As China steps up measures to protect its citizens, an industry dependent on human trafficking and forced labour is adapting by targeting new groups – with a focus on English speakers.

By EMILY FISHBEIN | FRONTIER

This article was supported by the Pulitzer Center and is part of a series of articles about human trafficking into the cyber-scamming industry in Myanmar following the 2021 military coup.

In 2022, Sara responded to an online ad for customer service workers in Thailand, accepting a job after two video interviews over Skype. 

“They had an address; they had a telephone number … it looked legit,” she said. “The salary was market-related. Everything sounded perfect.”

Two weeks later, she flew from South Africa to Bangkok with a friend who had accepted a job with the same company. After two days in a van, they reached the Moei River that forms the border between Thailand and Myanmar, where they were escorted onto a rowboat. 

“Then I realised, ‘OK. This is a bit dodgy.’” 

Sara, like the other trafficking victims interviewed in this story, is being identified by a pseudonym. She is one of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been lured into compounds in Southeast Asia and forced to scam others online. 

The industry was turbo charged by the COVID-19 pandemic, which emptied out gambling enclaves and left overseas Chinese criminal syndicates searching for new sources of income. They have since made tens of billions of dollars through online fraud, largely using a strategy known as “pig butchering”.

Initially, they mainly targeted Mandarin speakers in both the trafficking and the scams. But as China stepped up measures to protect its nationals, scamming syndicates cast a wider net. By June 2023, Interpol was warning that what began as a “regional crime threat” had morphed into a “global human trafficking crisis”; later that year, it reported that law enforcement agencies had “rescued” people from 22 countries who had been trafficked into Myanmar.

Frontier spoke with three trafficking victims and four representatives of anti-trafficking groups, who described sophisticated recruitment networks, brutal conditions and limited means for escape. 

“The reason that this crime is thriving is that it’s operating in areas of absolute impunity,” said Mr Andrew Wasuwongse, Thailand country director with the International Justice Mission, a global nonprofit. 

Rule of law has collapsed in Myanmar since the military seized power in a 2021 coup. While some ethnic armed groups have joined the fight to overthrow the regime, others have taken advantage of the chaos to further their business interests, including by working with Chinese criminal syndicates.

Agnes and Cynthia, both from Nairobi, were trafficked with a group of Kenyan nationals in 2022. Like many others, their stories started when someone they trusted promised to connect them with customer service jobs.

“She was my family, so I quickly believed her,” said Agnes, who was recruited by a distant relative.

She and Cynthia, who was recruited by a friend, each paid 250,000 Kenyan shillings (about US$2,000) for a flight from Nairobi to Bangkok, a visa and agent fees. They were then added to a WhatsApp group with other Kenyan nationals, where a man translated instructions from Chinese on behalf of their supposed employer. 

The first sign that something was amiss, Agnes said, was entering Thailand on tourist visas, rather than business visas. But their employer assured them everything would be fine, so they went to Jomo Kenyatta Airport wearing business attire as instructed, and sent the first of several selfies to the WhatsApp group.

Their traffickers used these photos to track their progress and identify them at the airport in Bangkok, guiding them to a specific immigration officer who collected their biometric information and stamped their passports. 

Then, like Sara, they were sent off in a van. They travelled for two days, changing vehicles multiple times. As the cityscape faded to cornfields, worry set in. 

“We passed through those roads – you don’t see anyone,” said Agnes. “We asked ourselves, ‘Why have we come here?’”

Rules of engagement

After crossing the Moei River, Sara and her friend were dropped off at a company “office”, where their passports, laptops and phones were confiscated. Then they were given three days to rest.

“We didn’t know that they were giving us three days to sleep because we were no longer going to sleep,” Sara said.

They were then told their real job was scamming people online, and that the only way out was to pay US$300,000, which they couldn’t afford. After being threatened with detention in an underground prison, they signed an 18-month contract.

They were assigned to an English-speaking team, mostly made up of fellow Africans, and given scripts to follow. Sara took on the identity of a wealthy Asian woman from Chicago who liked to travel. To make her character believable, she researched popular tourist destinations, planned elaborate fake vacations and studied mundane details of daily life in Chicago.

“You need to be an actor, basically. You need to remember each and every thing,” she said.

She trawled social media – Instagram, X and Facebook – searching for well-off white men aged 40 to 65. “We were usually looking for people that were staying alone, people that were excluded,” Sara said. “Lonely people, people that were very rich.”

After building their trust, she would recommend a cryptocurrency investment opportunity and guide them to a fraudulent site. Once they deposited an initial sum, she handed the process over to the team leaders who continued the elaborate scam.

Agnes and Cynthia’s group also crossed the Moei River by boat, before being photographed and escorted inside a building with armed guards. There they were handed an exploitative contract that outlined “punishment” for failing to meet quotas, according to Agnes.

She said that when her group questioned the terms, they were told the alternative was to find their own way home. “(The bosses) started to tell us, ‘This place is run by rebels. So if we take you out, you’re either going to die, or you’re going to become slaves to another person,’” she recalled. They were never told which armed group’s territory they were in.

That evening a man explained to them through a Chinese-to-English interpreter that he had bought them.

“(He) told us plainly, ‘You have come here to make money. Money, money, money,’” said Agnes. “‘And in order to get this money, you have to steal from someone.’”

They were each given iPhones with 10 preinstalled numbers to enable them to continue working even when numbers were deactivated for suspicious activity. The bosses explicitly instructed them to filter out potential scamming targets by race and nationality, while posing as white women on mainstream social media platforms. 

“They had told us, ‘If anyone is Black, you leave him out. If anyone is from India, you leave him out. If anyone is from Asian countries, you leave them out,’” Agnes said. “‘You only take the Western nationality. The Australians, the Americans, the Canadians, the UK.’”

They were permitted to target both married and unmarried men, but were instructed to stick to certain ages and professions. “If he was less than 40, they told us, ‘That is a joker. He doesn’t have money. So don’t even continue that conversation,’” Agnes said. “When we found (men with) good careers, that one is good to go.”

Cyber crime and punishment

The three women interviewed by Frontier did not know the names of their companies or where in Myanmar they were held, but their experiences follow well-documented patterns.

Forced to work seven days a week, they were threatened with punishment for falling short of their quotas. Agnes said her group was once forced to do callisthenics while carrying jerrycans full of water, but Chinese nationals and other workers who couldn’t speak English had it worse.

“They were beaten, beaten a lot … They would come with bruises on their backs,” she said, adding that some had food withheld or were forced to stand in open sewage pits.

Even their tormentor, a Chinese-speaking Malaysian, was not spared. A trafficking victim himself, he worked as a scammer when he wasn’t disciplining the other workers, and was beaten, starved and forced to do push-ups when he failed to meet his targets.

He would inject drugs to cope, said Agnes, and would also “come and start inflicting that pressure from his boss to us”.

Sara worked 20 hours per day and was expected to message at least 300 new people each day, and get at least five to engage in conversation.

At one point, she was held in her office for a week, unable to even bathe or change her menstrual products. “They didn’t care what was happening to you. You just had to work,” she said.

The area where she was held, which she estimates had around 20 scamming compounds of 400 to 500 workers each, also had a facility where workers would sometimes be sent for injections.

“They mainly gave you glucose for you to be able to work for longer hours,” she said.

Those who failed to meet targets were beaten, deprived of food or forced to run for hours in the rain. Sometimes the company would increase the ransom fee for disobedient workers to buy their freedom.

Women and girls worked under the additional threat of sexual exploitation. Sara said some workers who didn’t perform well at scamming were transferred into sexual slavery. The Kenyan women said some workers, including teenage girls, who were initially recruited for scamming were later forced to work in pornography.

“They could not communicate in English, but they were introduced to the pornography side because they were attractive,” Agnes said.

The three women described a range of tactics their companies used to keep workers from escaping.

“It was more like a prison,” said Sara. “There was always someone looking at what we were doing, what you’re saying, cameras everywhere.”

When a worker from India lied that his brother had died and asked to go home, the bosses instead made a display of punishing him. “They were beating him up until he couldn’t cry anymore,” Sara said. 

The unexplained disappearances of other workers further fuelled her fears, alongside threats from her bosses. “They would even tell you,‘We could kill you and throw you in the river, and no one would know where you are,’” she said.

During a trip to the Thai border town Mae Sot last year for a different story, a Thai soldier told Frontier he had found bodies floating in the Moei River, who he believed to be scam workers.

Sara said workers were also given incentives to cooperate, like alone time on their phones and access to a “mini-city” within the syndicate’s operational area, complete with restaurants, nightclubs, casinos and hotels. 

“If you were a willing scammer … you would get the money to enjoy the luxuries.” But she added that many of these workers became addicted to drugs and gambling, making it harder for them to leave. “They had to make money to get their fix,” she said.

Her company also used psychological manipulation. “They always made us say,‘We are happy to be here. We are one big family,’” Sara said. “It was more like a brainwash thing – that if you say something over and over again, you eventually believe it.”

Sara, who cooperated while plotting her way out, was able to buy her freedom after nine months. It cost $100,000, which she said she paid off through scamming, money from friends, and digging into her savings. Dropped off in Mae Sot, she returned home a month later with the help of an anti-trafficking nonprofit and the South African embassy.

The group of Kenyans including Agnes and Cynthia also all got out, but Frontier is withholding further details in order not to jeopardise other rescue efforts. After being sent back across the Moei River, they were detained in Thailand for unauthorised border crossing, and held for a month. Upon returning home, they filed reports with the Kenyan police, but believe their traffickers are still operating.

“It is very painful because for us here, we are suffering. The money we had saved, no more,” said Cynthia. “We thought we would go work abroad and get a greener pasture, and then things turned another way.”

Moving targets

The experiences of Agnes, Cynthia and Sara are representative of wider trends in the industry, according to Wasuwongse from IJM.

He said that his organisation has seen a notable increase in the targeting of English-speaking scamming victims since 2022, and that those trafficked are increasingly coming from East Africa or South Asia.

Judah Tana, founder and international director of Global Advance Project, a Thailand-based nonprofit, also described a rapidly globalising industry. He said many of the victims his organisation has supported since 2022 are from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, former Soviet countries and Brazil.

He and other advocates said that once people are trafficked into online criminality, the ways out are limited – especially in Myanmar, where most scamming operations are based in border zones controlled by business-oriented armed groups.

Mercy Otieno, head of protection with the Kenyan nonprofit Awareness Against Human Trafficking, said it’s more difficult to contact or assist Kenyans who were trafficked to Myanmar compared to other countries such as Laos.

“We were not able to tell if (victims) were OK, if they were experiencing any challenges, or if the situation was getting worse,” she said. “We only had to rely on them escaping so that we could get assistance.”

Wasuwongse said that unlike in Cambodia or the Philippines, where his organisation can sometimes work with local law enforcement to rescue trafficked people, most victims in Myanmar need to find their own way out – either by finishing their “contracts,” paying a ransom or recruiting a replacement.

Tana described more daring rescue methods, like facilitating escapes during transfers from one scamming compound to another via Thailand. In other cases, he said they’ve been able to convince armed groups to arrange releases, including by helping families to negotiate ransom payments. 

While international embassies and NGOs typically avoid ransom negotiations under policies that prohibit engaging with criminal actors – actions which could potentially encourage further trafficking into the industry – Tana said his organisation often plays an intermediary role to bring ransoms down to a less extortionary amount.

At the same time, he acknowledged that crime syndicates have responded by increasing ransom costs and incentivising effective workers to stay. “The more successful (the scammers) are … the less (the companies) want them to be able to leave,” he said.

Still, he claimed the organisation has been able to facilitate the release of more than 600 people from compounds in Myanmar since 2022.

Given the barriers to individual rescues and the scale of the crisis, he and other advocates called for a more coordinated response.

The NGO representatives interviewed by Frontier said their organisations are engaged in prevention activities including raising public awareness about trafficking risks, flagging deceptive online recruitment ads to social media companies for removal, and training immigration officials and airport staff to identify potential trafficking victims.

They also recommended that governments, international bodies and the private sector work together to crack down on money laundering, regulate cryptocurrency transactions, block the supply of electricity and internet services to scam areas and restrict the bulk registration of SIM cards.

“It’s a global monster. We need to attack it from all areas,” said Tana.

Seng, an anti-trafficking specialist with a Myanmar-based civil society organisation, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, warned that the trafficking will persist unless the underlying problems – in this case a lack of rule of law or viable job opportunities for young people – are addressed.

“Although the authorities should be the ones to manage it, that can’t happen under the military,” she said. “We’re trying to mitigate cases, but we can’t remove the root cause.”

Nu Nu Lusan contributed to this report.