BANGKOK (AP) — It often starts with a text message asking if you are available on weekends, looking for a part-time job or you get a simple “hello” from an unknown number. Halfway across the world, a laborer is usually pulling in 12-16 hour days, sending non-stop messages, hoping someone will take the bait.

The ultimate goal is always to take your money — victims have lost tens of billions to scams and hundreds of thousands of people are in forced labor to keep the schemes going. These workers are often housed in massive complexes scattered across southeast Asia, where the industry has flourished.

Here is why rooting out the scamming industry is such a complex issue:

The crackdown in Myanmar

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday confirmed it had been hacked, potentially disclosing important government data to malicious actors.

The small government office, with some 275 employees, provides objective, impartial analysis to support lawmakers during the budget process. It is required to produce a cost estimate for nearly every bill approved by a House or Senate committee and will weigh in earlier when asked to do so by lawmakers.

Caitlin Emma, a spokeswoman for the CBO said in a written statement that the agency “has identified the security incident, has taken immediate action to contain it, and has implemented additional monitoring and new security controls to further protect the agency’s systems going forward.”

The Washington Post first wrote the story on the CBO hack, stating that the intrusion was done by a suspected foreign actor, citing four anonymous people familiar with the situation.

MONTREAL - A former researcher with Quebec's hydro utility who is facing economic espionage charges said Thursday he was applying for work at universities in China as a contingency plan because he was unhappy at Hydro-Québec.

Yuesheng Wang, 38, maintained under cross-examination that there was nothing nefarious about his interest in moving back to China. He explained that it was tied to Hydro-Québec's unwillingness to extend his work visa for more than year at a time and his experience at the institute around 2017 and 2018.

“At that time, my thinking was if I’m not happy at Hydro-Québec, going back to China to be a full professor was one of my options," Wang testified.

The Crown argued that Wang, while he was working at Hydro-Québec, applied to work at Chinese universities under the framework of the Thousand Talents program, a recruitment tool used by the Chinese government to attract foreign-trained scientists to return to work in China.

Religious groups can relax: the federal government is not planning to remove their charitable tax status.

Not that it ever planned to do that. But now we have an official word from the office of Liberal MP Karina Gould, chair of the House of Commons Finance Committee, that it’s not going to happen.

In an email to Al Postma, the Canadian executive director of the Christian Reformed Church (a copy of which I have seen), her office stated there is no plan to remove religion as a charitable purpose from the Canadian Income Tax Act.

Charitable status for religious organizations “is not under review, and this government has no plans to change that,” her office said. “Any suggestion otherwise is false.”

Garry Gutting was an American professor of philosophy who used to write The Stone, a regular feature in the New York Times. In an April 2016 column, Gutting — who died in 2019 — mused about the government’s role in limiting religious hate and violence.

“At certain points in their histories, both Christianity and Islam have been intolerant of other religions, often of each other, even to the point of violence,” Gutting said. For Christians in Europe in previous centuries, this included the persecution of Jews, the Spanish Inquisition and the persecution of Anabaptists.

Today, Christians and Muslims see killing of people who disagree with them as wrong. And why is that? Not because they received new revelation from God, according to Gutting. It was because governments enacted laws that said it was wrong to kill someone who believed differently from you.

It was a slow process, but over time governments in Europe accomplished this through toleration acts and by giving legal recognition to other forms of religious belief. They also abolished penalties for heresy, blasphemy and apostasy, and moved in the direction of freedom of conscience and worship.