Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

More claims are coming forward concerning foreigners held captive in Cambodia. Hoax or no hoax ?

More than 50 M'sians held captive by syndicates in four countries: MCA's Michael Chong
04- 07- 2022 06:45 PM

KUALA LUMPUR: More than 50 Malaysians are being held captive in Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand by online scam syndicates, according to the MCA public services and complaints department.

The department’s head, Datuk Seri Michael Chong(pix), said it had received calls from some of the victims the past two months asking to be rescued from captivity.

He said the victims had been deceived with offers to work as telemarketers with salaries of US$3,000 to US$4,000 per month.

“We are working together with the embassies and Royal Malaysia Police to rescue those victims. We also appeal to young people to be more careful and not be easily cheated and blinded by the high salary that the syndicates offer,” he said at a press conference here today.

They are believed to be in the hands of the syndicates for between two and six months already.

During the press conference, Chong also made video calls to two men who claimed that they were being held against their will by a syndicate in Cambodia.

One of them, who wants to remain anonymous, said there were 13 Malaysians including five women, aged between 17 and 36, in the same area as him who were forced to work as ‘scam operators’.

“We were told to scam our customers, and if we could not do that, we would be confined in a room without food for two or three days,” he said.

The other victim claimed that he was with a different group of about 50 Malaysians including a woman, also in Cambodia.

He said they were taken to Cambodia by flight or through illegal land routes.

“We work more than 15 hours (daily) to cheat customers around the world. We must follow instructions or we will never know our fate,” the victim said.-Bernama
https://www.thesundaily.my/home/more-th ... -KB9047792
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

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Human trafficking in Cambodia nearly doubled in 2021
Government officials blamed the coronavirus, but critics see a lack of will to tackle the problem.
By RFA’s Khmer Service
2022.04.07

Human trafficking cases in Cambodia almost doubled in 2021 compared to 2020 because the government was preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, a report issued Wednesday by the country’s National Committee for Counter Trafficking said.

The report, which was released during a ceremony at the Ministry of Interior, the committee’s parent ministry, documented trafficking of laborers, organs, babies and surrogates, and sex workers.

Minister of Interior Sar Kheng said human trafficking was on the rise amid the COVID-19 pandemic. He urged authorities not to let their guard down.

“Criminals are choosing human trafficking as a career. They won’t let it go. They are taking advantage of us when we are facing a crisis,” he said.

The committee’s vice chairperson, Chou Bun Eng, said during an interview with a local radio station that traffickers used to move through Cambodia, but now the country has become a popular trafficking destination. She highlighted a particular case earlier this year to illustrate the point.

“The trafficking suspects brought in victims to Cambodia. The suspects lured the victims to work in Cambodia due to the country’s development and political stability,” she said.

“There was huge increase compared to 2020, we found 359 cases in 2021 whereas in 2020, there were only 155 cases,” said Chou Bun Eng.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambod ... 65439.html
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

There are a number of contradictory reports from the Malaysian press on the latest "news" of groups of Malaysian workers being trafficked in Cambodia. Some say that the Malaysians concerned were working legally in Cambodia when they were arrested or rescued, and that there is no human trafficking in this case. However, other information suggests that there may be some Malaysian workers who are being detained illegally in online gambling sydicates.

Here are the links to reports on this topic from Malaysian press:
https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/617558
https://www.thesundaily.my/local/report ... -FX9055733

Same topic from the Khmer Times: https://www.khmertimeskh.com/501055930/ ... y-rescued/
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

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More from Malaysia:

Malaysians duped by fake job offers in Cambodia were beaten, abused with electric shocks: Lawyer
12 Apr 2022 05:11PM (Updated: 12 Apr 2022 05:11PM)

SEPANG: The 16 Malaysians who were duped by lucrative job offers in Cambodia were abused with electric shocks and forced to work as scammers without any salary.

The victims, 12 of whom were repatriated on Tuesday (Apr 12) morning, were also beaten and slapped, said their lawyer.

Heng Zhi Li, who represents the 15 men and one woman, said the victims had left for Cambodia in stages between September 2021 and February this year after they were allegedly promised a salary of RM7,000 (US$1,650).

He added that the victims began contacting the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) in January.

Information about their situation was then shared with the Council for Anti-Trafficking in Persons and Anti-Smuggling of Migrants (MAPO) which subsequently sought assistance from ASEANAPOL and Interpol to rescue them.

Foreign Ministry deputy secretary-general Amran Mohamed Zin said that the Cambodian authorities had received information on the involvement of 16 Malaysians in illegal activities in the country and arrested all of them on Apr 4.

“Even though the Cambodian government found that they were carrying out illegal activities in Cambodia, legal action has been set aside for now so that we can bring home our people from being stranded there,” he told reporters at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport 2.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/ca ... se-2621601
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

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In Thai villages, Chinese gangs recruit desperate for phone scams
Thai police say they have rescued some 700 Thais held against their will by Chinese gangs in Cambodia.
By Vijitra Duangdee
Published On 13 Apr 2022

Bangkok, Thailand – The brokers arrived with promises of high-paying online sales jobs in Poipet, a Cambodian border town just an hour’s drive from Teerapat and Dao’s home in eastern Thailand.

After more than two years of pandemic-induced poverty, Teerapat and Dao were willing to take virtually any work away from their remote, rural village.
But by the next day, the couple began to realise they had made a terrible mistake.

After being driven deep across the border to the crime-ridden Cambodian beach town of Sihanoukville, Teerapat and Dao allege that they were ordered to stay inside a guarded 12-storey compound where Chinese “bosses” laid out their instructions via an interpreter.

Their “job” quickly revealed itself as a scam, according to interviews with the pair and corroborating police information.

Instead of online sales, Teerapat and Dao say they were directed to make unsolicited phone calls posing as customs officers, policemen or potential investors looking to secure a bank transfer.

The couple allege they were each expected to scam at least 500,000 baht ($15,000) every month along with dozens of others at the compound, all the while facing the threat of being sold to another gang if they failed to make the numbers.

“I normally don’t trust people easily,” Teerapat told Al Jazeera, speaking under an alias for fear of reprisals.

“But we were both desperate for money so when the broker said we could make up to $2,000 a month – with everything paid for, transport and room and board – we were convinced.”

“Had I known that my job was to scam other Thais, I would have never gone,” Teerapat added.

Thai police say there could be more than 1500 Thais trapped in Sihanoukville, held against their will by the scam gangs.

Two dozen of them were rescued on Sunday from a 10-storey townhouse sealed behind razor wire and covered by security cameras, according to Thai authorities, following a long negotiation between Thai police who travelled to Cambodia and a group of Chinese men.

“With our Cambodian counterparts we have managed to rescue 700 Thais in total so far,” Lieutenant General Surachate Hakparn, a senior Thai police officer, said in a statement. “We’ve issued human trafficking warrants for international organised gangs as well as prosecuted brokers who smuggled Thais through illegal border crossings into Cambodia.”

Media reports from across Southeast Asia allege hundreds of Malaysians, Filipinos and Indonesians have also been lured to Cambodia by organised crime groups based in and around Sihanoukville, a city notorious for its lawless reputation, casinos and Chinese criminal gangs.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/1 ... hone-scams
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

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More fake news, nothing going on they just want a free ticket home. I like the description " the crime ridden Cambodian beach town Sihanoukville" that'll bring the tourist back
I'm standing up, so I must be straight.
What's a poor man do when the blues keep following him around.(Smoking Dynamite)
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

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April 14, 2022
Chinese authorities take aim at overseas telecom fraud located in Cambodia
China Daily

The investigations of five major trans-border telecom fraud cases have been placed under the joint oversight of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security, sending a strong signal that China will punish such crimes severely.

The cases were registered in Zhejiang, Fujian, Henan and Hunan provinces, as well as Chongqing municipality, and each involve a large number of victims and caused severe harm to the public, the SPP said on Tuesday.

In one case, police in Zhejiang studied evidence against overseas telecom fraud gangs in December 2020 and uncovered a group entrenched in Cambodia.

The preliminary investigation showed that the group set up a false investment platform overseas to defraud Chinese citizens. So far, more than 400 people from the group or associated with the group have been arrested, involving a total fraud of over 150 million yuan ($23.6 million).

In recent years, procuratorial and public security organs have worked closely to crack down on telecom fraud and related crimes, effectively safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of the people. However, there is still a high incidence of such crimes, which seriously affects people’s sense of security, the SPP said.

Criminals will be targeted regardless of whether they are based locally or overseas, with both online and offline efforts to be explored by procuratorial and public security authorities.
https://www.khmertimeskh.com/501057810/ ... -cambodia/
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

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Police Rescue 66 Thai Nationals from Scam Call Centers in Cambodia
The joint police operation offered the latest evidence of an organized crime racket that spans the Mekong region.
By Sebastian Strangio
April 14, 2022
A cross-border operation by Thai and Cambodian police earlier this week rescued 66 Thai nationals from captivity in Cambodia, where they were forced or tricked into running telephone scams.

According to a report from Reuters, the operation broke up what authorities described as a part of a wider Chinese-run transnational crime scheme. The rescue came a few days after Cambodian police rescued 16 Malaysian nationals held captive in Sihanoukville on Cambodia’s south coast, as Luke Hunt wrote in The Diplomat this week.

These two cases were the most recent pages in a thickening catalog of evidence about organized crime rackets that are ensnaring unknown numbers of Southeast Asians. The stories are all much the same: workers are typically drawn to Cambodia through social media advertisements promising high-paying jobs. As soon as they arrive in the country, however, their travel documents are seized and they are held and forced by racketeers to make scam calls in their own languages. Those who refuse are subject to various forms of violence and mistreatment.

As Thailand’s assistant national police commissioner Surachate Hakparn told Reuters this week, those who refuse to participate in such operations “get assaulted, some get whipped, others get electrocuted … Some get beaten up and others get locked in dark rooms and are not given food.” The lawyer for the 16 rescued Malaysians said that they were beaten, slapped, and abused with electric shocks.

The scale of these operations is hard to determine, but it appears to be taking place at a nearly industrial scale. The Reuters article contained the remarkable revelation from the Thai police that since October, more than 800 Thai men and women have been rescued from scam call centers in Cambodia. Surachate added that more than 1,000 Thais are still working in scam call centers in cities like Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville, and Poipet.

The rise of these Chinese-run scam operations is closely linked to the increasing economic integration between China and mainland Southeast Asian over the past decade, and the accompanying surge of investment from the PRC. One component of this has been the entry of Chinese organized crime syndicates into parts of the region with weak legal frameworks and corrupt local elites providing accommodating conditions for illicit activities.

It is no surprise that such operations have focused on “wild west” towns like Poipet and Sihanoukville; the latter was known for the presence of organized crime long before its sudden Chinese investment boom. In mid-March, 35 civil society groups urged the Cambodian government to address “a crisis of forced labor, slavery, and torture” in facilities that it described as “slave compounds.”
In full: https://thediplomat.com/2022/04/police- ... -cambodia/
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

Post by Pseudonomdeplume »

Weeding out their liabilities.

"We rescued 66 more."

"And the other 6,400?"

"We only had 7 bikes."
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Re: Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs (UPDATED)

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

For general information: This was published in Thailand, but Thai police are also looking for information into human trafficking gangs working with Thais and other foreigners in Cambodia.
https://www.nationthailand.com/in-focus/40014602
Thailand: Report Human Trafficking
People can report human-trafficking crimes or crimes against women or children by calling the 1599 hotline, via https://humantrafficking.police.go.th, Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/antihumantraffickingpolice/, Line @HUMANTRAFFICKTH, Twitter @safe_dek or by scanning the QR code.
Published : April 16, 2022
By : THE NATION
In English: https://humantrafficking.police.go.th/en/
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