They were promised scholarships and tech jobs. Instead, these young people ended up in scam factories in Southeast Asia, where they were forced to defraud strangers or face torture. Now, two dozen victims have been freed from slavery to tell their own stories.
Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) has rescued and repatriated 23 young Nigerians who were trafficked to Thailand and other Southeast Asian nations and coerced into committing cyber-enabled crimes, in what is described as a disturbing evolution of human trafficking.
Authorities involved in the operation revealed that the youths, mostly educated and computer-literate, were lured abroad with promises of scholarships and lucrative employment that never materialized.
Instead, they were trafficked to countries including Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand and were compelled to carry out romance scams, cryptocurrency fraud and fake investment schemes targeting victims primarily in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Ethiopia in industrial-scale operations.
“The traffickers go after boys and girls who have one skill or the other, preferably computer and IT skills,” said NAPTIP Director-General Binta Adamu Bello, calling the trend “a new dimension of the human trafficking phenomenon.”
“On arrival in the destination country, the victims are trained in various scamming methods. Some of them are enrolled in language schools, preferably to learn Chinese, and within a short time graduate as translators and are offered the role of customer care agents to deceive their targets,” said Bello.
Once trained, Bello said that the victims were housed in hostels, provided with all the necessary gadgets and monitored by mafia-like enforcers who imposed strict quotas for fraudulent activity.
Those who failed to meet daily targets were reportedly tortured. Some recruits said that those who refused to comply were either killed or suffered organ harvesting, particularly among younger victims with no history of smoking or drinking.
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The rescue operation was carried out by NAPTIP in collaboration with civil society partners, such as Myanmar’s Eden, with support from the British government, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok, which helped facilitate travel documentation and emergency travel certificates for some victims.
The NAPTIP operation reflects a broader trend in Southeast Asia, where scam centres and “fraud factories” have enticed job seekers from across the world into deceptive employment offers only to force them into cybercrime.
In fact, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) estimates that hundreds of thousands of individuals are held in such operations across Southeast Asia, enduring coercion and abuse while being forced to commit online scams and fraud.
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