Organized criminal groups in Asia coerced thousands into scamming others online

You see a decent job advertisement that promises a good salary, flexible conditions, and seems great in general, apply, and end up as a slave to a gang that makes you spend 16 hours a day to defraud victims online. Sounds like a movie plot but, unfortunately, it’s a reality for many people in Asia who ended up victims of human trafficking in Myanmar and Cambodia.

Chinese criminal syndicates force the victims to defraud people online via cryptocurrency scams, online gambling, romance scams, and lottery scams, and if they do not comply, they are beaten up, tortured, and threatened to be killed. The victims’ relatives often receive requests for ransom money in exchange for their family members but the money exchange doesn’t often guarantee that they will see them again.

Shwe Kokko, a city in Myanmar, is also known as Scam City. The place sits on a border between Myanmar and Thailand and was built as a result of a collaboration between Chinese investors and Myanmar Border Guard Forces. The country’s unstable military and economic situation helped Scam City become a place for illegal online gambling operations, online scams, and human trafficking.

One victim rescued from Scam City told journalists that he came to work in a casino, but instead was made to commit online get-rich-fast schemes involving fake accounts and conversation scripts on Facebook, Tinder, and WhatsApp. When the victim refused, he was told to pay ransom money that he couldn’t afford.

Human rights researches estimate that more than 30,000 people were trafficked to Cambodia for cyber slavery and between 100,000 and half a million Chinese citizens were forced to do this work.

In another case, a victim, whose family paid a ransom, reported that he was forced to lure women from China to invest in Bitcoin. His “employer” had regular performance meetings, and good workers would be rewarded with sleep and late starts, and bad workers would be beaten up. Victims could be sold between companies with a head price of around $8,000 or more depending on their skills.

The scamming compounds were able to earn a lot of money from their fraud. In one case, thousand of scam victims lost between $15,000 and $30,000 in a lottery scam and others lost millions of dollars in romance scams. The criminal operations had a special software that helped them to log into many WhatsApp accounts simultaneously and translate messages into any language. They were taught how to create fake accounts and lure victims using fictitious stories.