Hundreds of thousands of people are forcibly recruited in Southeast Asia by gangs who force them to practice Internet fraud, often under pain of torture, according to a UN report released Tuesday.
“People forced to work in these frauds suffer inhumane treatment while being forced to commit crimes. They are victims. They are not criminals,” said the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, in a press release. .
Many of these people who are victims of human trafficking are, among other things, subjected to torture or ill-treatment, according to the UN, which regrets that they have been wrongly identified as criminals and subjected to criminal proceedings or sanctions instead of being protected. .
The magnitude of this network is difficult to estimate, according to the report, due to its clandestine nature and the gaps in the response from the authorities.
However, citing credible sources, the UN claimed that at least 120,000 people were forced to commit Internet fraud in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and about 100,000 people in Cambodia.
Other countries in the region, including Laos, the Philippines and Thailand, were also identified as top destination or transit countries, where at least tens of thousands of people were stranded.
According to the UN, these large-scale Internet scam centers generate several billion dollars in revenue each year.
The report indicates that the people detained by the gangs come from countries belonging to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and even Africa and Latin America.
The majority of people trafficked through these fraudulent internet networks are men. These networks took advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic, the report explains. The response measures implemented to combat the health crisis had a considerable impact on certain activities, causing in particular the closure of casinos in many countries.
These activities have moved to less regulated regions, such as conflict-affected border areas, but also to the Internet.
At the same time, the pandemic has increased the vulnerability of many migrants, who have been left stranded in countries far from their homes and made unemployed, while widespread lockdowns have increased the number of people online likely to be taken in by these gangs.
Source: TSF
