11 pregnant women at Thai-Myanmar border among hundreds in limbo after scams crackdown

Eleven pregnant women are among the more than 2,400 people stuck in limbo on after being pulled out of illicit scam compounds in Myanmar and are in urgent need of medical treatment in Thailand, a civil society group said on Friday.

The 11 women are being kept in a camp with harsh living conditions, scant healthcare and insufficient food for them, said Jay Kritiya, a coordinator for the Citizens Network for Human Trafficking Victims.

“There were 12 women who are three to four months pregnant,” Jay said. “One of them had a miscarriage two days ago.”

Thailand is fronting a regional effort to dismantle scam centres along its borders, which are part of a Southeast Asian fraud network across multiple countries that generate billions of dollars from scams every year, often using people trafficked by criminal gangs, according to the United Nations.

Thailand has for weeks been coordinating efforts to repatriate 7,372 people of about 20 different nationalities from the Myanmar scam operations, many of them to China.

Thailand’s foreign ministry on Friday said more than 2,400 were still at the border waiting to be returned to their home countries.