PHOP PHRA: At a scam compound in Myanmar, Filipina worker Pieta had just days to romance strangers online and trick them into investing in a fake business – failing which she would be beaten or tortured with electric shocks.
Pieta was one of 260 people – many visibly injured or bruised – rescued from an illicit centre along the Myanmar border this week and handed over to Thailand, following a series of crackdowns on the illegal operations.
Advertisement (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});Scam compounds have mushroomed in Myanmar’s borderlands and are staffed by foreigners, sometimes trafficked and forced to work, swindling people around the world in an industry analysts say is worth billions of dollars.
Pieta, a pseudonym to protect her identity, thought she was accepting a job in Thailand that paid $1,500 a month when she left the Philippines six months ago.
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“If we didn’t reach the target, we were beaten up... (or given) electric shocks,” she told AFP from a holding centre in Phop Phra, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) south of Thailand’s Mae Sot after the rescuees were taken by boat across a small border river on Wednesday.
Advertisement (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});“I’m just going to cry. Oh my God. I’m so happy... that I left that place,” she said, adding that enforced squats – sometimes up to 1,000 – were also meted out as punishment.
The 260 foreign nationals – among thousands allegedly lured into the notorious cyberscam centres with promises of high-paying jobs before they are effectively held hostage – came from over a dozen countries including Ethiopia, Brazil and Nepal.
Advertisement (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});AFP spoke to some of them under the condition of anonymity. Many bore signs of physical abuse, including one woman who had huge bruises on her left arm and thigh and said she had been electrocuted.
Liu, one of 10 Chinese nationals rescued, described gory methods his Chinese bosses inflicted as punishment.
He told AFP that he saw one worker having his face rubbed into a metal grate on the floor until he bled to death – a claim AFP is unable to verify.
“So many were beaten to death, it was so bloody,” he said.
Scam centres have proliferated across Southeast Asia in recent years, including the Philippines, where police this week rescued 34 Indonesians from a Manila compound.
Chinese supervisors there had allegedly stripped them of their passports and said they would be moved to a new site in Cambodia against their will.
Gilberto Cruz, of the Philippines’ anti-organised crime commission, told AFP Friday that about 21,000 Chinese nationals who had worked for now-banned offshore gaming centres continued to operate smaller-scale scam operations in the country.
Thai officials said the Kyauk Khet centre is also run by Chinese nationals and first appeared on the other side of the Moei River in 2019, although it is still under construction.