SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Online scam centers have flourished in Southeast Asia. These are the places where people scam victims into sending them money, usually after they've built up an online relationship with the target, but the people working in these centers are often victims themselves of human trafficking and forced labor. That is the case of some 7,000 people on a border right now between Thailand and Myanmar. They're from all over the world, and they face an uncertain future as governments in the region crack down on these online scam centers. Here to explain is journalist Jan Camenzind Broomby, who joins us from Thailand. Welcome.
JAN CAMENZIND BROOMBY: Thank you for having me.
DETROW: Let's start with that. There are thousands of people stuck in Myanmar. Who are these people, and how did they end up there?
BROOMBY: Well, these really are people from all across the globe. There are dozens of countries represented here. And they're people with language skills, sometimes people with masters educations and Ph.D.s. And many of them, they applied for jobs. They sent in CVs. They had multiple interviews. They even negotiated and signed contracts with HRs all for jobs in Thailand that they thought they were going to be going to but that never actually existed. I spoke to Amy Miller. She works for Acts of Mercy International. It's an NGO that's based on the ground here, and they've been doing work for years trying to get some of these people out of these scam centers once they're in. This is what she explained to me.
AMY MILLER: Often, it starts with them receiving either an ad on Facebook, on Telegram, on WeChat. They go on a website. They go through an interview process that often looks very legitimate. They are given a flight to Bangkok, paid for, and then all of a sudden, they're driven six or eight hours up to our border line.
BROOMBY: And once they're taken up to the border, it's really too late for them essentially. Many of them don't even realize that they've crossed the border until their phone doesn't have any connection and until they're surrounded by militia and by soldiers in Myanmar, and by that time, it's really too late.
DETROW: Who is behind all of this what essentially sounds like human trafficking?
BROOMBY: Myanmar has been in the throes of a civil war ever since the coup that took place in 2021. And in this civil war, we've seen different militia groups that are each holding different areas of control, especially along this Thai-Myanmar border. And it's within this chaos that we've seen largely Chinese organized crime groups that begin to use the disorder for their own benefit. They've been paying millions of dollars to rent land along the border, and in that land, they've been building scam compounds. And these scam compounds house, we think, between 120 and up to 200,000 scam workers that are working there at the moment. Now, so far, it's been a win-win, at least for those on the higher levels. The compound bosses get to run these scams, and they've been raking in billions of dollars in revenue, taking money from unsuspecting victims in the United States, in North Africa, in North America, in Europe and really across the world.
DETROW: And just to help us understand this, are these call centers behind this increased proliferation in random texts that people get? You know, hi - I lost your number. Who are you? Or is it a wide range of different schemes?
BROOMBY: That really is - if you're getting messages like that, that really is one of the playbooks that these scam centers have been operating. Now, there are different scam centers. We think there are up to 70 of them just in the stretch across Mae Sot, the border town that I'm in now, across the 70-kilometer stretch on the other side. And different compounds will have different playbooks and different strategies that they use. But essentially, there are different teams within these scam centers, and each team will be tasked with doing a different job.
Some of them will be tasked with gathering contact information. Others will be tasked with researching people to find people that might have money and could potentially become good victims, victims that will be able to invest a lot of money. Then there are people that reach out and make the initial contact. Those are the kinds of messages that you might receive if there's someone who's told you that they've lost their phone, someone messaging you to say, hello - my name is Ricky. How are you? Then once the victims have been hooked on, once they've been speaking to someone for a while, it moves up the chain of command.
DETROW: Let's get back though to the beginning of this conversation, though, because the people in these call centers, as you have described, seem like victims themselves. They're there under false pretenses. They don't seem to be allowed to leave. What's happened here?
BROOMBY: So what we've seen in the last few weeks really has been a crackdown, and that all happened because a Chinese celebrity was trafficked into one of these camps. It caused an uproar on social media in China, and it pushed the government in Beijing to increase their pressure on the authorities in Thailand. And the Thai authorities in the last few weeks have cut off the electricity supply and cut off the flow of fuel across the border that these scam compounds and the areas around them have been relying on. That's put increasing pressure on the militias that control these grounds, and because of that, we've seen the militias beginning to crack down on the scam centers themselves.
We've seen up to 7,000 people, we think now, released from these scam centers. The problem is that they're now stuck in a limbo position. They aren't able to enter into Thailand yet, and they also aren't being housed in the scam compounds either. And so we've got - we've been hearing reporting - we've been hearing quotes from people telling us that they're living in unsanitary positions, that they're sharing bathrooms between dozens of people, that they haven't been fed enough food, and they're stuck in a limbo until the coordination efforts between the governments can be sorted out and can repatriate them back home.
DETROW: Any sense of what the timeline is for that? I mean, this seems like an untenable situation right now.
BROOMBY: Well, I've spoken to people that have been there for weeks already living in these camps. Some people have been able to leave. We have seen flights leaving from Thailand, flying people back to Indonesia, flying people back to China. But for the people that remain stuck in these compounds, their fate really is unknown, and it's still up in the air. And it's a big logistical challenge to sort this out as well. We are expecting a militia group essentially to function as a civil service to engage with other countries that don't have diplomatic relations or don't have embassies in Thailand.
DETROW: I'm curious, based on your reporting on this, do you think these crackdowns will continue, and the amount of these scams will go down? Or do you think this is something that could pop up somewhere else or resurface in one way or another pretty soon?
BROOMBY: For the militia groups, this really has been one of the best ways for them to make money in recent years. They need the money to fund their ongoing civil war. They need the money to fund the food and the resources that their citizens need in the areas that they control. And so I think it's highly unlikely that we're going to see these scam centers shut down altogether. We've heard also from people that are still working in the scam centers as we speak, some of them handcuffed to their desks to prevent them from leaving. So the scams really are continuing. For the 7,000 people that are now stuck in limbo, they may eventually be able to go home, but there are still upwards of 100,000 people stuck working in these scam centers in Myanmar.
DETROW: That is journalist Jan Camenzind Broomby reporting from Thailand. Thank you so much.
BROOMBY: Thank you.
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