Hooked by the promise of money

It was May 25 this year, an otherwise normal day, that Lin Ping received a shocking WeChat message from her 19-year-old son Xiaowei, saying he and a friend had been “tricked and sold to Myanmar,” pleading for her to seek help from the Chinese police.

In the frantic messages that followed, Xiaowei said he had been lured by the promise of a job transporting raw jade stones in Xishuangbanna, in southwest China’s Yunnan province.

But upon arrival, he had been kidnapped and smuggled to neighbouring Myanmar, where he was forced to work for an online and telecom scam operation located in a compound in Kokang in northern Shan State, a hotbed of cybercrime activity.

Lin, a resident of Baishan city in northeast China’s Jilin province, said she had contacted the gang holding Xiaowei in August through an intermediary, who told her 450,000 yuan (RM290,000) would buy her son’s freedom. But it was far more than she could afford.

Lin has had no subsequent contact with Xiaowei since Sept 4, with the silence instead punctuated by photos sent to her phone of him being beaten by his captors, apparently because he failed to achieve their targets in terms of illicit gains from cyber scams.

Xiaowei is just one victim of organised cybercrime gangs operating across South-East Asia and China’s southern borders in countries that have enslaved hundreds of thousands of people and netted tens of billions of dollars in profits stolen from unsuspecting victims of their scams.

The situation is getting worse. Cybercrime scams and the related kidnappings have exploded since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent economic downturn fuelled the number of such crimes, including love scams, bogus investment pitches and illegal gambling schemes.

Scammers operating in one unnamed South-East Asian country are estimated to be generating between US$7.5bil and US$12.5bil (RM35.5bil and RM59.2bil), or half the value of that country’s GDP, according to a report late last month by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Such online and telecom scams involve not only fooling unsuspecting people into transferring money, but also establishing an entire grey industrial chain designed to support the illicit enterprise, which includes the theft and resale of personal information, human smuggling, forging of official documents and other crimes.

Telecom fraud inevitably gives rise to a new form of human trafficking, whereby criminal groups extract benefits from both trafficking people and through the use of the victims they traffic to exploit others, said Jian Kunyi, a law professor at the Yunnan University of Finance and Economics..

The United Nations in an August report said criminal gangs have forced hundreds of thousands of people in South-East Asia into participating in unlawful online scam operations.

At least 120,000 people in Myanmar and roughly 100,000 in Cambodia “may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams,” according to the report.

People trafficked into the online scam operations often face a range of serious violations and abuses, including threats to their safety and security; and many have been subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, according to the UN report.

Over the past few years as the scale of the problem has exploded, Chinese nationals have become a primary target of criminal syndicates, who use Chinese facilitators that employ scams, kidnapping, or human trafficking to entrap their victims abroad, China’s top procuratorate said in September.

They recruit victims by enticing them overseas with the promise of non-existent high-paying jobs or through people smuggling pipelines, then detain them illegally in foreign countries, forcing them to engage in online frauds and scams, according to China’s Ministry of Public Security.

But Chinese aren’t just the victims of these crimes, they also are often the perpetrators.

A Chinese national living in Cambodia who has been assisting authorities to rescue trafficked people said that many of the online gambling and telecom fraud operations in Cambodia are run by Chinese nationals.

In late September, more than 150 Chinese nationals suspected of such scams were deported from Indonesia as part of Beijing’s international crackdown. — The Straits Times/ANN