The Trust Factory

Presentation

The Trust Factory enters the concealed world of Southeast Asia’s scam compounds, where people are trafficked into a system that turns captivity into digital labour. Inspired by true events and documented cases:
Inside the compounds, workers are forced to operate false identities across dating apps, professional networks, and social media, using invented names, photographs, professions, and biographies to gain trust outside. Their work is systematic: there is a hierarchy with task delegations and daily quotas to meet, with KPIs being the amount of contacts gained and victims’ financial investments scammed. Those who resist, try to escape, or fail to meet target requirements face severe punishment and violence.

The central tragedy of The Trust Factory is a contradiction: one victim is forced to manufacture another victim.

The opera unfolds in two parts. It opens from the protagonist’s point of view as he is kidnapped at Bangkok International Airport and transported across borders to a scam compound in northern Myanmar. The audience travels with him, witnessing his loss of identity and dignity as he is coerced into scamming. The second part shifts outside, where a woman encounters one of his fabricated identities through social media and is drawn into an online relationship built on false promises, losing her money and being emotionally devastated when the account disappears.

Artistically, the project transforms scam scripts into theatre, online messages into arias, and digital profiles into unstable identities. Live voice, surveillance, spatial sound, projection mapping and immersive visual design - combining footage filmed in real locations with 3D digital twins - reveal the distance between the person onstage and the identity seen online.

The project asks what happens when trust itself becomes an industrial product. The factory does not simply produce scams. It manufactures fake identities convincing enough to be trusted.

Co-producing Partners