Sewing machines are not needed in Thailand’s sweatshops. Up to 100,000 victims of human trafficking could be held in compounds in Myanmar, Thai police are warning, forced to operate round-the-clock cybercrime campaigns via workstations and call centers set up there.
Thai Police General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, director of the Anti-Human Trafficking Center, reported that tens of thousands of kidnapped people are being held in captivity and forced to work the scams, which are run by 30 to 40 Chinese criminal gangs. The cybermill activities could include social engineering, running fake gaming sites, or working on cryptomining, among other things.[1]
Recently, Thai police said they have instituted a crackdown on the illegal centers, which are clustered along its border with Myanmar by cutting off electricity and fuel supplies to the sites. It's working; Thailand expects to receive 7,000 victims in a first wave of releases from capitulating scam sites in the coming weeks, with more to come in the next few months. The victims will be sent to the Thai side of the border, screened, and then sent back to their home country, according to the Thai police.
The phenomenon was discovered in 2023, when Interpol announced "Operation Storm Makers II," a coordinated effort among 27 individual Asian countries targeting cyber-fraud operations engaging in human trafficking. It noted that victims are usually promised well-paying jobs across Southeast Asia, but are instead robbed of their passports and phones, and forced to "commit online fraud at an industrial scale, while enduring abject physical abuse," according to Interpol's announcement at the time.
Many of the captives appear to have been beaten or tortured into submission, with escapees often displaying bruising and burn marks. "Some syndicates use violence to control people ... when you say, 'I don't want to work here anymore,'" Thatchai said. "But the syndicate has already invested in them [by paying for] the ticket for the transportation, for the cost of living."
A subsequent United Nations report revealed the scope of the activities toward the end of 2023: The efforts were generating billions of dollars from the forced labor of about 120,000 victims being held in Myanmar and another 100,000 in Cambodia. Thousands more, meanwhile, are trapped in Laos, the Philippines, and Thailand, it added.
There have been a few anemic moves to cut off the activity, such as the US sanctioning a Cambodian businessman last year for his involvement in some of the cyber sweatshops. But the trafficking has shown no signs of letting up, and the Thai police effort appears to be the biggest and most disruptive operation targeting the situation to date.
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[1] https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/thailand-cyber-sweatshops-free-captives
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