Q&A-'Scammers are winning': Rescuing trafficked cyber-scam victims

LONDON - Although the lid has been lifted on the brutal conditions in cyber-scam compounds across Southeast Asia, rescuing victims is still complicated and made ever more difficult because of U.S. aid cuts, says a leading expert.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked by criminal gangs to scam centres in recent years, the United Nations has said, where they have been forced to contact people via social media and messaging apps to lure them into making fraudulent investments, a scheme known as "pig butchering."

Making the most of a pandemic-induced economic malaise, criminal gangs have duped workers from as far as Ethiopia and India to go to Southeast Asia, promising them worthwhile employment opportunities.

Ling Li, a PhD candidate researching technology-facilitated modern slavery at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, used to work as a consultant with development charity Winrock Cambodia and has rescued detainees in Cambodia and Myanmar since 2020.

Families are desperate to get their loved ones home, she said, recounting the tale of a Chinese mother who jumped out of a seventh-floor window in despair a few months ago unable to raise the money to buy her 18-year-old son's release.

Traumatised, Li withdrew from the case and she does not know whether the mother or her trafficked son survived.

Efforts to tackle this multibillion-dollar industry have been dealt a blow since President Donald Trump gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development - one of the leading donors tackling trafficking in the region, anti-trafficking groups say.

Li said charities are having to turn rescued detainees away from their shelters due to funding cuts and that the scam industry is booming.

In an interview with Context, she told us about her continued rescue work through EOS Collective, the anti-trafficking group she recently co-founded.

How do you rescue trafficked cyber scam victims?

Family members find us through social media so we talk to them through their families.

In Cambodia, we help the victim fill a form and advise them on how they can ask the Cambodian police to do the rescue.

They can also choose to jump out of a window and we can send a car to pick them up - they have to figure out which floor is safest for them. Sometimes in these cases we can help them with a shelter and apply for paperwork to get home.

They can also pay a ransom. There are middlemen who are sometimes able to negotiate the price with the 'scam boss' to try to make it as low as possible.

On the Myanmar side, we also do some rescues, but people trying to escape always have to pay.

What are conditions like inside these centres?

They work 14 to 16 hours a day and they have KPIs (key performance indicators).

Take 'pig-butchering'; they are told they have to engage with three people per day. If they cannot meet the KPI then a 'good' compound will ask them to work longer hours. (In) the bad ones, of course, there are beatings.

If you have several days where you don't (meet the targets), you can be locked in a dark room and deprived of food.

What happens to trafficking victims once they are rescued?

We help them find a place at a shelter, with legal aid, repatriation and prepare them for victim identification.

When we had funding, if they were identified as being a victim, we would be able to connect them with organisations like Winrock to request support to pay for their flight ticket home.

For people who jumped out of windows, we can get medical support for them.

Also if they go back to China for example, and they have a certificate from Cambodia identifying them as a victim, then Chinese law enforcement will consider this and might not punish them for criminal activity.

What impact have US aid cuts had on your work?

We don't have the resources to do rescues (properly) anymore. If we rescue them, what do we do after that?

When they get out, shelters don't have any capacity.

So we have to send them to immigration detention. We have to tell the family members, 'I understand that he was beaten, I understand he was trafficked, but he has to (go to) jail. That's the only way'.

In our monitoring work, we see so many new scam compounds being built along the borders of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, in just these (past) few months.

The scammers are winning the game.   

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

(Reporting by Lin Taylor, Editing by Ana Nicolaci da Costa.)