The United Nations on Tuesday issued a report on the brutal treatment of people forced to work in online and telephone scam centers across Southeast Asia.
According to the U.N., there could be over a quarter of a million victims of these slavery and human trafficking rackets.
“Credible sources indicate that at least 120,000 people across Myanmar may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams, with estimates in Cambodia similarly at around 100,000,” the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) said.
“Other States in the region, including Lao PDR, the Philippines and Thailand, have also been identified as main countries of destination or transit where at least tens of thousands of people have been involved,” OHCHR added.
The human trafficking rings spotlighted by the U.N. report specialize in luring job seekers into slavery at “scam centers” that participate in everything from “romance-investment scams and crypto fraud to illegal gambling.” These centers generate billions of dollars per year in illegal revenue.
The connection between human trafficking and online scam operations has been on the radar of international investigators for years. The U.N. said the problem escalated dramatically after the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic because it forced casinos to shut down, relocate, or become online operations.
Casinos in Southeast Asia are massive job creators for impoverished people, including a large contingent of migrants who stream across national borders in search of casino employment. When the Wuhan coronavirus shut down the casinos, migrants suddenly found themselves “stranded in these countries and out of work,” which made them easy prey for human traffickers.
The coronavirus lockdowns also caused a huge surge in online activity, which made scammers hungry for cheap labor so they could expand their operations. Increased use of digital payment systems and QR codes during the pandemic also created opportunities for cybercrime.
It was a match made in hell, and OHCHR said the forced scam labor market grew until it was devouring far more than its early desperate victims:
Most people trafficked into the online scam operations are men, although women and adolescents are also among the victims, the report says. Most are not citizens of the countries in which the trafficking occurs. Many of the victims are well-educated, sometimes coming from professional jobs or with graduate or even post-graduate degrees, computer-literate and multi-lingual. Victims come from across the ASEAN region (from Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam), as well as mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, South Asia, and even further afield from Africa and Latin America.
The report noted that traffickers were “easily able to fraudulently recruit” young university graduates by simply offering them “real jobs” abroad, and then kidnapping them into sweatshops when they arrived.
“The conditions offered in these fraudulent ads are typically very attractive, for example promising a high salary, regular bonuses, free accommodation and food. The jobs are often said to be based in Bangkok or other regional hubs,” the report said.
The report delicately noted the “high degree of trust in social media platforms by people in Southeast Asia,” combined with “limited regulation protecting the rights of users online.”
The scam slavers developed a sweet tooth for well-educated victims because they were likely to speak multiple languages. When Vietnam experienced a surge of interest in online gambling, for example, the scammers suddenly needed more workers who spoke Vietnamese.
Some of these scam centers are essentially concentration camps — complete with rusty barbed-wire fences and brutal armed guards — openly doing business in regions with weak law enforcement, such as the border regions of Myanmar. Anarchic conditions created by coups and insurgencies also increased the power and influence of organized crime.
“There have been credible reports of law enforcement officials either working as guards in the trafficking operations, assisting with moving trafficked persons across borders, tipping off traffickers in advance of raids, and extortion of the victims of trafficking, including in the context of immigration detention following rescue,” the report noted.
Various levels of coercion are used against scam center slaves, including literally chaining them to their desks. Their “employers” almost always confiscate their passports and cell phones, making it very difficult for them to flee. The victims are often kept in “debt bondage” by being told they must pay off enormous fees for food and housing before they would be allowed to leave. In a particularly cruel touch, when scam center slaves are sold to another operation, they are often told their debts have been increased by the cost of shipping them to another country.
Some people have been rescued from scam center slavery by their families paying ransom to the gangs, but those less fortunate are subjected to inhumane living conditions, malnutrition, physical abuse, torture, and execution if they disobey their owners.
The scams using slavery run the gamut from simple phone hustles to elaborate investment scams that invest considerable effort in training their operators and creating the illusion of a legitimate business.
One of the current crazes is for a scam known as “pig-butchering,” in which lonely targets are sucked into online dating schemes and persuaded to send money to the object of their affection. Many of these scams are carried out by men pretending to be women, but the scam centers keep a few attractive women on hand in case a target demands visual communication.
OHCHR was adamant that the people trafficked and forced to work for these scam operations should be treated as victims, not criminal perpetrators.
“All affected States need to summon the political will to strengthen human rights and improve governance and the rule of law, including through serious and sustained efforts to tackle corruption. This must be as much a part of the response to these scams as a robust criminal justice response,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk.
“People who are coerced into working in these scamming operations endure inhumane treatment while being forced to carry out crimes. They are victims. They are not criminals,” Turk said.
The Diplomat noted on Wednesday that the crisis is a little different in each of its hot zones. “An archipelago of Chinese-run special economic zones” creates “voids of regulation” across much of Southeast Asia, while the International Crisis Group (ICG) describes the conflict zone around Myanmar as a “contiguous zone of vibrant criminality, much of it beyond the reach of state authorities.”
In Cambodia, the problem is patronage: “As the local media outlet Voice of Democracy detailed in a series of reports before it was shut down by the Cambodian government in May, a number of these large scam operations have links to prominent tycoons and elite grandees.”
The government of Cambodia dismissed the U.N. report as a political fabrication.
“I don’t know how to respond, where did they get the number from? Have they investigated? Where did they get the data? Foreigners are just saying things,” Cambodian police spokesperson Chhay Kim Khoeun scoffed to Reuters on Tuesday.