GENEVA (AFP): The United Nations has called on governments to clamp down on scam centres, which have mushroomed in South-East Asia with hundreds of thousands of people trafficked into forced labour.
The UN human rights office released a report documenting torture, sexual abuse, forced abortions, food deprivation, solitary confinement and other abuses.
"The litany of abuse is staggering and at the same time heart-breaking," said UN rights chief Volker Turk, urging governments to act against corruption that is "deeply entrenched in such lucrative scamming operations, and to prosecute the criminal syndicates behind them".
His office had said in a 2023 report that hundreds of thousands of people were forced to work in the centres, which other investigations have found are responsible for billions of dollars of online fraud.
The new update said satellite imagery and reports from the ground showed that nearly three-quarters of the scam operations were in the Mekong region and have spread to some Pacific island countries, South Asia, Gulf states, West Africa and the Americas.
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Based on accounts from victims, police, and civil society groups, the report said forced labourers were held in immense compounds resembling self-contained towns, made up of heavily fortified multi-storey buildings with barbed wire-topped walls and armed guards.
"The treatment endured by individuals within the context of scam operations is alarming," the report said, based on interviews with people trafficked into scam centres in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates between 2021 and 2025.
"A victim from Sri Lanka related how those who failed to meet monthly scamming targets were subject to immersion in water containers (known as 'water prisons') for hours," the report said.
"Victims also recounted being forced to witness or even conduct grave abuse of others as a means to ensure compliance; one Bangladeshi victim said that he was ordered to beat other workers and a victim from Ghana recounted being forced to watch his friend being beaten in front of him."
A Vietnamese woman told how she was starved for a week after trying to escape.
People said police and border guards were sometimes complicit in the scam centres.
The UN said many of the forced labourers were wrongly treated as criminals once freed.
The victims "require coordinated timely, safe and effective rescue operations... as well as available support mechanisms to ensure torture and trauma rehabilitation," Turk said.
Senior human rights officer Pia Oberoi, one of the report's authors, said they had looked at why people were still falling for scam centres' fraudulent recruitment, years after their existence came to light.
She said many people sucked into scam centre recruitment felt they had few options.
"Survivors told us that they were under severe economic pressures," with some trying to pay off family debts, she told a press conference.
Nearly three-quarters reported being recruited through someone they trusted.
Oberoi called for better oversight of online recruitment by the social media platforms that host the job postings. -- AFP
