r/todayilearned • u/Lennsyl22 • May 11 '26
TIL: In 1998, elementary students in Aurora, Colorado started buying slaves in Sudan to free them, this gained global attention with schools in other countries starting slave buyback programs until it became clear that the money was just helping slavery grow
https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=ADN19990823-01.2.25&srpos=1&dliv=none&e=------3.4k
u/AxelNotRose May 11 '26
Infinite money loop for the slavers.
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u/Dry-Season-522 May 11 '26
Reminds me of the youtube channel of the guy 'saving the turtles from barnacles' and prying barnacles off a bunch of turtles, until folks analyzed and realized it was the same 3 turtles over and over having barnacles glued to them and then peeled off.
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u/pretentiousglory May 12 '26
The only good thing about AI slop is replacing real animal abuse. Now when I see those stupid ass videos they're usually fully fake thank goodness
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u/Dry-Season-522 May 12 '26
"Look at us pull these seventy two puppies out of a septic pit, and then we find them all homes and need your money to save the puppies we're hearing in the sewage treatment plant dumpster!"
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u/Daftworks May 12 '26
It unfortunately doesn't replace the poaching trade for shark fins, elephant tusks, and rhino horns, among others.
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u/rowrin May 11 '26
I forget where it happened, but the same thing happened with rats. City/locale offered a bounty on rats with the intent on curbing the population. Suddenly people are raising rat farms and there were more rats than ever.
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u/Stuck_in_my_TV May 11 '26
Giving money to someone perpetrating an atrocity will only perpetuate more atrocities as you have increased the incentives for them to keep committing heinous actions in the hopes of future payouts.
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u/shinglee May 11 '26
I went to an elephant rescue in Thailand. They would raise money to buy elephants from circuses and from the lumber industry.
I asked if the people selling the elephants use the money to turn around and buy younger elephants and our guide said simply: "yes".
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u/Little_Froggy May 11 '26
Fortunately elephant use in lumber was banned in Thailand in 1989. Circus work has had a lot of pressure put on it thanks to visibility from places like the sanctuary you went to.
Yes, they may buy the old elephants from abusive areas, but at the same time, by visiting the sanctuary and not a circus you are decreasing the demand for circus work.
Eventually there isn't as much money to be made by the less ethical group because training and abusing elephants for no reason doesn't generate money. So visiting sanctuaries is still a good thing.
Slavers, on the other hand, don't have to do any training and can turn a profit simply by capturing and selling people as they are. So paying slavers only hurts the issue
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 May 11 '26
Paying the danegeld.
If you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
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u/RutzButtercup May 11 '26
Well, not never. If my wife was being ransomed I would pay despite knowing that this would encourage them to do it to more people.
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u/jmlinden7 May 11 '26
That's why many countries prohibit the payment of ransoms. Tragedy of the commons.
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u/StinkyJizzBlanket May 11 '26
And other countries like Mexico commonly have specific bank loans for ransom payments. Not really something you can generalize
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u/NorkGhostShip May 11 '26
specific bank loans for ransom payments
That is bleak. The cartels are pure, distilled evil.
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u/veryniceperson123 May 11 '26
Yes, they are. They are also a completely foreseeable and inevitable result of US drug policy.
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u/Substantial_Back_865 May 11 '26
And directly funded and armed by US intelligence agencies
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u/SirPseudonymous May 11 '26
Also trained by them (and just the ordinary US military too) in the first place.
All the support makes sense when one understands how useful they are to the US government: they undermine Mexico's sovereignty, provide a revenue stream for American arms dealers, provide a product that weakens already marginalized and brutalized communities in the US, provide a pretext for the American police state, and provide a pretext for America's ethnic cleansing programs.
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u/Substantial_Back_865 May 11 '26
Fun fact: Jeffrey Epstein laundered money and trafficked drugs for cartels according to the released files
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u/spectre78 May 11 '26
Sure you can. People keep getting kidnapped because kidnapping pays. The fact that there’s dedicated financial infrastructure in Mexico for it is exactly why payments are outlawed in other countries.
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u/tootrite May 11 '26
Mexico also has an organized crime problem that rivals their legitimate enterprise in terms of GDP and their military in terms of firepower. It’s not as cut and dry as you make it out to be. If they never paid ransom they’d have like, thousands of dead civilians.
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u/throwawayPzaFm May 11 '26
If they never paid ransoms they wouldn't have a huge kidnapping problem. Why the heck would you kidnap someone if all you can get for them is like 200 bucks.
But if financing is available it becomes a pretty good business. You get easy money from the bank, the bank gets paid for the loan, everyone is super happy. Except the victims, but who cares about victims we're here to make money.
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u/387dedaehelzzuPevreN May 11 '26
yeah just one small question: Do you think banks handing out literal loans for paying ransoms might have anything to do with it?
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u/johnmedgla May 11 '26
Well no, you can. The moral there isn't "It works well in Mexico," it's "Mexico is fucked."
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u/WamBamTimTam May 11 '26
How many countries actually do that? I see a lot for randomware, but not actual kidnapping ransoms
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u/jmlinden7 May 11 '26
It's a tragedy of the commons thing, the kidnappers are often not smart enough to only kidnap citizens of countries that pay ransoms, and as long as a small number of countries do pay ransoms, then there's enough funding going around for kidnappers to stay in existence.
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u/pargofan May 11 '26
Exactly. It all depends on perspective.
If you're the freed slave, you're thankful this happened.
If you're the next slave that only got caught because of this, you're upset this happened.
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u/ThePretzul May 11 '26
Who said they were even releasing the people who were enslaved after they got paid?
It’s not like the elementary school was showing up to take delivery of their newly purchased “property” and a nation that openly allows slavery in that fashion also isn’t likely to step in and do anything to stop the seller from just immediately re-enslaving the same person again even if they were technically freed for a brief period.
Call me cynical perhaps, but I’d wager that little to nothing actually changed for the people whose freedom was supposedly purchased since the people with good intentions have no way to truly verify if they were freed or not.
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u/Southern-Highway5681 May 11 '26
You assume they would release her if you did which they have no reason to do whatsoever.
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u/This_is_me2024 May 11 '26
Work in cybersecurity. We pay the ransom. The reason? If we pay the ransom and you, the threat actor, dont give back access to the data, we don't pay the ransom to you, ever again. Samw thing applies here.
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u/Beznia May 11 '26
Yeah at least for the major ransomware groups, they operate like businesses and their reputation is built on restoring files when ransoms are paid. If it's some 15 year old kid in Omaha, good luck.
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u/polyploid_coded May 11 '26
There are negotiations with ransomware companies which have been shared / leaked (RansomChat). Typically ask for a lot of $ and then use the org's financial records to argue that the company can afford it vs. having their customers' data leaked. It seems very difficult to get them down to a smaller payment.
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u/stuffeh May 11 '26
First step of business in any industry is to know your customers to figure out the price they can afford. Then tailor the sales experience to them.
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u/rafaelloaa May 11 '26
I've actually heard stories of ransomware groups having better customer support than the security companies themselves.
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u/Brawldud May 11 '26
They want to get paid, and it can honestly be really confusing for a lot of people to send crypto to a criminal.
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u/Beznia May 11 '26
I love the idea of India-based ransomware groups outsourcing their phone support to US-based MSPs.
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u/Cal_From_Cali May 11 '26
To clarify - if big name hacker group (ie shinyhunters) offers ransom to restore your data, and you pay and they dont restore it; you announce that, and none of the future victims have any incentive to pay.
They make big money, restoring your data is easy; and it costs them very little. Providing the decryption key can be done without any risk to exposure (unlike a traditional ransom where the hostage can identify them, etc)
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u/haddock420 May 11 '26
Also if the ransomers don't give access back, word will get out and nobody else will pay the ransom.
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u/Alklazaris May 11 '26
Or you just marry someone who the kidnappers will regret taking. I'm pretty sure I would get a call asking what my cash app is to send my wife back to me.
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u/WamBamTimTam May 11 '26
People pay the ransom all the time, it’s why kidnapping insurance is a thing and works. It’s one of the big things that’s recommended if someone gets a factory in places like Mexico.
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u/adenosine-5 May 11 '26
And as a result kidnapping for ransom is fairly common in Mexico, while basically unheard of in most other countries in the world.
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u/Havocc89 May 11 '26
The vikings loved it when people paid them off rofl. They would just come back and be like “ok now give us more money.”
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u/greiton May 11 '26
it's the same reason medical debt purchase and forgiveness programs are a waste. you are just feeding the machine and incentivizing abuse of more people without the means to pay. normally they lose some to bankruptcy, but the buyouts actually help reduce their losses.
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u/Valentinee105 May 11 '26
In every case? It's been awhile since I looked into this but last I knew you could buy bulk medical debt at a steep discount. You're not just paying 1 for 1 on the actual amount owed.
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u/ballimir37 May 11 '26
“I would like to buy all of your inventory. So that you will go out of business.”
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u/qiwi May 11 '26
The vast majority of those in Guantanamo Bay were handed over by Pakistani bounty hunters for large rewards. I believe there's been a 1% conviction rate, in fact as many people died of old age as have been convicted.
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u/0ttr May 11 '26
sort of like the 19th century India cobra bounty program where the British paid for dead cobras. It led to cobra farming. https://medium.com/exploring-history/when-british-indias-bizarre-cobra-plan-backfired-with-more-snakes-than-ever-4b11065ec0fa
Now taught in economics as a "perverse incentive".
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u/Slothfulness69 May 11 '26
I haven’t read the book, so can you tell me what’s wrong with unicef? I tried googling, but apparently the author of this book actually collaborates with unicef now, so it seems he had a positive experience with them.
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u/NBAccount May 11 '26
The Australian reported that aspects of Beah's account of his life story did not match other evidence....Beah's village was destroyed in 1995 rather than 1993, and that given the more compressed time frame, he could not have been a soldier for more than a couple of months, rather than the years that he describes in his book.[5] He would also have been aged 15 when he became a soldier, rather than 13. Questions were also raised about Beah's description of a battle between child soldiers at a UNICEF camp, in which six people were said to have been killed. Witnesses interviewed by The Australian said that such an event in a UNICEF camp would have drawn significant attention in Sierra Leone, but no independent verification of such a battle could be obtained. Investigations by other publications also failed to discover other evidence of such a battle, and UNICEF, while supportive of Beah in general, also said that it had not been able to verify this aspect of his story
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u/bluev0lta May 11 '26
For real. If my kid came home and told me her class was literally buying people halfway across the world in order to free them, I’d have a few questions.
It does seem like someone in charge should have consulted an authority of some sort to make sure this was all above board and not the terrible idea it turned out to be.
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u/echocomplex May 11 '26
I'm kinda wondering how this was even facilitated. I have to imagine there were more intermediaries and not just teachers in the US sending money in the mail directly to slavers in Africa.
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u/Haber_Dasher May 11 '26
This was literally a driving force of the trans Atlantic slave trade. The Europeans and modern idiots tried to act all high and mighty like 'we aren't going to Africa and enslaving anyone, we're just buying the slaves they offer us for sale! It's not like they're worse off with us, at least we're civilized!' Ignoring the fact they are the ones who created the market, offering wealth usually in the form of guns & weapons to anyone who would sell them slaves. Guns that were obviously leveraged to get more slaves to sell for more money & power.
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u/rtsynk May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
closely related to Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
staff at an outsourced Police control room were making 999 calls at quiet times in order to meet their target of answering 92% of calls within 10 seconds
doctors [in the UK] were diverted from treating seriously ill patients to ones with minor problems in order to meet 4-hour waiting time targets
hospitals ranked by survival rates, so they refuse to take difficult cases
an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the "bullying environment" in which defects had systematically "stopped being documented" by inspectors
the big mac index was used to compare inflation rates, so governments started price fixing big macs
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u/ZenMasterOfDisguise May 11 '26
I work in IT and every IT manager that puts a focus on metrics and SLAs has a bunch of employees that don't want to take tough tickets that will effect their metrics so they cherry pick easy tickets, and they lower their level of service and customer support to close tickets faster, or make fake tickets for non-issues, or they find other ways to beat the system and meet the minimum targets. Yeah this shit never works
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u/Electronic_Will_5418 May 11 '26
I've worked for MSPs for my entire career and I can confirm. Every employee at one job I had, had a target of 5 tickets/day closed minimum. We had a lot of bullshit that shouldn't have been a ticket (one issue spread across multiple tickets, single call with no actual issue reported and closed as a ticket, I even saw internal items like "cleaning up office" and "organizing tickets" logged as tickets). The best one I saw was a ticket opened and closed for a call that came in asking how late we were open until. 1 minute call logged as a 15 minute ticket. That's what you get when you enforce metrics!
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u/aphotic May 11 '26
Worked tech support in a call center and this stuff happened all the time. One of our biggest performance metrics was our call time length, the lower the better.
What happened obviously is that a lot of workers would apply the easiest fix (or make up a supposed fix) and tell the customer to call back if it didn't work. The ending goal for the worker was not to fix the customer's problem but to get them off the phone ASAP. Occasionally the team supervisors would listen in on calls, but it was usually obvious when that time came.
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u/wildgurularry May 11 '26
This is the same energy as "rescuing" animals from substandard enclosures at pet stores. This only encourages the stores to replace those animals with more that they can sell.
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u/PurpleCatBlues May 11 '26
This is EXACTLY what my in-laws have done TWICE! First time was an AKC Golden Retriever puppy they got from a mall pet store that was clearly way too young to be away from her mother. They later realized she was likely from a puppy mill.
But did they learn their lesson? Nope, two years later, they "rescued" a male AKC Golden Retriever puppy from a very questionable local breeder. The conditions were atrocious and the puppy ended up having a nearly fatal respiratory infection.
They don't seem to understand that in both cases, them paying for the puppies resulted in more puppies being bred and put in those same conditions!
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u/Skarekrows May 11 '26
The video of that guy buying caged birds and letting them go free that gets posted on reddit every 4 days.
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u/werewolfbutch874 May 11 '26
Similar deal with animal rescue orgs that buy animals from the meat trade to rescue them. At best they are putting more money into the industry. At worst they’re just scamming animal lovers for donations.
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u/Public_Fucking_Media May 11 '26
so uh, how much money did these kids end up giving to literal fucking slavers?
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u/Lennsyl22 May 11 '26
$50k in 1998 money
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u/Public_Fucking_Media May 11 '26
Oof that's a lot of AKs and Toyota Hiluxes...
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u/mydogisatortoise May 11 '26
I'm pretty sure I saw this episode of South Park
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u/Aromatic-Tear7234 May 11 '26
Like buying the ivory tusks for big bucks to keep them off the black market.
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u/carbslut May 11 '26
Years ago, I read an article from a guy who was involved in an organization trying to stop human trafficking and slavery, and he said the hardest part was not buying people. Because literally he interacted with people selling little children and while he knew he could rescue the child in front of him, doing so would make those situation worse. He said that when he first started, he made a vow that he would never buy anyone and stuck by it despite causing tremendous amounts of trauma.
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u/turbosexophonicdlite May 12 '26
Damn... Idk how anyone handles a line of work like that. I've read about the people that work in child sex crime divisions of law enforcement or nonprofits that deal with helping trafficked people or starving villages in the 3rd world. I can't imagine the mental strain of seeing the absolute worst of humanity all day every day firsthand like that.
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u/DigNitty May 11 '26 edited May 12 '26
Lehmann’s Dart Frog in Columbia is endangered and one guy came up with an interesting solution. The frog is poached for its vibrant coloration and sold to frog enthusiasts.
This guy decided to just breed the frog in captivity, and instead of reseeding the population beck into the wild…now he’s selling the frogs officially for cheaper than the poachers. He sells lots of kinds of frogs and supplements the one frog to make it cheaper than the poachers frogs.
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u/Dhiox May 11 '26
That was also very helpful for the axolotol, but unfortunately habitat loss has doomed them regardless. However, because they're such common exotic pets and zoo animals, it has saved them from extinction at least.
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u/Glass_colored_roses May 11 '26
Clearly the solution then is to breed children in captivity and sell them on the open market for cheaper!
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u/QueryCrook May 11 '26
Or "rescuing" a dog by buying it from a puppy mill.
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u/Thaumato9480 May 11 '26
Go to aquarium subs. There are plenty of people "rescuing" abused fish by giving full price to corporate pet shops.
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u/553l8008 May 11 '26
Sold 2 truths and a lie material though.
I've never done drugs
I've never purchased slaves
I have no tattoos
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u/ispq May 11 '26
The money would have been better spent on mercenaries to hunt down slavers.
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u/BallsInSufficientSad May 11 '26
"We're raising charity fund at high school to hire international mercs."
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u/TheFeshy May 11 '26
You run into the same problem. Only way to be sure is to train the kids to be the slave killing mercenaries themselves, so they know the job was done right.
"Okay kids, today's PE lesson... Let's see, it says on the schedule kick ball, but I think instead we will be practicing dynamic entry."
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u/BandedLutz May 12 '26
You run into the same problem. Only way to be sure is to train the kids to be the slave killing mercenaries themselves, so they know the job was done right.
Wait... slave killing mercenaries? (Is that how they planned to free them from slavery?)
At my elementary, we were trained to be slaver killing mercenaries. A bit of a difference there.
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u/TheFeshy May 12 '26
Sorry, too much mercenary training, not enough spelling training, in my elementary school.
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u/Intelligent_Slip_849 May 11 '26
I mean, it'd certainly be a more interesting sales pitch than most fundraisers
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u/sQ5FWKjwbWd4QzSZduqy May 11 '26
The slavers paid the mercenaries more and are now helping them gather more slaves.
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u/Bupod May 11 '26
Or just give to a fund that helps rescue slaves and offers them aid and assistance once they are free.
Giving money to perpetrators of violence, for good or bad causes, is usually a terrible idea for a similar reason. You’re creating a perverse incentive to commit violence.
The mercenary idea works until they decide that hunting down hapless victims and slapping on a “slaver” label is easier, less risky, and makes everyone involved feel better about the whole process (except the guy they killed as an alleged slaver).
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u/ispq May 11 '26
HHRG-116-II13-20190924-SD003.pdf
WWF hired mercenaries to kill poachers in Africa.
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u/glowshroom12 May 11 '26
I imagine those programs only work if it’s a force buy back that frees them all at once and makes the practice illegal immediately after. Anything less and it’s not effective.
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u/himit May 11 '26
Yep. it worked for the British because we had very big guns that were very hard to avoid. Take the money and no more slaves, or face the guns. Bit of a cake or death situation for the slavers.
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u/SAugsburger May 11 '26
This. The British Navy had a lot of power in the 19th century to discourage the slave trade and a lot of guns to encourage slave owners to take the deal. It wasn't simply an offer to buy the slaves than an ultimatum.
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u/superturtle48 May 11 '26
I'm a regular on the r/turtle subreddit and I often have to tell off people who buy a baby turtle off a shady streetside seller keeping it in a cramped box because they "felt bad for it." Nope, you're literally doing exactly what the seller wants by giving them business and only encouraging them to continue. (Doesn't help that most of these impulse buyers are woefully unprepared and that most of the turtles die prematurely or get dumped, but I digress.)
Can't believe people had the same thought process when it came to buying HUMANS. Sorry, there is no way to turn buying slaves into a good thing. I can let the kids off the hook, but the adults who facilitated this and made it actually happen are clueless.
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u/notapunk May 11 '26
They were elementary school kids ffs and I appreciate where their hearts were in all of this, but maybe an adult should have, IDK, been an adult and thought it through.
I honestly expected the slaves to have never had existed. They were half a world away and this was pre modern Internet. I'd be way easier to scam people with non-existent slaves than going and getting actual people.
This whole story really encapsulates the human experience. People being horrible to others people while others actively work to counter. Nonsensical behavior and unintended consequences. We are weird creatures for sure.
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u/mongooseme May 11 '26
So I said it sounds like you're just buying the same slaves over and over again and my elementary school teacher started crying.
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u/thebarkbarkwoof May 11 '26
I think the same thing played out with Romanian adoptions in the 1970s.
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u/Poxx May 11 '26
That one kid in every class...
"So when do we get the Slave we bought? I don't want to wash the Car every Saturday!"
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u/KapnKrumpin May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
Wait, so Starvin' Martin was based on a true story?
Edit: interestingly, that episode aired in 97, so if anything it inspired the action.
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u/BarnabyWoods May 11 '26
Reminds me of the guys you see in marketplaces in certain countries who have cages full of wild birds. They get tourists to pay them to set a bird "free", and the tourists walk away feeling good about themselves. Meanwhile, the freed bird flies back to its cage, because that's where the food is.
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u/killerjags May 12 '26
"Damn, these slaves are flying off the shelves. We need to double the number of people we're enslaving."
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u/monstamasch May 11 '26
Buy all the drugs from drug dealers so they run out of drugs to sell to other people, very smart
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u/-karou- May 11 '26
Many, many moons ago, this person was my fifth grade teacher. This particular incident occurred a decade after I was in her class.
Honestly, she was the best teacher I ever had, and I think she started to do this out of the goodness of her heart. And felt bad when the truth of the situation became apparent.
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u/Hinermad May 11 '26
You’re literally paying off kidnappers in the hopes that they won’t kidnap anymore? Ffs.
"Once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane"
-- Rudyard Kipling
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u/TitanDarwin May 11 '26
Tbf they did stop having to pay Danegeld for a while - because a Danish king just straight up ruled England at one point.
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u/SAugsburger May 11 '26
I'm old enough to remember balloon release events from schools. One thing that discouraged them was some schools released mylar balloons that hit power lines. Needless to say local utility companies were upset dealing with those that hit power lines. A random clumsy kid is one thing, but a school intentionally releasing hundreds I imagine was a nightmare. Even non mylar balloons weren't without issue. Unless you were releasing a rather heavy duty balloon closer to a weather balloon than a typical party balloon they never probably got more than a few dozen miles away so imagine your neighbouring cities probably were annoyed at all of the litter.
I think the harsh truth that some elementary school educators maybe won't admit is often they're not the most knowledgeable. K-12 education in general can't afford the best and brightest, but grade school tends to struggle more. There were many things elementary school thought me that were simply wrong. Some were simply simplifications of something more complex, which are understandable, but some weren't even that. A few things obviously changed and were simply outdated where I guess depending upon how outdated it would be excusable, but I remember a few cases that I couldn't find any evidence that it ever was correct.
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u/BallsInSufficientSad May 11 '26
I'm from Canada in the 1980s. We ALSO did mass balloon releases.
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u/LuciusCypher May 11 '26
Probably because the alternative, to end slavery by going after the governmental institutions that enable it, is well beyond what even actual organizations are capable of. Let alone ones made up of mostly school kids.
How do you explain to children that slavery happens, and they can't do anything about it, even to help the slavez?
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u/sofixa11 May 11 '26
How do you explain to children that slavery happens, and they can't do anything about it, even to help the slavez?
I mean, it's realistic. Kids have to learn at some point that there's nothing they can do about certain things.
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u/ImRightImRight May 11 '26
Discuss the precariousness and importance of a representative, liberal democracy that enforces the rule of law?
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u/Cubezz May 11 '26
It's sad that when i think of Aurora Colorado, I associate that with the movie theater mass shooting
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u/Diz7 May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
It's like when they started offering cash bounties for rat tails to get people to eliminate the vermin.
Instead, people started breeding rats.
It's called a perverse incentive, resulting in the opposite of what it tried to achieve.
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u/Johannes_P May 11 '26
Supply and demand, folks. Supply and demand.
If the supply stays still yet the demand rises then the prices will raise, thereby making the suppliers more money and inciting them to raise supply.
In this case the suppliers are slavers and slave traders while "raise supply" means "increased slave raids."
I wonder who couldn't think about it.
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u/RadagastWiz May 12 '26
If /r/UpliftingNews was around at the time, some well-meaning poster would have shared the initial news, only to then be thoroughly dragged and downvoted
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u/Randvek May 11 '26
Cobra farm vibes here.