought about by the arrival of the Internet, the development and multiplication of more or less well-thought-out scams is unfortunately a point that cannot be forgotten. But while their victims can often find themselves destitute and without recourse, the people who defrauded them are not always better off.
What is a grazer?
The term “browser” is an expression designating people whose job is to extract money from the Internet. These scams can take many forms: from the famous Nigerian prince who asks you to pay legal fees to make you inherit his considerable fortune to the attractive woman who promises to join her victim once she pays him a ticket. flight or medical expenses. Grazers are not lacking in imagination.
These scams can turn out to be particularly cruel in the event that those affected actually believe they are helping or have a connection with the person who is scamming them. But above all, there is generally no recourse, and tracing the origin can sometimes be very difficult.
Grazers sometimes suffer more than their victims
Most of the people behind these scams come from poor countries and often without real labor rights. These elements could have let us guess, but an investigation of English VOD came to confirm it: the working conditions of grazers are sometimes truly exploitative.
The journalist behind this investigation thus interviewed several people who had recently survived – the term is no exaggeration – from a Cambodian company that scammed Westerners by convincing them to invest in a crypto-currency that did not exist. The witnesses for this article thus explained that after having given them several guarantees, the company’s recruiters confiscated their telephones as soon as they arrived in town, before installing them in a building where they would have to live and work without being able to go out.
The quotas imposed on these “employees” were very hard, and those who did not reach them were systematically punished and/or humiliated, by being obliged to do 50 push-ups for each missing “client”, for example. One of the interviewees even explains that she was Tasé and beaten up after having made a simple mistake of recipient for a message. And when, finally, the police came to ask the company to let them go, the latter agreed, on the condition that they pay $ 2,800 each ” to reimburse expenses incurred “. Most of these employees, however, never received the salary that was promised to them.
Of course, the person directly behind the scam can, given the conditions, hardly be held responsible. And if, in the case described in the article by VODthose responsible have been arrested, the practice nevertheless remains widespread.
Source : English VOD, Actu.fr
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