Organised criminals use threats, torture and sexual violence to coerce victims to work in international scamming operations
Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked and forced to work for online scamming operations in south-east Asia run by criminal gangs, according toBillions of dollars are being generated each year by gangs who coerce victims into cybercrime, where they are subject to threats, torture and sometimes sexual violence, said the report, published by the UN human rights office on Tuesday., while tens of thousands more people are being forced to work in Laos, the Philippines and Thailand.
Many of those involved are skilled and multilingual, lured by the promise of jobs in programming. But they ended up in guarded compounds with their passports and phones seized. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said countries trying to crack down on scamming operations should remember that people working in them are victims rather than criminals, who “endure inhumane treatment while being forced to carry out crimes”.Asia Pacific“It’s so incredibly lucrative that there is very little political will to address this holistically.
The report said the phenomenon had grown since the Covid pandemic, when casinos were closed and the criminal gangs operating them moved into less regulated spaces, such as cryptocurrency fraud and illegal gambling. It said many of the victims were migrants who lost their jobs during the pandemic and were unable to move because of lockdowns.
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