GENEVA, July 31 — Human trafficking for forced criminal activity is growing at an alarming rate, with hundreds of thousands of people trapped in online scamming centres across South-east Asia, the United Nations said Wednesday.
Too often, instead of getting help, victims are arrested for crimes they were forced to commit, the head of the UN’s migration agency said on World Day Against Trafficking in Persons.
“Trafficking is a human rights crisis, but it’s more than that. It’s a massive global business that fuels corruption, spreads fear, and prays on the most vulnerable,” Amy Pope said.
Her International Organization for Migration agency has witnessed trafficking for forced crime expand with “alarming” speed, she said.
“Right now, across South-east Asia, hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in online scamming compounds,” the IOM chief said.
“These operations bring in an estimated US$40 billion (RM170 billion) a year, and many of those trapped are migrants, young jobseekers, children, and people with disabilities.”
She said the Geneva-based IOM had helped nearly 3,000 victims rebuild their lives since 2022.
The agency has helped bring people home from the Philippines and Vietnam and supported victims in Thailand, Myanmar, and beyond, Pope said.
But she warned that far more remained stranded.
“To make matters worse, instead of getting help, they’re often arrested, prosecuted, and punished. Let me be clear: no-one should be jailed for something they were forced to do,” she said.
She urged governments and civil society to step up and get national laws changed so that trafficking survivors could be protected rather than punished — and urged authorities to go after the traffickers rather than those they exploit.
Myanmar’s many-sided civil war — sparked by a 2021 coup — has enabled the rapid growth of lucrative internet fraud factories established in its loosely governed borderlands.
Cyberscam operations lure foreign workers with promises of high-paying jobs but hold them hostage and force them to commit online fraud. Many of the trafficking victims are Chinese men.
Many people have said they were trafficked into often heavily fortified scam compounds to target victims with romance or business scams on social media, luring them into making untraceable cryptocurrency payments. — AFP
