According to a UN report released Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia are forcibly recruited by gangs who force them to engage in online fraud, under threat of torture.
“People who are forced to work are treated inhumanely and are threatened with committing crimes. They are victims. They are not criminals,” Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement.
Many of these people, victims of human trafficking, are subjected to torture or ill-treatment, the UN said, deploring the fact that they are being wrongly identified as criminals and prosecuted or punished instead of being helped.
The size of this network is difficult to calculate, according to the report, due to its clandestine nature and the authorities’ poor response to the problem.
Citing sources believed to be reliable, the UN indicates that in Myanmar at least 120,000 people have been forced into online fraud, and in Cambodia that number is said to be 100,000.
Other countries in the region, including Laos, the Philippines and Thailand, were also identified as key destinations or transit points, with at least tens of thousands of people falling victim to this network.
These control centers, which are responsible for large-scale online crimes, already generate billions of euros in revenue per year, according to the UN.
The report indicates that the abducted people are from countries belonging to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), such as Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, in addition to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and even Africa. and Latin America.
The majority of people trafficked through these fraudulent online networks are men.
These networks benefited from the pandemic, the report explains. The response measures implemented to deal with the health crisis had a significant impact on certain activities, leading to the closure of casinos in many countries.
The pandemic has increased the vulnerability of many migrants stranded in distant lands and unemployed, and widespread lockdowns have increased the number of passive people misled by the internet.
Source: DN
