Human Trafficking in Asia: Slavery 2.0 in Fraud Factories

Status: 12/20/2022 06:42 a.m

Whether by email, messenger or SMS: More and more people are falling victim to online fraudsters. But there are also victims on the other side. Tens of thousands are forced into crime in Southeast Asia.

By Silvia Flier ARD studio Singapore

“An absolute dream job,” Salam from Bangladesh thinks as he sees the palm-lined streets, the holiday resorts and the large casino where he is soon to work. He has arrived in Dara Sakor, Cambodia – a holiday paradise that he says is becoming hell for him.

“New form of human trafficking”

Salam is an engineer. In his home country of Bangladesh, he worked in a textile factory and earned the equivalent of 200 US dollars a month. “It’s very difficult to make a living and support a family,” says Salam. An old school friend told him he could get four to six times that amount at a Cambodian casino with $850 to $1,200. His uncle runs an employment agency.

At first, Salam is interested but suspicious. He googles his concerns away and reads that gambling is legal in Cambodia, unlike Bangladesh. That calms him down and so the textile engineer Salam becomes the victim Salam. The victim of a global system of cybercrime and online fraud, cybercrime and cyberscam.

The 26-year-old is not the only one. “We’re talking about a new form of human trafficking with thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of victims,” ​​says Mina Chiang, founder and head of the human rights organization Humanity Research Consultancy. Your company was involved in freeing Salam from the clutches of human traffickers. Since then he has been working for her.

Create fake accounts and scam numbers

The fraud factories are run by Chinese gangs with mafia-like structures. Through middlemen and online ads, they lure people from all over Asia – from China, Bangladesh, India, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia. They promise them lucrative jobs in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.

Once there, however, the reality is different: the new workers’ passports and mobile phones are often confiscated on site. They are quartered in large blocks of flats and forced to create fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. They are supposed to write to people from the wealthy countries of Europe, the USA and Canada, get their phone numbers by fraud and collect them in Google Sheets.

The next step is to persuade the unsuspecting via WhatsApp to transfer money or invest in dubious cryptocurrencies. The system has a method – and it works like this: First, the victims are fed the prospect of money or love, wealth or romance. Then they are financially exempt. This is called “Pig Butchering”, which means pig slaughtering.

overtime and corporal punishment

“Slaughtering” is going on on a large scale out of large, empty buildings in Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. Human rights activists speak of “scams” or “fraud factories”, i.e. factories in which people cheat other people en masse and as if on an assembly line. This is made possible by increasing digitization and globalization, the emergence of social media that allow easy access to personal data, and artificial intelligence software that facilitates translations and the generation of fake profile photos.

In the “fraud factories” people often work at night. From 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., for 13 hours, Salam recalls. If the goals are not met, for example obtaining five telephone numbers a day, overtime has to be worked. That can be up to 18 hours at a time, he says. There were also threats of physical punishment in the form of push-ups and planks, as well as beatings and electric shocks.

Salam himself had to do up to 240 push-ups and planks for 15 minutes. On the other hand, he had never experienced beatings and electric shocks himself – but heard the screams. According to Phil Robertson of the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, these are “lawless enclaves” in which people are exploited and abused: women forced into prostitution or men locked up without water and food.

Sanctions demanded by the international community

Mina Chiang also reports on rape and organ trafficking. The forced laborers are then sold on to other human traffickers like slaves. So did Salam, which was sold three times: the first time for $3,500, most recently for $10,000. The higher price came about “because I already knew how the job worked,” he says.

Meanwhile, international attention to the topic is slowly increasing. In July, the US downgraded Cambodia in its annual human trafficking report. After months of official denials, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered a hunt for the ringleaders. In August, the authorities launched a series of high-profile raids. Finally, in September, police freed more than 1,000 people from three facilities in the Cambodian coastal city of Sihanoukville.

But that doesn’t go far enough for observers and human rights activists like Phil Robertson and Mina Chiang. “As long as a business doesn’t kill you, it will keep going,” Chiang quotes a Chinese proverb. That is why she is demanding tough sanctions from the international community against the countries involved in order to end the scam system. A system that keeps Salam from sleeping: “In the dream I’m sitting at the computer and the supervisor comes,” he says. “I remember everything – because I can’t forget.”

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