The Multi-Billion Dollar Industry Using Trafficked Slaves to Scam Americans | Timothy Blackwood

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Americans are ripped off in the billions annually through romance “pig-butchering” scams—the most dominant type. But who’s really behind them?

The shocking reality is the vast majority of these scammers are trafficked victims, enslaved across more than 60 countries and forced to scam or face torture.

“You’re working 17-hour days. You’re catatonic. You’re not getting sleep. You start to doze. They’ll electrocute you, and if you refuse to scam, they’ll torture you,” said Timothy Blackwood, an award-winning Canadian-American film director.

His film “Scam Slave: From Hell to Home” follows a Ugandan man promised a high-paying job in Thailand, only to be kidnapped by a Myanmar-based crime syndicate.

“There’s all different types of scams going on there. There’s villas, there’s strip clubs, there’s clinics to support the staff that are managing and running these compounds,” Blackwood says.

These scam centers in Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar generate billions that fund even more advanced operations.

“It’s not simply in the horrific statistics of how many billions of dollars are being scammed from Americans annually, but the human cost to people’s lives.”

In this episode, I dive into how these operations stay hidden and what can actually be done to stop them.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Timothy Blackwood, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Timothy Blackwood:

It’s a pleasure to be here. Pleasure and honor to be here to speak with you today.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, there are a great many scam centers in countries like Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar or Burma. And people there are often shockingly enslaved doing these scams against Americans. Tell me about what’s going on here.

Mr. Blackwood:

Well, what I’d like to do is pull it back for a second and talk about the film and the specific focus that we take in this film. So many, many Americans have either had a family member or a friend scammed in some type of generally online scam operation, but they don’t know that behind these scams are the people that are running them. And what I wanted to do was to pull back the veil on that because I’d heard that these people are actually trafficked. People on the other end of the line have actually been trafficked in to do this in many cases. 

, what my film, Scam Slave from Hell to Home, does is it follows the journey of a young Ugandan man named Gideon. And Gideon belongs to a village. He’s from a small village outside of Kampala. He’s an entrepreneur. He’s running an internet cafe and using the internet cafe to support his family. And a client comes in and says, you’re good at English. You’re great at computers. I can get you a job for $1,200 a month doing data entry in Thailand, in Bangkok. And for Gideon, this sounds like a dream come true. That’s a huge sum of money, and he’s going to be able to help his family. 

So he gets his tourist visa. He goes over to Thailand, has to sell his internet cafe. Everything that he’s worked towards to get this data entry job goes over to Bangkok, and a driver picks him up. And instead of driving him to the company, he’s effectively abducted and driven across into Myanmar, into what is a scamming center where he’s enslaved to scam Americans.

Speaker C:

I come from a family with almost 11 children. This customer introduced me to an opportunity for a job in Thailand. I’m the hope in my family right now. He told me, you are in Myanmar. You are here to scam.

Mr. Jekielek:

And this is, you know, basically like a prison, it’s a lot of computer terminals.

Mr. Blackwood:

100 per cent. And what happened was during COVID, these casinos along the border between Myanmar and Thailand, they were empty because of the travel ban. So the operators of these casinos figured out that they could fill these hotels with individuals and essentially scam people, put them at computers and have them reach out to Americans and people around the globe and scam them for their money. 

So, what happens to Gideon is he ends up in this scamming center, surrounded by people from dozens of other countries—thousands of people. This is a huge operation, massive. And if you don’t scam, you know, after work, you’re working 17-hour days. You’re catatonic; you’re not getting sleep. You start to doze, and they’ll electrocute you. And if you refuse to scam, they’ll torture you.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, the electric batons, you know, and by the way, congratulations on an incredible film, right? 

Mr. Blackwood:

Thank you. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Engaging, like deeply and deeply human. I absolutely loved it. Those electric batons that you’re talking about, you know, cattle prods—sometimes designed specifically for people—are what’s used to torture people in concentration camps and black jails and prisons in China. I’m very familiar with the technology. It’s a horrible, horrible thing to experience. And so when he comes in, actually, he doesn’t want to participate.

Mr. Blackwood:

He doesn’t want to participate. He doesn’t know exactly what they’re asking him to do, but he knows that it’s wrong. He knows that whatever it is they want him to do, he says, I’m a Christian. Listen, this isn’t what I came here to do. Where’s the grocery store I’m supposed to do data entry in? And they said, no, you’re here to scam. 

And if you don’t do this, I’m going to call my supervisor, and you’re not going to like what’s going to happen to you. He refuses. The supervisor comes in and effectively electrocutes him, drags him back, and throws him at the desk where he’s supposed to work. That’s the beginning. That’s the beginning of his first 24 hours in Myanmar.

Speaker C:

Everyone was looking at me. And then this Chinese guy, full of tattoos on his body, came into this room, kicked me in the chest, grabbed an electric taser, and he electrocuted me.

Mr. Jekielek:

Give me the bigger picture on these scam centers. Because one of the things I remember, we met each other at your screening—a screening of the film and part of this incubator program that you’re part of. And I mentioned, I know as a fact that the FBI has been working on trying to break some of these. In fact, we’re going to be running a story sometime in the next few weeks—I don’t know when we’re going to run this interview—but about this. Of course, it’s very hard to do that from the U.S. because they’re outside jurisdictions and so forth. But they are doing it, and they’ve had some successes. How does this all look, these, like this, this whole operation?

Mr. Blackwood:

I’ve had the honor, the unique opportunity, to be in active conversation with Ambassador Betty Bigombe, who is the Ugandan ambassador to Malaysia. And she plays a very important role in helping to free Gideon and a couple of other Ugandans that are enslaved in this compound. Actually, it’s a massive ongoing obstacle to be able to get individuals out of these scamming compounds once they’ve been trafficked. You know, they’ve been tricked. 

Most of these people have been tricked into coming there, and they’re driven across the border, both to Myanmar and also Cambodia. And so once they’re there, you know, it’s very difficult to get people out. So, you know, if she’s a government official and you’re from Uganda, there’s no embassy in Myanmar. There’s no embassy in Cambodia. In fact, she’s handling this whole region and is very, very under-resourced. And it doesn’t appear that there’s a huge amount of national resources dedicated to help these people get out. 

So what happens is even once they’re released from the compound, you can get them over to Thailand. You have to prove that they don’t have their passports anymore. They’ve often been taken away, and they’re now in Thailand. You have to prove that they were not willfully scamming. Some of these scamming compounds have been closed down. Like the biggest notorious compound, KK Park, was shut down. And I think this is an effort by the government to say we’re cutting down on the scamming centers. It had hundreds of buildings. 

So you want to talk about the scale of it? There are hundreds and hundreds of buildings in these compounds, thousands and thousands of people enslaved. There are all different types of scams going on there. There are strip clubs; there are clinics to support the staff that are managing and running these compounds.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, who are these people?

Mr. Blackwood:

The people that are running these things, Gideon talks a lot about that in the film. And in Gideon’s case, in a massive scamming compound, this is run by a Chinese crime syndicate. All the higher-level people are Chinese crime bosses, right? Translators, many of whom are trafficked, communicate with the people that have been enslaved. So they’re also the ones that are torturing the individuals that are scamming. And if you don’t want to scam, you get thrown out a window, or you get put in what’s called a dark room or a red room, and you’re hung up by your wrists for days at a time, deprived of water, given urine to drink in Gideon’s case.

Speaker C:

He ordered the soldiers to put me in handcuffs for over 30 minutes. I felt electricity all over my body. I reached a point where I couldn’t feel any pain. He just kept kicking me, punching me, and yelling at me in Chinese. I shouted, I cried, I begged for mercy, but he wouldn’t stop.

Mr. Blackwood:

The victims that I’ve spoken with are extremely traumatized. I spoke with other victims. They’re not featured in the film, largely because the trauma that comes with the torture and this just absolutely grotesque form of enslavement is just so traumatizing psychologically, mentally, and emotionally that it’s very hard for them to want to go on and recount these stories on camera. 

But there’s also one other really important fact, and that is they’re terrified of their former captors. The torture that they undergo in these scamming centers leaves such an impression that they don’t want to speak out about the crime bosses that are running them. They’re terrified. I spoke with one individual who said, listen, I was called a year ago and I was threatened not to say anything. Most of them will not come forward to speak out because they’re so traumatized.

Mr. Jekielek:

So even these rare ones that actually make it out.

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes, the rare ones that make it out.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s very rare. Like, tell me a bit about that. I mean, do you have any more insight? In the film, you kind of say that you couldn’t explain how they actually got out. I’m guessing they paid some sort of big ransom or something like this. But can you give us a little more color about how that escape operation was actually managed?

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes. Ambassador Betty Bigombe meets with local military who are in charge of the area of this particular scamming compound. And she speaks with them and makes some type of negotiation to get the Ugandans out. She’s a skilled negotiator. And she doesn’t want to talk about the very specific details, makes an agreement that she would not disclose exactly what the agreement was that gets them out. But the important thing is she gets them out. She subsequently has gotten out around 400 enslaved people from Myanmar and Cambodia. And she’s working extremely hard to get more out. But it’s a big uphill battle.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so, in these situations, really, it’s just the Ugandans that are being released, right? Because the others don’t have these advocates for them like the ambassador.

Mr. Blackwood:

Some don’t have any. I mean, sometimes what they initially do is they want ransom. But in the case of Gideon and the Ugandans, there was no reassurance that if they paid the ransom, families paid the ransom, which they’re too poor to do that. The people running the scamming compound would actually let them out. These are professional scammers. They’re running a whole global crime syndicate to scam people. 

So at every level, they’re making money off these enslaved victims. Every single level, right? And they can be sold from one, what they call them companies. So one company is doing a certain type of scam, and they will, the people they have enslaved aren’t working out or they’re underproductive. They’ll sell them, the slaves, to another company, and they’ll get sent to another scamming compound. You have no access to the outside world to advocate for help. 

And if you’re from a developing country with families that have no money and resources, and a government that’s not behind freeing you or interested in the human rights of its own citizens that have been enslaved, how do you get out? How do you find freedom again? And what’s so devastating for these victims is they go abroad to get work to support their families. Most of these people are looking for honest work, right? 

And there’s a report that came out that said, you know, 30-some per cent of these people are tricked or scammed by someone they know, another 30 per cent by a trusted individual. Only 20-some percent, according to the report, says it’s by, you know, something they found online. So within these countries, within the developing world, are extremely fragile and weak, and where people are starving and trying to get a meal. 

These governments, they’re not doing what they need to do to help get their own citizens out, let alone provide a context, right, within their own economy for people to be able to flourish. There are huge amounts of corruption, right? Huge amounts. And just because we don’t have Americans getting, you know, kidnapped and put in these scamming centers and tortured on a daily basis doesn’t mean that we don’t have an obligation to defend the individuals that this is happening to, right? We’re being scammed, Americans being scammed, you know, in the billions of dollars annually through these schemes, right? Billions. 

That’s a huge, huge sum of money. People’s entire 401ks, their savings disappearing, right? So we have an obligation at a national security level to do something about this, but we also, at a human rights level, at the level of human rights, at the level of the fact that each human being, if we truly believe, is entitled to respect and dignity and some kind of inalienable rights, we have a responsibility to do something about this, right?

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, it’s even in the collective consciousness, very much so, the scams are so common. There’s a whole film called The Beekeeper. I don’t know if you have come across this.

Mr. Blackwood:

I’ve seen The Beekeeper. Yes. How her mother is scammed, I think, is very well done. And she’s so ashamed she commits suicide.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s right, activating Jason Statham.

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes, activating Jason. And then, you know, where I think that film really fails is it goes up to the level of the White House and makes these kinds of posh guys who are dressed in suits. And it really is highly inaccurate who the villains are in the real-life scenario.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. It’s fascinating.

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes, that it’s all being done within America when these scam operations are happening within the Golden Triangle and now beyond. I want to talk about one particular scam, one particular kind of scam, which is pig butchering. And people have started to learn about this because it’s an extremely lucrative form of scamming, right? And we go into this in the film. This is the kind of scam that Gideon is involved with in the compound that he’s enslaved in. 

You get a text message from a random number. It says, hey, I didn’t see you at the pool the other day. It’s Lisa. And you’ve just lost your wife and you’re feeling lonely. And let’s say you’re a retiree and you’re looking for connection. And you think, well, no, Lisa, I’m sorry, you got the wrong number, Lisa. I wasn’t at the pool.  Oh, well, what’s your name? 

They reveal themselves to be a pretty, 26-year-old Thai girl and a relationship begins. She’s sending you photos and videos of herself, so you think she’s real. Down the line, she says, listen, I’m making a lot of money in crypto, investing in crypto. If you invest money, you are literally going to get like five times as much back. Let me show you my wallet. 

And what ensues is tricking the person to invest in what is a fake cryptocurrency wallet. And what they end up doing is having to invest more and more and more and more. And the money keeps growing. It looks like they’re making a lot of money on their investment. And then when they go to withdraw the funds, they say, well, there are these fees associated. If you want to get the money out, you’re going to have to put in like another $50,000. You say, I’ve already put everything I own into it. I just want to get the money out. They say, no, sorry, can’t do it. 

So you borrow the money from your son, your brother, whoever, and you’ve now borrowed. And you go to withdraw, and then they cut you off and they’ve taken all the money, and you realize that this whole thing was a scam. And so it’s pig butchering. You fatten the pig as much as you can, and then you butcher it. So it used to be for something to be stolen from you, right? People case out your house. We’re going to see when he comes and goes. We’re going to work our way in there, find where he keeps his mother’s jewels or jewelry, and we’re going to get the stuff you own.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wow. So, how, you know, you got some really remarkable footage from inside these centers, or at least one or a few of them. Tell me a bit about that. Where did this footage come from? How did you get it?

Mr. Blackwood:

You know, I appreciate that you noticed that. I can’t say how that came about. I can say I’m just very grateful that we have it to show audiences and very grateful for, you know, there are many, you know, unnamed angels on the ground that are doing everything they can to help people that escape from these centers or help people escape. And so I can’t go into the details of how I got the footage, but I’m very grateful for the fact that we got it so people can see it, but also for the work that people are doing that will not be recognized publicly due to the security, due to the fact that they need to remain anonymous for their own security. A very dangerous endeavor.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you’ve just described this pig butchering scam. What are some of these telltale signs of scams that people should watch out for? I mean, look, I’ve gotten, let me put it this way, I’ve gotten those texts. Like, you know, just someone says, hi. And the odd time, like, I sometimes, hey, I don’t have you in my contacts. And then I see what the next step is. If it’s not like, hey, it’s this and this person that I actually know,” then I just, so that’s a hint, right? If the person is not actually known to you, you should not engage, right?

Mr. Blackwood:

You shouldn’t engage.

Mr. Jekielek:

But what are some other telltale signs?

Mr. Blackwood:

If you’ve been engaging with someone and they seem like they’re a beautiful model from the other side of the world and they want to marry you, and you’re 70-years-old and you’re a widower and this woman wants to come cook for you and do everything for you, she’s probably not real or she’s someone that’s been trafficked and is working as a slave to convince you into a pig butchering scam. That could be very, very likely. So you have to be extremely careful with who you communicate with online that you’ve never met in person. And do not, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to actually be true, right? You’ve got to use your common sense. 

What I would encourage people, and these people, Erin West, who runs Operation Shamrock, is really at the forefront of this endeavor of trying to help people and is having a good deal of success. I’d encourage people to check out her website and podcast. But what she says, and a clip that we use in our film, is that she says, these individuals are extremely sophisticated. You don’t have to be 65 or 70 to be scammed. They will get you at any age. This is happening to people across the board.  

One of those individuals is a young woman, probably in her mid-20s, that this happens to. And it happens when she meets a guy on Hinge who connects with her. He was born in the same town that she’s from, also in China, and really connects with her. And he gets her into a pig butchering scam, of which she loses all of the money that her mother, who died, left her, right? And he’s telling her, think of all the good you can do for your family through this crypto investment. It’s a sure deal.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, crypto seems to be one of the features of these scams.

Mr. Blackwood:

Of course, 100 per cent. Because you can’t trace it, right? You can create a fake wallet. People can deposit money into that fake wallet, into a kind of fake exchange.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, and that allows you to elude law enforcement later.

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes. Aaron West is working with local law enforcement agencies on this, but this is really not a massive security.This is not like a national security, true national security crisis that we’ve recognized it to be, that it actually is.

Mr. Jekielek:

It strikes me, right, that AI would probably make these scams a lot easier to run because you could even create fake videos.

Mr. Blackwood:

They’re doing that with deepfakes, extremely sophisticated. One of the executive producers on the project, Matthew Friedman, a colleague of mine, has shared with me, from the research we’ve done, the scammers are years ahead of the industry. Like, before the private sector had come up with these deepfakes, they were mastering it. They can hire the most brilliant programmers and work on these things at the most sophisticated level before the private sector touches it. And they’re always steps ahead of us.

Mr. Jekielek:

Like, they’re ahead of, like, you know, Google.

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes, that’s what Matthew has explained to me. Extremely sophisticated. We have to understand that the scale of this is just so huge. The amount of money that is being made. I mean, if you’re making billions of dollars a year with relatively low overhead, the ability to reinvest that into more sophisticated scams and technology is kind of endless. You don’t have to, and there’s no, of course, there’s no regulation for how you do that or that you have to go through any type of legal process. You hire great minds and you fly them in, and you have every level of technology available to you to be able to improve on these techniques. So deepfake is a big one, yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s interesting because as we’re talking here, we’re at FreedomFest, and a lot of people here are very concerned about their privacy, about programming, money not really being money, right? A lot of the technologies used to allow governments and law enforcement to track transactions are precisely things that a lot of people here would not want to see implemented. But these scams are being used for a good reason to implement these technologies that allow very close governments, let’s say.

Mr. Blackwood:

Surveillance control. We have to be extremely careful of that. Listen, the government has—this is a massive, massive failure of our national security. It’s huge. So, to be apprehensive of the government that has failed to protect its own citizens from these scams, you know, the fact that I, as an independent filmmaker, am out here sharing this short, inspiring, and powerful short documentary made on a very low budget in an effort to help educate people. The fact that I’m having to do that—there’s no national campaign like what we have with fentanyl or what we have going on with some good things with making America healthy again, so on and so forth. No one’s talking about it. 

We’re talking about immigration every day, border security, tightening our borders because of foreign actors that come in and whatever else have you. This is not what’s going on there. Does the 401k that gets stolen from a working-class woman by a scammer not matter? We’re talking about hardworking Americans that have worked their entire lives, earned an honest living to save this money, and for it to be stolen overnight in these sophisticated scams. And what are we doing? What’s our government doing?

Mr. Jekielek:

Reports that at least there are the beginnings of a response to this, and that’s with the FBI. 

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes. They should get going.

Mr. Jekielek:

I agree with you that this has not really been on the radar very much at all, but I do know it’s at least on the radar of the FBI right now.

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes, I know President Trump signed, from what I read, an executive order in March to prioritize this. And that’s a positive, very positive development. This is coming. You know, about five years late, and the sophistication of these enterprises has grown, and they’ve enriched themselves so much that this is going to be a very, very, very challenging fight. And I think that this is where we, as just everyday Americans, have to step up and be proactive about our internet usage. We have to step up and take the reins, so to speak, on our own digital footprints, right? We can’t. It’s clear that we can’t. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And we shouldn’t, right? We shouldn’t rely. This is, I mean, again, this is sort of a key message, right, of FreedomFest. We shouldn’t be reliant this way. We have to figure out that we have some responsibility for ourselves in figuring these things out.

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes. And if we’re not conscious of it, you know, what happens with our data and our information? Here’s the point that I’m really curious about, right? And we don’t delve into this in the movie, but after having spent a year on telling Gideon’s story, it’s really provoked this question for me. And that is, as you well know, and pretty much every American that turns on the TV or the news knows about the massive push for artificial intelligence and kind of owning that movement, that America needs to own that movement. That’s the effort, right? 

And we see the data centers springing up. We see massive, massive, massive amounts of investment going into AI, right? AI functions based on having access to huge amounts of information, right? Huge databases. It does really well with having access to information, analyzing it, right? So, how are we going to become the leader in AI and also protect the privacy of American citizens, the privacy and the financial integrity and bank accounts of hardworking Americans? How can we do that? 

So, every single day we hear about how aggressive we’re being with AI and leading the world in AI. Why isn’t there any ounce of that effort being made to protect Americans from being scammed? How can we possibly accomplish those two things at the same time? It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? Because the people that are leading the AI revolution are extremely smart people.

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s a way to do it. Let’s just say there’s a bad way and there’s a good way. I’ve had a number of people on the show about these types of questions—how do you develop AI in a way that it doesn’t grow to want to kill us all?

Mr. Blackwood:

Well, that’s a big overarching question. Why is it that the people that are leading the AI firms now, why are they not at the forefront of the cybersecurity question of what’s happening to Americans being scammed? Why not?

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, why not?

Mr. Blackwood:

It’s a question. I don’t have a precise answer to it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Maybe you can encourage them with your film.

Mr. Blackwood:

I would hope so because I think the way to really break this down for individuals is it’s not simply in the horrific statistics of how many billions of dollars are being scammed from Americans annually, but the human cost to people’s lives. When people are scammed, there is a human cost to their lives, and a human cost to the enslaved people from over 65 different countries who are working to scam Americans and people from around the globe.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me about the hand drawings that are in your film. I find them to be incredibly compelling.

Mr. Blackwood:

The hand drawings in the film. What was really important for this film was to showcase the narrative of someone who goes through the process—the process of being trafficked.

Mr. Jekielek:

And many of them are also wearing what looks to me like military fatigues.

Mr. Blackwood:

It’s the local militias. There’s a civil war going on, as you know, in Myanmar. And so the different local military groups are involved in protecting these compounds. So they’re very, very involved. There’s a lot of money flowing, right? And so the local military are the ones that are protecting a lot of these compounds or have different territories.

Mr. Jekielek:

So who drew them?

Mr. Blackwood:

So who drew them? In the film, we have drawings because we can’t show Gideon’s experience of being tortured once he gets into Thailand. It’s all in retrospect, but we want to make his experience of being enslaved in the scamming center present for the audience. And so, what we do is we’ve got hand-drawn illustrations from an extremely talented artist, Sophia, a colleague of mine. And she just did a phenomenal job of showcasing what Gideon goes through inside the scamming center through her hand-drawn illustrations in pencil.

Mr. Jekielek:

What’s happening with Gideon now?

Mr. Blackwood:

It’s a tough road. You come back from being enslaved in the Golden Triangle, one of these scamming centers. You come back home, and you’d left with a promise to your family that you were going to be sending them money and they’d no longer be living in poverty. They’d have food to eat, they’d have money to send their kids to school. And now you come back home, and you still owe people all the money that you borrowed to go do that trip. You come back worse off than when you left. 

So he’s in the process now of getting on his feet. He’s also a musician and hip-hop artist. He’s a very talented young man, and he’s pursuing his career in music. In fact, he sings the closing song in the film during our closing credits. And he’s also doing activism. He’s being proactive in the ways that he can help other people who get in touch with him escape. He works on two fronts as an activist. 

So he goes around to schools and tells his story—schools in different groups to younger kids—and explains the trap that you can get into to be scammed, like what happened to him. So he’s doing that. But then also, he’s helping as an activist when people hear his story from podcasts and so on and so forth. They get in touch with him to say, oh, I have a sister who’s disappeared, or someone from inside a scamming compound gets access to his number, and then he can do what he can to try to help them escape.

Mr. Jekielek:

How did you get in touch with him? I mean, I saw that you actually went to his village.

Mr. Blackwood:

Yes, we filmed in Uganda, which was a very powerful experience, and I’m deeply honored to have met his family, to have been welcomed into his father’s church in the village. His father’s a pastor and farmer. And I got access to him through a journalist who’s working on a book on the topic, who’s done a lot of great work in this space. And I’m super grateful to him for making that introduction. And we really want people to learn about Gideon’s story because Gideon’s story is really reflective of what thousands of other people have gone through.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, it’s an incredible film, made a huge impression on me. I’ve already shared it with some people that, you know, might be able to use it to affect some change. We’ll see. Do you have any final thoughts? Anything else you would like people to know about the film, where they can watch it, and any final thoughts you might have?

Mr. Blackwood:

We’re screening at film festivals right now, so you can look out on social media for, Scam Slave: From Hell to Home. We’ll be screening at Flickers Film Festival in Rhode Island in early August. So anyone on the East Coast that wants to come up to Rhode Island, it’s a fabulous film festival. Then we’ll be rolling out to festivals around the globe and also looking for a really strong online partner that could do a wonderful digital release of the film. So we have some individuals and groups that we’ve approached, hoping that they’ll want to distribute the film online.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Timothy Blackwood, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Blackwood:

It’s an honor and pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the work you do and for taking the time to speak with me about my film, Scam Slave: From Hell to Home.

 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.