MUANG NGOI, Laos—Terry had come to see. The air turned sweet. Soon it would be nightfall. The forest was a canopy of shadows and rising tension, the awakening of howling beasts. Terry had driven across the country to reach this remote river village, and now he was finally here, looking to the top of the hill, ready to confront the person he believed had fraudulently clicked more advertisements than anyone in Laos. In the distance, he could hear them: dozens of mice clicking.

For nearly two months, Terry, 64, an American counter-trafficking agent working with various government agencies around the world, had tracked the source of this fraudulent clicking activity to a small hut in southeast Asia registered to an obscure publishing magnate, a man named Raleigh Theodore Sakers.

Authorities say the underground click farm would have never been discovered, if the site’s owner, Raleigh Theodore Sakers, had never started his side hustle:

“They were solving captchas on the side.

Ya dig? Raleigh had them kids working non-stop 16-hour days, seven days a week.

Their tiny hands, he said, make it easier to see the screen, which helps them click faster. The children do not know their families.”

Repeat Offender

Terry says the above image is a closer approximation to the reality of work on a Lebal Drocer clickfarm. Standing in stark contrast to the club-like atmosphere being sold in the advertisement, a Lebal Drocer clickfarm is an un-ventilated cell where a single person is made to click, or touch, a battery of phones attached to a board, reminiscent of a switchboard operator’s station.

Children as young as the age of three are hunched over dirt mounds, like pitcher’s mounds with an iPhone for a plate, and they are being forced to peck on Temu advertisements while having no understanding of what they are doing.

“These children are working before they are even making memories,” Terry said. “If I wasn’t a cop, and I read books instead of watching MMA, I would say this is just like Brave New World.”

Dr. Angstrom H. Troubadour, the scientist who famously designed a slightly curved, corkscrew tunnel for Raleigh Sakers to stumble through, said the media giant hired him to develop a social media mining technique that entertained the child like a toy.

“Lebal Drocer’s child mines would be addictive,” Troubadour said of Raleigh’s designs. “They cry when they are given their twice-daily break. They refuse food, and even toilets. These were the results of our experiment.”

Terry said that experiment stopped when a meme popularized the expression “the children yearn for the mines” and drew attention to the science before any product could take form.

“We was hot on ’em,” said Terry. “I smelled blood.”

But before he could reach the hut, all at once, the clicking stopped. When he opened the thatch door, the room still warm with the heavy presence of sweat and exhaustion, only a piece of plywood remained, with an iPhone charger, still plugged into the lone solar battery, powering nothing.

He phoned back to America, and had his assistant check all the official records. That night it was determined media mogul Raleigh T. Sakers has been dead for more than 25 years.