Eight people who worked at a cartel-run scam call center in Mexico have been found dead, officials said Tuesday.
Investigators believe the group tried to quit their jobs and were brutally murdered in response.
“Best guess is these kids had decided they wanted out of the business,” a U.S. official told the Associated Press. Cartel leaders were “sending a message to other defectors.”
The eight victims — six men and two women — were working at a call center in Jalisco state, near the city of Guadalajara. Their families all reported them missing between May 20 and May 22.
The call center was a scam operation run by the Jalisco New Generation, according to police. While better known for drug trafficking, kidnapping and gruesome murders, Mexican cartels have recently expanded their operations to include timeshare phone scams.
But leaving the job wasn’t as easy as leaving an average call center job. Days after their families reported the victims missing, authorities found their remains dumped in a ravine, the BBC reported.
The remains were not immediately identifiable, as police said they discovered hacked-up body parts in plastic bags. Test results came back Monday to confirm they belonged to the missing call center workers.
U.S. officials first warned of cartel call centers earlier this year. Brian E. Nelson, the U.S. under secretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said the Jalisco New Generation cartel’s “deep involvement in timeshare fraud in the Puerto Vallarta area and elsewhere, which often targets elderly U.S. citizens and can defraud victims of their life savings, is an important revenue stream supporting the group’s overall criminal enterprise.”
Across Mexico, more than 112,000 people are missing, according to activist groups. An estimated 15,000 of those people are Jalisco residents.