Two Taiwanese men have been sentenced to two years in jail each after they staged a fake kidnapping from a Cambodian seaside resort and posted video of it online, a court said.
Chen Neng-chuan, 31, and Lu Tsu-hsien, 34, were apprehended after posting footage of themselves being detained and assaulted by security guards in Sihanoukville on Facebook.
“Both men had entered Cambodia to produce slanderous videos related to human trafficking, detention with torture, rape and selling human organs,” the Preah Sihanouk provincial court said in a statement.
The court found them guilty on charges of “incitement to cause chaos to social security” at a trial on Thursday. It sentenced them to two years in jail each and ordered them to pay a combined fine of about US$2,000 (RM9,560), the statement added.
The provincial government said the men produced videos with “fake content that affects the honour, order, and security” of the province.
Extensive reporting by AFP and other media has documented thousands of people – mostly Chinese, but some from Taiwan and other countries – lured to centres to operate online scams fleecing victims for large sums.
Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) said one of the men live-streamed a video on Monday night in which he claimed to have broken into a “scam park”, where he was chased and beaten up by unseen attackers, while a second video shows him claiming to have escaped.
In the second video he shows injuries and describes being robbed, tied up, beaten and assaulted, CNA said.
In August, the United Nations warned that hundreds of thousands of people are being coerced in South-East Asia by criminal gangs into carrying out online scams, often under the threat of torture.
Many have been trafficked into working in online criminality and face serious violations such as torture or sexual violence, the UN said in a report. — AFP
