Shady, violent operations of Southeast Asian scam farms back in spotlight

University graduate Ariyan* is still haunted by his trip to Thailand last summer.

The 25-year-old could not have imagined his visit to the country to start a new job would include a terrifying journey to an unknown location in cars loaded with guns and armed guards.

Soon after landing in Bangkok, he and a few friends were whisked away to a compound deep in the mountains of Myanmar’s Kayin state, just across the border from Thailand.

Their ordeal started with the offer of a supposedly lucrative data entry job for a Chinese construction company in Thailand. But the job offer was a scam.

Like thousands of others, including Hongkongers, they had been lured to Southeast Asia for forced labour, where their job was to swindle people across the globe in so-called scam farms, offering everything from get-rich-quick schemes to fake romance online.

“When we said we didn’t want to work here, we wanted to go back, at this moment, the Chinese [man] was very angry. He took out an electric shock machine and touched our bodies for an electric shock for like 10 seconds,” recalled Ariyan, a Bangladeshi.

The plight of victims such as Ariyan – and the shady and often violent operations of scam farms run by criminal syndicates in lawless areas of countries such as Myanmar and Cambodia – has again been thrust into the spotlight by the recent high-profile rescue of mainland Chinese actor Wang Xing.