Governments outside Southeast Asia have a fundamental role in tackling cyber-slavery in the region.
That is the wider lesson from the arrests in India earlier this month of three Indian men suspected of trafficking young Indian graduates to Cambodia, where they found themselves trapped as cyber-slaves. The arrests followed investigative reporting on the case from The News Minute in India.
As in many previous cases, the seven victims from Kerala in southern India were not told that they were going to Cambodia. They were misled into thinking they would be taking legitimate jobs in Thailand. Once in Bangkok, they were transferred across the border to their real destination.
The graduates found themselves trapped in a remote compound where they were tortured and forced to work for between 13 and 15 hours per day, using prepared scripts to try to defraud people online. The group was able to escape and reach the Indian embassy in Cambodia while being moved between compounds. They believe that they were in imminent danger of death had they not escaped.
Cyber-slavery compounds are known to operate in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Dubai. The centers are operated by the Chinese Mafia and were originally manned mainly by Chinese nationals. Online scamming has much greater money-making potential if English-speaking financial victims globally can be targeted, so the operations have increasingly sought to recruit English speakers. According to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a conservative estimate of the annual value of funds stolen worldwide by cyber-slavery syndicates operated by the Chinese Mafia is $64 billion.
English speakers from African countries such as Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa are known to have been trapped into working in the compounds, and the victims from southern India in Cambodia found themselves alongside cyber-slaves from Pakistan and Bangladesh.
India has acted faster than many other countries to address the problem, posting warning signs at its airports on the dangers of traveling to Southeast Asia for work with unknown employers. In March, India rescued about 250 of its trapped nationals from Cambodia.
This form of human trafficking is difficult to deal with because destination countries, such as Cambodia, tend to have “either a low interest or a low capacity” to tackle the problem, says Michael Brosowski, founder of the Blue Dragon anti-slavery NGO in Vietnam.
Like India, Vietnam has been active in detecting and dismantling human trafficking rings that take people into Cambodia and other countries for forced online scamming, Brosowski says. “By using intelligence gained from people who have been rescued or escaped, governments can put together cases that are strong enough for prosecution,” he says.
The scripts and tactics being used in the compounds are constantly evolving. The strategy often used is to win the confidence of people who want to start a new relationship online and then trick them into making a crypto-currency payment. That imaginary world has now gone stale after heavy international media coverage, so new narratives are needed.
The Kerala victims reported that they would telephone people in India to try to get credit card numbers by falsely claiming that the card had been misused. The scam-compound operators went as far as creating rooms designed to look like the inside of an Indian police station. The slaves would be dressed as Indian police officers and would make video calls from the rooms.
They would impersonate real Indian police officers with identities that could be checked online, with artificial intelligence tools being used to replicate the face of the Indian officer. A picture of Mahatma Gandhi on the wall behind them completed the illusion.
The operations in Cambodia enjoy the highest levels of official protection. The LYP Group and its owner Ly Yong Phat were sanctioned by the U.S. in September for their role in forced criminality in Cambodia’s cyber-scam compounds. Ly Yong Phat is a permanent member of the Central Committee of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and an advisor to both Prime Minister Hun Manet and his father Hun Sen.
No one has ever been arrested for operating a cyber-slavery compound in Cambodia. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reported in late September that the country has started to conceal the identities of foreigners who buy Cambodian passports, which makes it much easier for criminals to enter the country and operate with impunity. Police “raids” on the compounds are largely for show, and those who are “rescued” by the police are often simply sold back to the compounds.
This means that the governments of the origin countries that supply the people who become slaves need to be much more proactive in tackling the issue. Dismantling the local trafficking gangs in the host country must become an urgent priority. There’s a need for more thorough vetting and licensing of recruitment agencies to separate traffickers posing as legitimate recruitment consultants. Information campaigns warning against the dangers of traveling to the region on the promise of a job need to be stepped up.
Even more fundamental is the need to rethink attitudes to those who have survived cyber-slavery. Governments for too long have been tempted to write off their experiences as simply a piece of bad luck while visiting Southeast Asia, or to criminalize the former cyber-slaves. On a human level, these victims need support to resume their lives and reintegrate into society. They can also provide priceless information about the compounds which pose a threat to everyone.