Online Fraud Relies on a Horrifying Slave Labor Complex
Discussion of cyberfraud tends to focus on people who are cheated out of their money by scammers. But this vastly lucrative industry also relies on the forced labor of those who have been trafficked to work in prisonlike compounds in Southeast Asia.
A group of Chinese nationals who were arrested during a police raid on suspicion of running an online love scam syndicate in Batam, in the Riau Islands province of Indonesia on August 29, 2023. (STR / AFP via Getty Images)
“I don’t trust you. You are one of them, right? You all just want to sell me like some animal.” This was the first message a young Taiwanese woman named Alice (a pseudonym) sent to us when we reached out to her after she was rescued from a scam compound in Sihanoukville, Cambodia.
Like the dozens of other survivors we met in the following months, her harrowing experience had left her unable to trust anyone. In the ensuing two weeks, as we continued to exchange messages, Alice was always on edge.
Penniless and paperless, she was staying in a safe house in Phnom Penh together with other survivors who mostly came from mainland China, waiting to find a way to return home to the small child she had left behind.
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