By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-23 00:31:37 | Updated at 2025-01-23 03:57:33
3 hours ago
University graduate Ariyan* is still haunted by his trip to Thailand last summer.
The 25-year-old could not have imagined his visit to the country to start a new job would include a terrifying journey to an unknown location in cars loaded with guns and armed guards.
Soon after landing in Bangkok, he and a few friends were whisked away to a compound deep in the mountains of Myanmar’s Kayin state, just across the border from Thailand.
Their ordeal started with the offer of a supposedly lucrative data entry job for a Chinese construction company in Thailand. But the job offer was a scam.
Like thousands of others, including Hongkongers, they had been lured to Southeast Asia for forced labour, where their job was to swindle people across the globe in so-called scam farms, offering everything from get-rich-quick schemes to fake romance online.
“When we said we didn’t want to work here, we wanted to go back, at this moment, the Chinese [man] was very angry. He took out an electric shock machine and touched our bodies for an electric shock for like 10 seconds,” recalled Ariyan, a Bangladeshi.
The plight of victims such as Ariyan – and the shady and often violent operations of scam farms run by criminal syndicates in lawless areas of countries such as Myanmar and Cambodia – has again been thrust into the spotlight by the recent high-profile rescue of mainland Chinese actor Wang Xing.
