Experts say Southeast Asia’s online scamming and human trafficking industry is growing. VOA’s Dave Grunebaum has more.
Human rights activists join family members of Malaysian victims trapped in scam compounds who share their stories at a news conference in late November. Their identities are being concealed for security reasons. This mother says her 24-year-old son went to Thailand for a vacation and ended up trapped in neighboring Myanmar.
Victim’s mother
They hit my son until his buttocks were full of bruises. They handcuffed him to the ceiling. That’s how he slept for two days.
The mother says the family paid a US$16,000 ransom to the crime group holding her son, but the captors never set him free.
Victim’s mother
It’s very heartbreaking. I have been crying for many days.
Jake Sims, a visiting expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, says the criminal networks operate these scam compounds in countries with significant corruption and gaps in the rule of law.
Jake Sims
US Institute of Peace
Over the last several years, hundreds of thousands of people have been brought to the region, many of them via various forms of coercion, deception, human trafficking, to be involved in a very lucrative global industry of organized cybercrime that is defrauding people from all over the world to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year.
Dave Grunebaum
VOA News
Experts say most of the victims in these scam centers come from across Asia. They are often lured by false promises of a legitimate job opportunity only to be tricked, trafficked and trapped.
They are forced to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week in alleged scam compounds like these. They are ordered to befriend people on social media as well as dating apps and coax them to invest their money into crypto currency scams. And experts say these types of cybercrimes and the human trafficking connected to it show no signs of slowing down.
Dave Grunebaum, VOA News.
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