Focus on Human Trafficking Shifts From Cambodia to Myanmar
Interpol proves its worth in cross-border rescue operation in the country’s east.
By Luke Hunt
February 07, 2023
Cambodian authorities were disbelieving when persistent reports began emerging early last year that Chinese organized crime syndicates had established a network of human trafficking operations based largely out of the southern port town of Sihanoukville.

Several foreign embassies – all of them Asian – warned their citizens of the risks associated with traveling to this country and the United States dropped Cambodia to the lowest ranking on its annual Trafficking in Persons Report for failing to “meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.”

Many of those scam operations were established by Chinese criminals who decided not to return to the People’s Republic amid the great exodus as the COVID-19 pandemic was erupting in early 2020.

Instead, they stayed and traded in human misery by luring unsuspecting job seekers with false promises of well-paid work into slave compounds where they were forced to conduct a range of fraudulent telecom scams. And the traffickers prospered.

But as the pandemic ebbed and borders opened, traffickers set their sights on greener, less complicated pastures inside Myanmar.

Their victims are now seemingly being flown to Yangon, Bangkok, and onto other transit points, primarily Mae Sot, northwest of Bangkok, and Chiang Rai in the far north close to the Golden Triangle, a region notorious for drug production and other illicit trades.
https://thediplomat.com/2023/02/focus-o ... o-myanmar/

Inside the crypto ‘prisons’ scamming Britons out of their life savings
The large-scale sophisticated cyber racket sweeping the globe has been dubbed a ‘scamdemic’
By Nicola Smith, Asia Correspondent and Joe Wallen, South Asia Correspondent 24 January 2023 • 12:00pm

For two weeks last year, Sophie, a successful businesswoman and mother from the north of England, was hospitalised after collapsing when she lost a quarter of a million pounds in a cryptocurrency scam.

Like many victims of a sophisticated cyber racket sweeping the globe, she does not want to be identified out of a misplaced sense of shame. Her name has been changed as family and friends are still unaware she lost almost her entire life savings through the fraudulent scheme.

“It was like being brainwashed. It still pains my heart,” she told The Telegraph, adding that she knew of others who had lost hundreds of thousands of pounds. “We are all good at our own business but in that precise moment we were brainwashed. You’ve been clever all your life, trying to look after the money you have and eventually lose to a scammer.”

Thousands of savvy crypto investors have been caught out by the “liquidity mining” scam, which deploys a tactic known as “pig butchering” – where victims are emotionally manipulated and their accounts fattened before being drained.

To date, the largest known amount swindled via this fraud was $8 million, belonging to Divya Gadasalli, 25, from Texas, who lost her family fortune last year.
Full article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-heal ... e-savings/

Investigation Reveals: UK is a "Pig Butchering Chinese Cybercrime Hub" Involving Millions
Cambodia has a reputation as a friendly base for Chinese internet criminals, but meanwhile, the UK is providing fake business adresses for these same types of international gangs, who are human-trafficking and scamming money at a global scale, while UK authorities turn a blind eye, even when the victims being scammed are British.


‘Everything is fake’: how global crime gangs are using UK shell companies in multi-million pound crypto scams
Investigation reveals more than 150 fake firms, many with ties to China, are targeting people online, breaking their hearts – and emptying their bank accounts
Shanti Das and Niamh McIntyre
Last modified on Mon 30 Jan 2023 10.35 GMT
A woman meets a man online. They flirt. Then, after a few weeks, they begin imagining a future together. Fast forward a few months and one of them has had their heart broken and been defrauded of their life savings.

It sounds like a classic romance scam, but it isn’t. This is “pig butchering”: a brutal, elaborate and rapidly expanding form of organised crime, often involving criminal syndicates, modern-day slaves and victims around the world.

Since it came to prominence in 2021, the fraud – which involves scammers grooming their victims before stealing huge sums in cryptocurrency – has led to losses of hundreds of millions of pounds and prompted warnings from Interpol and the FBI.

Last month, an inquest heard that one UK victim, a former police officer and father from Wiltshire, took his own life after losing about £100,000 – his entire pension lump sum – in a scam bearing the hallmarks of pig butchering.

Now, an investigation by the Observer and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found that global organised crime gangs are using the UK as a virtual base for their operations – systematically exploiting lax company registration laws to carry out fraud on an industrial scale.
Analysis has identified 168 UK companies accused of running fraudulent cryptocurrency or foreign exchange trading schemes, with around half of these likely to be linked to pig-butchering scams.

Registered to addresses including an empty shop in Croydon, a flat above a Chinese takeaway in Somerset, and a council flat in an east London tower block, dozens of the firms share an address, an office or are linked through domain registrations, indicating they may be connected. The vast majority of company directors are resident in China.

The companies do not appear to have genuine ties to the addresses where they claim to be based, and details about the real owners are scant. The fact the properties have been linked to frauds is often known to the UK authorities.

Yet despite extensive evidence of fraudulent activity, and concerns about the potential for earnings to be laundered via the UK, little has been done to tackle the scam companies – or to prevent new ones from opening.

“This is as big a scandal as any of the financial scandals that we’ve seen in the last 20 years,” says Graham Barrow, an anti-money laundering expert. “It is an abject failure by the UK government to have done nothing about it.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... ypto-scams

No end in sight, warns Interpol.

‘Highly adaptable’: Asia’s scam crisis grows as criminal gangs find new ways to avoid crackdowns
Published: 4:42pm, 7 Jun, 2023
The end to Asia’s scam crisis is nowhere in sight as criminal gangs adapt to crackdowns by moving operations to new territories and conjure new tricks to solicit money from victims connected by the internet, Interpol warned on Wednesday.

The “scamdemic” which has pulled in tens of thousands of Asians to work – mostly unwittingly – as scam agents, has whipped across the world with West Africans, South Americans and even Europeans pulled into a vortex of crime worth billions of dollars annually to the networks behind it.

It is a two-sided industry, with educated, tech-savvy young workers trafficked into the scamming trade, while victims from Hong Kong to Singapore, Indonesia to China are carefully sifted out via the internet.

The scammers sell bogus romance, ponzi investment schemes or pose as officials to squeeze a target into a money transfer they never get back.
‘Please rescue us’: clock ticks for Indonesian scam victims held by Chinese gang
5 May 2023

Many scam hubs, which typically operate from casino compounds converted during the pandemic years, have now moved from Cambodia beyond the reach of the law into parts of Myanmar and Laos.

“These criminal groups are highly adaptable,” Isaac Espinosa, acting coordinator of Interpol’s Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling unit, told This Week in Asia.

“These are very elastic organisations … Cambodia started taking some action, so they started moving elsewhere to special economic zones and armed group areas. Basically they are constantly changing depending on the response of authorities.”

Interpol has now issued an Orange Notice on the scam trend – a global warning regarding serious and imminent threat to public safety.

Red Notices cover wanted individuals, while Purple Notices cover emerging criminal modus operandi, to help law enforcement across the world quickly identify criminal threats.

With 195 countries signed up – including China, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, four key nations in Asia’s side of the scam industry – Interpol says it has shared information on new scams, a database of criminal suspects and investigative details that could help member nations far apart make an arrest.
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/a ... crackdowns

‘Human trafficking is real’: Dirco warns of international job scams as South Africans get stuck overseas
By SINESIPHO SCHRIEBER - 13 June 2023

International job scams and human trafficking cases seem to be on the rise as more South Africans are duped and get stuck in foreign countries.

Department of international relations and co-operation spokesperson Clayson Monyela this week took to social media to warn of human trafficking as the department received cases of people stuck overseas after falling for fake job adverts.

“I just got a call about a young woman from Limpopo who also fell victim to a job scam (English teacher) in Thailand. Please warn young people in your circles not to fall for these scams,” he said.

Monyela urged job seekers to contact the department before accepting offers from overseas.

His warning came amid reports of SA citizen Xolani Sidwell Fongo allegedly stuck in Cambodia.

Fongo, from Free State, reportedly went to Thailand in November 2022 for a data capturer job which turned out to be a scam.

In a post on Facebook, Fongo said: “I’m stranded in Cambodia and in need of help to be repatriated back home. I was offered a job by the HR agents through my profile on Pnet. They falsely advertised the job to be in Thailand and I ended up in Myanmar (in Asia) and it was operated by the Chinese syndicates.

“I ended up in Cambodia because my visa was not going to be extended in Thailand, I had to leave that country. My visa is expired this side and I really need help to return back.”

The department said it is dealing with the two cases.

Last week, Interpol reported human trafficking cases were on the rise.

“Initially, online scam centres were concentrated in Cambodia, with further trafficking hubs later identified in Laos and Myanmar. Today, trafficking hubs have been identified in at least four more Asian countries, and there is evidence that the modus operandi is being replicated in other regions such as West Africa, where cyber-enabled financial crime is already prevalent,” Interpol said.
https://www.dispatchlive.co.za/news/202 ... -overseas/

FS woman worried about friend stuck in Cambodia after job scam
Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco ) spokesperson Clayson Monyela took to Twitter earlier this week to issue a warning about unsuspecting South Africans being lured overseas with dodgy promises of work.
Bernadette Wicks | 18 June 2023 12:57

JOHANNESBURG - A Free State woman whose friend is apparently stranded in Cambodia after falling victim to an international job scam, said his mother has been beside herself with worry.

Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco ) spokesperson Clayson Monyela took to Twitter earlier this week to issue a warning about unsuspecting South Africans being lured overseas with dodgy promises of work.

This is in response to a post about 29-year-old Zolani Fongo from Theunissen, who apparently went to Thailand last November to take up a job as a data capturer, but wound up being shipped off to Myanmar after his arrival and is now stuck in Cambodia without enough money to get home.

Monyela’s said he referred the case, together with another similar case involving a young woman from Limpopo, to the consular services team.

Fongo's friend, Palesa Moeti, said the saga has taken a toll on his mother.

"They are not taking it very well and his mother even made a lot of debt so he can get places to stay and food while he was still abroad so they couldn't afford to get him a flight ticket."

Moeti said initially Fongo’s loved ones were scared they would never see him again.

They’ve now managed to raise around half of the R30,000 he needs through crowdfunding.

"So I’m feeling much better and his mother is feeling much better too."

Moeti became emotional when asked what her message to her friend was.

"We’ll make sure you come back home safely and we’re still raising funds and we’ll not stop until you come back home and we love you so much and we’re with you."

They’re hoping to have him home by next Tuesday or Wednesday.
https://ewn.co.za/2023/06/18/fs-woman-w ... r-job-scam

Exclusive | Inside the Chinese-run crime hubs of Myanmar that are conning the world: ‘we can kill you here’
From Shwe Kokko to KK Park, a slew of brutal criminal enterprises now dot the Moei River that forms Myanmar’s border with Thailand
Survivors, ensnared by promises of legitimate work, spoke to This Week in Asia of trafficking, torture – and being forced to defraud strangers online
Alastair McCready in Mae Sot, Thailandand Allegra Mendelson in Mae Sot, Thailand
Published: 9:30am, 22 Jul, 2023
[excerpts]
Mechelle Moore, CEO for anti-trafficking NGO Global Alms in Mae Sot, has witnessed a surge in trafficking victims since receiving their first scam-related trafficking referral from Thai police in August last year.
“From there it snowballed,” she said. As of July, the organisation had helped no fewer than 452 people.


Beginning of the end?
While construction along the Moei continues, pressure is building on the scam compounds.

Interpol issued its first global warning on “human trafficking-fuelled fraud” in June, the same month that the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons 2023 report highlighted Thailand’s growing role as a “transit country” for people trafficked to Myanmar for “cyber scam operations” – a reputation Thai authorities likely don’t want, Tower said.

But most telling was a May statement from China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang, calling on Myanmar authorities to crack down on cybercrime in its border areas.

As one of the few remaining patrons of Myanmar’s internationally isolated junta, Beijing’s influence could prove crucial in taking down the scam centres, Tower believes.

On June 6, Thailand shut off electricity to Shwe Kokko, as well as the Lay Kay Kaw area that houses the entirety of KK Park. Much of the border area is supplied with internet and power by Thai-based companies.

While the blackout appears to have made a minimal impact on operations inside the zone, Tower believes it was pushed by Beijing as diplomatic pressure builds on the criminal syndicates.

“If there’s more and more reports coming out about the trafficking of Chinese nationals and Chinese nationals involved in fraud … that’s going to be a loss of face for the Chinese government,” he said.

But until something more is done, the scams will keep spewing out from Myanmar, as ranks of young people from across the world continue to cross the Moei.
SCMP article: https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics ... gn=3228543

I don't know how these educated South Africans believe they'll be offered a high paying job overseas while they're only supporting some shit two year degree from some random college in South Africa... That's the first red flag

August 29, 2023
More than 300 telecom and internet fraud suspects were repatriated to China from Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Laos
Since the beginning of this year, Chinese police have launched joint operations with police forces from the Philippines, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos, and captured more than 300 suspects, China’s Ministry of Public Security said, adding that these cases are still under investigation.

Last week a total of 24 telecom and internet fraud suspects were brought back from Myanmar to China in four days, the Chinese embassy in Myanmar said on Saturday.

At Myanmar’s Yangon International Airport, Myanmar police handed over six suspects to Chinese police on Aug 23, five suspects on Aug 24, eight suspects on Aug 25, and five suspects on Aug 26, respectively, the embassy said.

The suspects, who were detained in Myanmar by the police, allegedly operated telecom fraud targeting people in the Chinese mainland.

An increasing number of telecom fraud organizations have moved their dens out of China to avoid police crackdowns in recent years, China’s Ministry of Public Security has said.
China Daily

Chinese are running new phishing scams across Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand. It’s a scamdemic
China has a history of working with organised crime syndicates to achieve political goals. This time, it has affected Chinese nationals.
Aadil Brar
13 September, 2023 09:31 am IST

After China opened its economy last year, ending its zero Covid policy, an old problem has roared back with a vengeance. Chinese authorities are grappling with the issue of their citizens operating fraudulent schemes from Southeast Asian countries, targeting mainland Chinese residents.

China has a history of collaborating with organised crime syndicates in places like Australia, Canada, and Taiwan, employing criminal groups to achieve political objectives. However, the increasing prevalence of telecom fraud and human trafficking in Myanmar and the Golden Triangle area is now adversely affecting Chinese citizens.

What has been described as ‘scamdemic’ encompasses a series of illicit activities, including human trafficking and online scams. The epicentre of these activities lies in Cambodia and the Golden Triangle area, which overlaps Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos and is notorious for illicit opium production and other criminal activities.
Global threat of human trafficking

Cambodia, particularly Sihanoukville, has long been known as a hub for Chinese nationals engaging in illicit activities, including gambling. However, these scams originating in Cambodia have now reached industrial scale, deterring Chinese tourists from visiting this once-preferred destination.

In June, Interpol issued a warning about online scam centres operating from Cambodia, with networks extending into Laos and Myanmar.

Interpol noted that initially, victims of human trafficking primarily came from Chinese-speaking regions such as China, Malaysia, Thailand, or Singapore. However, victims are now drawn from as far away as Europe and South America, with even Indian nationals falling prey to job scams in Southeast Asian countries.

“What began as a regional crime threat has become a global human trafficking crisis,” said Jürgen Stock, Secretary-General of Interpol.

Interpol is not the only organisation sounding the alarm. In August, the United Nations reported that over 1,00,000 people were trafficked into Cambodia, and 1,20,000 into Myanmar.

In recent months, the Chinese Public Security Bureau has conducted a large-scale crackdown on the scam centres, which appear to have tacit support from the governments in Cambodia and Myanmar.

The Ministry of Public Security has said that it has “intensified the fight against telecom and online fraud” in the “Northern Myanmar and the Golden Triangle, an area that comprises parts of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, are two major hiding places of the fraudsters”.

“Since the beginning of this year, the ministry has dispatched teams to countries including the Philippines, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos for cooperation on international law enforcement, with severe crackdowns on telecom fraud and human trafficking,” said an article in China Daily. The report was subsequently published on the website of China’s Supreme People’s Court.
In full: https://theprint.in/opinion/chinese-are ... c/1759472/