2025-12-01 16:00:51
“Raise your hand if you have been approached by a scammer in any way,” said Frontline investigative reporter Martha Mendoza, moderator of the “Scams and Scammers” session during the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25). Most of the attendees raised their hands.
“Now turn to the person next to you and tell them how you were approached by a scammer,” she added, and the murmur of stories filled the room.
Law enforcement, governments, social media platforms, and even most newsrooms don’t fully commit to fighting the growing scourge of online fraud, even when scamming is spreading on par with drug trafficking and causes serious financial and emotional damage.
But journalists like Lian Buan, senior investigative reporter at Rappler, Emmanuel K. Dogbevi, founder and managing editor of Ghana Business News, Paul Radu, cofounder and head of innovation at OCCRP, and Mendoza are using data journalism, mapping, whistleblowers, undercover work, and traditional reporting methods to reveal a criminal activity that, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, siphons US$1.03 trillion a year globally.
“And if you think about the lack of restrictions on cryptocurrency combined with the rapid development of AI, the place where these scams are going is quite frightening,” Mendoza noted.
When suddenly there was a boom of PhDs in Ghana, and businesspeople who had money or were politically connected began insisting on being called “doctors,” Dogbevi sensed something was amiss.
“They go to events to speak, and everybody introduces them like ‘Doctor So and So,’ but they do not exude that kind of sense of someone with a proper Ph.D., so I decided to look into it,” Dogbevi said.
After an acquaintance revealed the name of the so-called university from which he received the Ph.D., Dogbevi found its email and physical address online. But a Google Maps street view search revealed that, instead of a higher education institution, the address shown was just a dump site in London. Digging deeper, he reached out to the company by email asking how he could get a Ph.D. and received an enthusiastic reply with a list of prices and degrees, and an offer to get a Ph.D. after taking a one-week marketing seminar in Dubai.
After Dogbevi’s team revealed the scam, Ghana’s Ministry of Education announced a crackdown.
Some helpful tips:
To detect scams, OCCRP’s Paul Radu also suggests you ask yourself the following questions:
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” dig further. You may be on the path to revealing a scam.
Once you’re certain you’ve detected a scam and you’ve collected initial information, it’s time to determine how far-reaching the structure is. Your run-of-the-mill scam might be operated by very large transnational operations linked to criminal syndicates, which involve other kinds of criminality, like money laundering, fraud, political corruption, human trafficking, and forced labor.
Mendoza described guarded compounds in Myanmar that look like business parks, with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people conducting phone and online scams with servers connected to Starlink. Southeast Asia workers with English skills are tricked into working in IT, then smuggled into Myanmar, and their income, which usually comes from scamming victims, is mostly spent within the same compound — in stores and with sex workers that are also trafficking victims.
As with other crimes, scamming snowballs. Small-time criminals might soon find out that they cannot operate without yielding to a larger ring, a more powerful criminal, or needing underground “angel investor” money to take their scam to the next level.
Scamming operations may also be linked to high-level politicians. Rappler’s Lian Buan described how Alice Leal Guo, a Chinese woman who posed as Filipino, ran a rapidly growing scam hub, the Philippines Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs), from a town where she was mayor. “When I got assigned POGO, I wanted to know who in the government did this. I’m very cynical that way. I always think that there’s some powerful person behind this,” Buan said.
Her reporting revealed links between POGO and the Duterte government, and in a rare instance of accountability — for a crime with alarmingly high levels of impunity — Leal Guo was sentenced to life imprisonment for human trafficking.
Rappler’s Lian Buan discusses her investigation into a scam operation’s links to the Philippine government at a GIJC25 panel. Image: Samsul Said, Alt Studio for GIJN
Here are more tips from Buan:
OCCRP’s Paul Radu highlighted the challenges of investigating scams that operate as very wide criminal networks, and the importance of collaboration in reporting on them: “It takes a network to fight a network,” he explained. And to understand how that network is set up and operated, he suggested thinking like a criminal.
Questions to drive your reporting:
“For criminals, this is a business, and crime is a commodity. They can buy packages to conduct these kinds of crimes from the black market, such as stolen identities, fake personas online, and malware,” said Radu.
A key point: once criminals set up scamming centers, they start earning a lot of money, and will need to launder the money and access other criminal systems. In a rapidly growing business they’ll need police and politicians to look the other way, and if they expand, they’ll need that in more than one country, and a small operation will become a criminal network like the one OCCRP exposed with its partners in their transnational investigation, Scam Empire, a collaborative effort by dozens of media partners that looks into the heart of this dark industry.
Even if the data is financial, the stories are human. Behind each scam is a person who was psychologically abused, maybe even tortured, and whose money, sometimes their retirement fund or their life savings, was taken from them through blackmail or deceit.
The panelists urged the assembled reporters to use their coverage to demand better guardrails and accountability from governments, tech companies, and institutions that enable scammers through direct business support or overly lax regulations and policies. Also, to push for asset seizure operations that could restore victims’ lost funds. In many cases, the authorities know or can find out where these assets are.
If enough media outlets coordinate a worldwide simultaneous release of stories that shakes public opinion and discourse in the same way the Panama Papers did, maybe law enforcement, legislators, and companies will be forced to act, and accountability will come to bear on a pervasive criminal empire.
2025-11-28 16:00:01
Around the world, access to essential medicines often depends less on scientific breakthroughs than on the market power of a few companies. Highly concentrated pharmaceutical markets can keep prices far above production costs, block competition, and leave patients dependent on expensive brands. The consequences are visible in hospitals and homes: rationed doses, skipped treatments, and families spending a significant share of their income simply to stay alive.
At the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Kuala Lumpur, investigative journalist Fabiola Torres offered a practical framework for exposing how these oligopolies are built and maintained. Torres, the founder of the Peruvian health investigations outlet Salud con Lupa, led the project Your Money or Your Health, which examined why insulin remains unaffordable in Peru despite the invention being more than a century old.
Her central message was clear: “Investigating oligopolies of the pharma is about people’s lives. It is about inequality. What they do may be legal, but it’s a scandal.”
Torres began the workshop with a case study familiar across the region: insulin. The original, 100-year-old, off-patent “human insulin” version of the drug should be cheap, widely available, and is recommended as the first-line treatment in international guidelines. But companies steer doctors and national guidelines toward newer patented “analogs” and device-based versions, making the original, affordable medicine harder to access.
Three companies, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi, control roughly 90% of the global market. Their newer, analog versions remain under layers of fresh patents and device protections, creating what Torres called a “modern patent barrier” around an old drug.
In Peru, insulin manufacturers and importers receive tax exemptions, but prices have not fallen. Public hospitals frequently experience shortages, forcing patients to buy insulin privately, often spending 10–20% of a monthly minimum wage. When hospitals run out, people ration doses or go without, leading to complications, disability, or death.
Torres’s team discovered that in 2024, a new clinical guidance was issued in Peru that made an insulin analog the first-line treatment. “The draft changed at the last moment… the description was for Novo Nordisk’s insulin analogs,” she explained.
A key contributor to the guideline was a leading diabetes specialist who also heads a Novo Nordisk–funded pediatric diabetes program, a financial connection not reflected in the documentation circulated to the public.
The case illustrated how market power, regulation, and medical guidance intersect, and how journalists can follow each thread.
The session in Kuala Lumpur. Image: Zahid Hassan for GIJN
Torres described how pharmaceutical oligopolies create a series of structural walls that determine who can access a medicine, and who cannot.
Torres said this concentrated market power allows a handful of companies to set the terms: which medicines enter the market, at what price. She explained how the oligopolies block cheaper, older, or biosimilar alternatives from reaching patients, who are ultimately paying the price.
When a drug patent is coming to an end, “companies file new patents on very small changes,” Torres said. This often allows them to maintain their lucrative patent rights with just minor modifications: altered doses, updated devices, or manufacturing tweaks.
Many countries lack complete frameworks for approving biosimilars, the lower-cost alternatives to complex biological drugs. In Peru, a biosimilar insulin has been approved since 2016, but remains constrained by regulatory gaps. Torres explained. Without clear guidance, Torres explained, doctors are less willing to prescribe biosimilar options.
Clinical guidelines adopted by each country are essential in shaping the prescribing habits and purchasing decisions. Peru’s guideline revisions demonstrated how undisclosed conflicts of interest can influence national policy, and shift markets toward corporate interest and higher-priced products.
Shortages, fragmented purchasing, and budget cuts make consistent access difficult. Torres documented long queues, reuse of syringes, and out-of-pocket purchases among families unable to obtain insulin through the public system.
Companies fund medical events, training, and donation programs, often without transparent disclosure. “Most of the medical events are funded by the companies,” Torres noted. Donation programs from companies can often act as a commercial strategy to influence doctors and create market preference for their patented products.
These relationships can subtly shape prescribing norms and delay the uptake of lower-cost options.
Pharmaceutical oligopolies shape access to life-saving treatments, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Torres emphasized that uncovering these structures requires attention not only to patents and regulations, but also to the “human impact” behind each barrier.
Torres offered practical steps for reporters investigating medicine markets:
For Torres, the lesson is that these markets can be understood and therefore challenged. With the right tools, journalists can expose the structures behind high prices and limited competition and help inform the public. The first step, she said, is simple: choose one medicine, follow its path through the system, and see where the trail leads.
2025-11-27 16:00:49
Religion is an intrinsic part of people’s lives — influencing communities, countries, and sociopolitical developments. But these very factors make reporting on religions and faiths challenging.
Journalists from New Zealand, Colombia, and Peru spoke at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in a session titled “Uncovering Stories Connected to Religious Groups” about how to find stories and angles when reporting on issues linked with religious groups and faith-based cults.
A big challenge when reporting on religion is terminology, said Anusha Bradley, an investigative reporter with Radio New Zealand. “Learn the lingo of the religion. You have to understand what they are saying,” she explained. Religions tend to have their own terminology and words, with specific meanings that may be unfamiliar to someone trying to investigate them for the first time.
“Understand the top-down structure,” she added. Many religions operate as a business, and it helps to understand the hierarchy and the way the institution is constructed. It is also important to understand power, control, and coercion — and how they are linked with the religious institution.
Bradley cited her reporting on the impact of shunning and child protection policies among Jehovah’s Witnesses in New Zealand. Her investigation uncovered how the religious group controls access to justice for victims of various forms of abuse. “There would be victims of domestic abuse, and they were told to pray harder,” she said. “Sexual abuse would require the presence of two witnesses [to confirm that the abuse occurred]” — practices that effectively blocked accountability and justice for victims and protected abusers.
Colombian journalist Juan Pablo Barrientos has been facing harassment for close to a decade for his extensive reporting and investigation into reports of the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church in his home country.
Barrientos was attempting to analyze how the Catholic Church, as an important national institution in Colombia, handled cases of priests accused of pedophilia. The title of Barriento’s investigation, “The Secret Archive,” refers to a section in the Code of Canon Law — which governs the Catholic Church — that decrees the establishment of an archive that is to be locked up and “protected most securely,” containing records of what the Canon describes as “criminal cases in matters of morals,” including a brief summary of what occurred.
“This, to me, is a criminal confession,” said Barrientos. This archive was critical to his investigation. The Catholic Church blocked access for years, and Barrientos and another journalist took their fight to access these church records in Colombia to court.
“Article 44 of the Constitution of Colombia says that the rights of minors prevail over all other rights,” said Barrientos. “The court argued that this is private information. But [we] were not asking for medical records, for financial records, for the sexual orientation of the priests. [We were] asking for information on crimes committed against children,” he added.
In June 2025, the Colombian Constitutional Court upheld the journalists’ rights to access — based on the constitutional principle of child protection — information about priests in the context of investigations into alleged sexual abuse.
Paola Ugaz, the Peru correspondent for the Spanish daily newspaper ABC, has for years investigated allegations of sexual, physcial, and psychological abuse against minors by Sodalicio Christianae Vitae (SCV), a powerful Catholic organization founded in Peru in the 1970s. After a book she worked on with former Sodalicio member Pedro Salinas, titled “Mitad Monjes, Mitad Soldados” (“Half Priests, Half Soldiers”) was published in 2015, she experienced retaliation — including various forms of targeted harassment and a criminal defamation complaint by people associated with SCV.
In April 2025, the Vatican formalized the dissolution of SCV.
The “Aha!” moment can come at any time during investigations, the panelists said, and shared a few general pointers for investigating powerful religious groups.
Bradley suggested checking the document trail. “The congregation would document the meetings they had, and the secretary would file everything” about those discussions within the church, said Bradley. “Many members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who retired or left [the church], took these documents with them.” She also noted that “every victim has a story… so it’s important to show a pattern by exposing the system.”
Barrientos urged journalists not to be afraid to ask questions of the Catholic Church in their own cities: “Ask for that secret archive that is in every one of your cities… Every city that has a Catholic Church… they have these secret archives.”
2025-11-26 16:00:26
When Russian customs data for coal exports is sorted not by price, but by tonnage, an obscure company suddenly stands out. It is registered to a small building on the outskirts of the southern border city of Rostov-on-Don, next to a car repair shop and a construction store.
The paper trail shows that this enterprise shipped nearly half a million tons of coal abroad in two years, mainly to Turkey. The coal is declared “Russian,” but in reality, reporters say that the product comes from mines in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. An investigation by the independent outlet iStories reported that this firm, Energoresurs, is closely linked to Oleksandr Yanukovych, the son of ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, and that the profits are routed through an offshore company while the war continues.
At the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia, the author of that investigation, iStories’ Maria Zholobova, joined Jelena Cosic from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Armando.Info’s Joseph Poliszuk, and Indonesian visual investigations producer and OSINT researcher Aqwam Fiazmi Hanifan, who works for Narasi.
Together they explained how they build dossiers on oligarchs, mine corporate and sanctions databases, construct their own datasets, and combine leaks, customs records, and local registries — all while navigating the legal and security risks that come with investigating powerful figures that may not want you digging into their corporate exploits..
For Jelena Cosic, every oligarch investigation begins in the same place: with a person and a spreadsheet.
“We always should start, no matter who we research, with these things,” she told the panel. Reporters should record basic identifiers — date of birth, addresses, passport numbers — all spelling variants of names, relatives and in-laws, business partners, offshore companies, and intermediaries. “Each line in the spreadsheet is a verified piece of information that can later be searched, filtered, and cross-referenced.
“Each row you would fill with another [piece of] information,” she said. “It will help you once you are stuck somewhere and you’re not sure where to go next.”
The second step is to feed that spreadsheet with documents. At ICIJ, Cosic’s team uses Datashare, an open source tool that can be installed locally. Reporters can scan and upload printed documents to make them searchable, while large PDF dumps can become an internal archive where names, addresses, and companies can be found across thousands of pages in seconds.
Court records are another priority — “the gold mine for many of these guys,” Cosic noted.
Image: Screenshot, IStories
Once the basic profile is built, Cosic connects people to corporate and sanctions data.
ICIJ has published searchable databases from its major projects — including Offshore Leaks and Pandora Papers — that contain profiles of “power players” and “confidential clients” and link to original corporate records and legal filings. Many of these documents are also available on DocumentCloud, a widely used repository used by investigative centers.
Among open data tools, Cosic highlighted:
She also recommended OpenSanctions, which aggregates sanctions lists from multiple jurisdictions and, crucially, all major spelling variants of sanctioned individuals’ names.
For politically exposed persons, Cosic mentioned specialized PEP databases she uses to double-check whether she has missed any companies tied to a target. And while commercial databases such as Sayari or Orbis can be costly, she urged newsrooms to negotiate temporary or discounted access, sometimes in exchange for credit in published stories.
Maria Zholobova’s investigation shows how customs data and leaked databases can be combined to map opaque trade schemes.
Instead of looking at prices, which can be manipulated, she sorted several years of Russian coal exports by shipment weight. Among them, she noticed an unfamiliar company that, since 2023, had converted into a much bigger player: a firm registered at a modest address in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
Corporate records showed that the company had taken loans from firms registered in the occupied Ukrainian territories and from entities linked to the former president, Viktor Yanukovych, and to his son’s business network. To identify the real owners and managers, Zholobova turned to an ecosystem of leaks and unofficial data markets that have emerged as official registers in Russia have closed: databases from banks, mobile operators, and taxi services, often accessed through Telegram bots.
By checking employment histories and how phone numbers were saved in other people’s contact lists, she found that the nominal owners and directors were, in fact, employees of companies associated with Yanukovych’s structures.
Foreign journalists may need to cooperate with Russian-speaking reporters when investigating similar networks, because this work depends on Russian-language materials and informal channels.
Joseph Poliszuk spoke about the experience of the Venezuelan investigative outlet Armando.info in tracking the oligarchs that circled around former president Hugo Chávez, and are now linked to his successor, Nicolás Maduro.
Poliszuk’s investigations in Venezuela focus on the “boliburgueses” – business people who have become wealthy through their proximity to the Bolivarian government.
One of them was the government’s leading food supplier — but investigations into the quality of the food his organization was paid to deliver to the hungry, and especially the powdered milk delivered to poor households, found it to be nutritionally inadequate. Reporters combined trade data, corporate documents, and laboratory tests to show this.
“We tested eight brands of the milk of the government,” Poliszuk recalled. “In one of the cases… one normal glass of milk was the same as 41 glasses of that kind of milk that they were giving to the people.”
The investigation led to a defamation case and pressure on the newsroom; after an insider warned that authorities planned to visit reporters’ homes, some team members left the country, and many of them now operate from exile.
In other projects, Armando.info reporters relied on property and corporate records. In one, they showed how the family of Venezuela’s first lady had bought out an entire street — 14 houses — using a proxy owner who was a former classmate. Proving ownership required cadastre documents, social media, off-the-record sources, and cross-checks with a separate court case in Miami.
When official data was missing, the newsroom searched elsewhere to build their own databases. Reporters compiled a national contracts registry from scattered documents and matched it against lists of generals and senior officials, exposing an oligarch who secured the state’s best contracts. They also matched the names of Chavez and Maduro officials with company records in Miami, finding that many had businesses — and often homes — in the United States.
Indonesian journalist Aqwam Fiazmi Hanifan showed how local registries and OSINT tools can reveal oligarch networks in Indonesia. Many corporate records are only available by purchasing documents from the Ministry of Law.
The AHU database lets you search profiles of Indonesian limited liability companies and view both a “latest profile” (current status, address, directors, and a snapshot of shareholders) and a “full profile” with the company’s complete legal history, including all changes to deeds, shares, and management. It also helps you trace ownership structures by showing direct shareholders, multi-layered corporate chains, nominee owners, and offshore vehicles, including those registered in jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Singapore.
“Oligarchs don’t just put the money into mining or private banks,” Hanifan said. “Sometimes they also put [it] into different businesses like coffee shops, restaurants, and football clubs. By hiding the real owners behind multiple layers of companies and using football clubs as a public face, wealthy people in Indonesia can quietly move and launder money, mask conflicts of interest, and shield other shady businesses from scrutiny.”
In one project that used the AHU database, Hanifan mapped a complex ownership structure behind a professional football club, showing links back to extractive industries.
For phone-based research, Hanifan uses Getcontact, which shows how a number is saved in other users’ address books, and OSINT Industries, which maps social media accounts linked to a given phone or email. But he warned that using data from breaches or leaks can be risky under Indonesia’s IT law. “You can be arrested,” he said.
The panelists agreed on several core lessons:
2025-11-26 12:03:59
Meet La Chama and El Pana.
Two AI-powered news anchors introduced themselves to reporters at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia. They were created not to spread disinformation, but to fight it.
“They (our editors) wanted to leverage the trust that the media outlets were willing to place in two aviators to disseminate the content,” one of the AI anchors said in a Venezuelan accent, explaining why they were built in a video showcased at the “Collaborating to Fight Electoral Disinformation Campaigns” panel.
Created by CONNECTAS, a Latin American investigative journalism network, AI-generated avatars La Chama and El Pana presented news to combat President Nicolás Maduro’s media crackdown during the 2024 presidential election. It was a response to the extreme hostility and censorship that journalists faced in the country. And it was one of the three projects showcased at the GIJC25 panel.
At a time when AI-powered disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the internet, Carlos Eduardo Huertas, director of CONNECTAS, was showing ways to use the same technology to combat it. And the stakes in this battle are very real. The World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks Report 2025” identifies misinformation and disinformation as the top short-term risk over the next two years.
The AI avatars of La Chama and El Pana were part of the CONNECTAS effort, “Venezuela Vota” and “#LaHoraDeVenezuela”, to counter government disinformation and censorship. When traditional reporting became risky for reporters, they turned to AI. In all, 14 outlets, information platforms, and independent organizations worked together, using their own resources, to counter official propaganda during the election.
“AI could be a disturbing tool during the election process because it’s easy to create misinformation and disinformation and spread lies,” Huertas said to GIJN after the panel discussion. “But if the journalists can work together in innovative ways, they can use the artificial intelligence to protect journalism.”
Along with Huertas, Kwaku Krobea Asante, program manager at the Media Foundation for West Africa, and Sonia Bhaskar, program head at DataLEADS, shared strategies to fight disinformation campaigns in Ghana and India, respectively, where elections were held in 2024. Nayeli Roldán, a Mexican investigative reporter from Animal Politico, moderated the panel.
In Ghana, during the 2024 election, members from Fact-Check Ghana, Ghana Fact, and Dubawa, combined to form the Ghana Fact-Checking Coalition. Asante said they brought in civil society organizations working on information integrity and resilience to join the collaboration.
The coalition created two media situation rooms — one in the northern and the other in the southern parts of Ghana in December 2024.
Covering elections becomes more challenging amid a spike in technology-powered disinformation campaigns, which spreads much faster. Launching these types of campaigns during elections undermine the outcome as well as voter trust in democratic institutions worldwide.
“When you try to work alone in silos, you achieve very little. And you may end up doubling the work that you have done in different ways,” Asante said. “When you join forces, you can reach more. You can get more in and address them.”
The coalition conducted live monitoring of narratives around the elections to spot misinformation, disinformation, and polarizing content, producing real-time fact-checking reports to counter the identified false narratives.
“We found coordinated networks engaging in disinformation astroturfing on X. And recycling of old photos and videos,” Asante explained.
Back in India, as the 2024 general election was underway, Shakti: India Fact-Checking Collective, a consortium of 100-plus fact-checkers and news publishers in India, worked collaboratively to aid early detection of online misinformation and deepfakes.
More than 6,600 fact-checks were distributed and amplified across more than 10 languages, according to Shakti’s website. This effort was also supported by deepfake and synthetic media experts and lawyers, according to Bhaskar.
The effort was led by DataLEADS in collaboration with The Quint, Vishvas News, BOOM, Factly, and the Press Trust of India, among other leading fact-checking organizations and news publishers.
For effective collaboration, panelists highlighted the need for trust among members and for strategies to be clear to all.
“It is important to ensure there’s enough transparency on where funding is coming from, who is doing what exactly? What is the structure and flow of work?” Asante shared.
They also highlighted the need to assess the sustainability of the fact-checking initiatives.
“But if you’re able to… have plans in place that can sustain the work. It’s really important that it can help.” Asante said.
Despite the tools available for AI detection, experts say old-fashioned reporting skills remain essential for fighting disinformation campaigns.
“The tools have evolved so much, the detection tools are really playing catch-up,” Bhaskar said to GIJN after the panel. “Detection tools can only help supplement, but they’re not good enough. We are very far away from our silver bullet.”
“We are still relying heavily on our journalistic skills,” she added.
2025-11-25 16:00:27
Early in her career, business and investigative reporter Selina Cheng gained rare access to women who alleged that they had been abused by Bey Logan, an associate and former top executive of Harvey Weinstein — the Hollywood producer sentenced to prison and on trial for multiple counts of sexual assault.
Survivors trusted Cheng with intimate details, which supported a strong investigation, but there was a personal cost — the ire of Logan, the Weinstein associate at the center of the story.
In 2019, two years after the investigation, Cheng says Logan called her, tearing into her, calling her names, and swearing.
“He’ll just send me stuff when he feels hateful. I don’t know if he’s drunk or something,” said Cheng, speaking as part of a panel about the particular risks and dangers female journalists face at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia.
This kind of harassment and aggression is especially common for female investigative reporters. A study by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) suggests online and offline risks against journalists are increasing and are disproportionately impacting reporters who identify as women, as a person of color, or LGBTQIA+.
The rates of incidence are staggering — and the impact far-reaching. An estimated 70% of women journalists have received some form of harassment, threat, or attack. Around a third have thought about leaving the profession because of these attacks and threats.
Threats such as harassment and intimidation sit alongside less discussed risks, such as negotiating equal and fair pay, or maybe having to assert yourself in a newsroom of predominantly older, male colleagues. These challenges rarely occur in isolation. They stack up, intersect, and often transcend borders and beats.
On the GIJC25 panel, Cheng was joined by fellow journalists Dragana Pećo, investigative journalist and researcher at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP); Hayatte Abdou, co-founder of National Magazine Comores; Mais Katt, founder and editor of Women Who Won the War; and Taís Seibt, chief of strategy at Fiquem Sabendo. Sarah Ulrich, an independent investigative journalist and GIJN’s German editor, moderated the session.
The experiences of the women on the panel revealed not only how common certain challenges are, but also the creative coping strategies they have developed to help them stay safe and keep reporting.
Serbian investigative journalist Pećo described the terror of finding her apartment turned upside-down a few years ago. Nothing was stolen — the violation was just a psychological tactic to remind her that her private world could be breached.
As part of the team that set up KRIK, an independent digital newsroom focusing on corruption and organized crime, Pećo was involved in high-profile investigations that included the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers.
It wasn’t the first attempt at intimidation. Pećo and her team had already endured smear campaigns, surveillance where “they literally knew what we were talking about in the office,” and messages stating that she and her colleagues should be “lined up and shot.”
Instead of retreating, Pećo strategically made her case public — detailing not only the break-in but the pattern of harassment against her newsroom.
“I wanted them to know that if this is the way [they think they can] stop me from doing my story, that’s not how things work. If you’re going to play this game, I’m going to set the rules,” she said, adding that it was the help and support of her colleagues that emboldened her and stopped her from feeling alone.
Speaking out delivered two forms of protection: international attention from other media rights groups and an outpouring of financial support from donors who recognized the attacks as efforts to silence watchdog reporting.
Globally, women still earn nearly 20% less than men on average. According to the International Federation of Journalists, the gender pay gap in journalism persists across continents, newsroom sizes, and reporting beats.
When a salary increase at the end of a probationary period did not materialize, Cheng was assured by her boss that she was not being paid less than any of her colleagues. Instead of arguing about it, Cheng did her own performance review. She listed her most important stories, added internal data on page views for each, and pasted links to other publications that had picked up or mentioned her stories. In the end, she got the raise.
A 2025 Reuters Institute study revealed how gender disparities persist in newsroom leadership. The study analyzed 240 major online and offline news outlets across 12 countries. Across these outlets, women make up just 27% of top editors, even though women constitute roughly 40% of journalists in the same countries. Strikingly, in every single market studied, including those where women outnumber men in the profession, men still dominate senior editorial positions. The data reveals a stubborn leadership gap that continues to shape newsroom culture, priorities, and opportunities.
Taís Seibt, chief of strategy at Fiquem Sabendo, works actively to shift the pipeline from the ground up. She intentionally invites women speakers into her university journalism classes, believing that seeing women leading investigations helps students imagine themselves in those roles.
“I believe in the community, in the power of visibility,” she said. “It is a small contribution, but it is important.”
Across a decade of teaching aspiring reporters, she has watched representation reshape confidence and ambition. Beyond the classroom, she has created fellowships specifically for young women, offering training in reporting, design, and secure research methods. Of eight fellows in 2024, half have been shortlisted for major investigative awards in Brazil, she said.
Cheng, who also heads a journalists’ union in Hong Kong, described the grind of reporting in repressive environments with threats that can last for months, years — even decades. To reset physically and mentally, she organizes hikes, beach days, and informal clubs that include cooking nights and book circles.
The joy of relaxing and distancing from the relentless news cycle builds stamina, she explained: “People need to have fun (…) they can continue for so much longer.” Joy isn’t a luxury but essential to protect against burnout-induced exits from the profession, she added.
Authoritarian crackdowns don’t stop at borders, and neither should journalist support systems. The speakers, as well as members of the audience, called for networks that connect women across countries so that threats to press freedom that disproportionately affect women, such as the Taliban’s erasure of women in Afghanistan, receive collective global pressure, not isolated outrage.
GIJN’s Women Investigative Network and groups, including Women Who Won the War, train, mentor, and advocate for women across the MENA region. The panelists and the audience called for an expansion of these models through more mailing lists, gatherings, resource-sharing, and even informal coffee chats at conferences. When women journalists unite, authoritarian systems lose one of their strongest strategies — making us believe we are alone.
Other tips shared during the session included:
Hayatte Abdou, co-founder of National Magazine Comores, said a male Australian colleague regularly checks on her well-being and connects her to global investigative teams: “If I am the investigative journalist I am today, it’s because of him.” Real allyship amplifies women without overshadowing them.
GIJN has compiled this comprehensive guide for women, female-identifying, and non-binary journalists to help them navigate harassment, discrimination, and countering isolation. These resources include guides for connecting with peers, seeking support, and asserting their rights.
