It was a tough and hard experience for 10 Filipino victims of human trafficking in Myanmar scam centers, from where they were lured with fake offers of high-paying jobs and forced to work without pay. They suffered threats and abuse and became desperate to get home. They recently contacted the Preda Foundation, a child protection and anti-trafficking organization in Olongapo City. Four of them have escaped from the scam center. Preda is in contact with the Philippine Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) and lawyer Don Albert Philippe C. Pangcog, the labor attaché at the Migrant Workers Office in Bangkok who has been helping many Filipinos escape the scam centers in Myanmar and those in the Thai processing centers to return to the Philippines.
After they escaped, the 10 Filipinos were advised by Col. Dominador Matalang at the Bangkok Embassy to cross from Myanmar to Thailand, and four did so. Thai authorities have ruled that they are not trafficking victims, as they had not been beaten. The Philippine Embassy will do all it can to pay the fines levied by the Thai authorities and free them from custody. That is 20,000 baht for each person, which equals to P34,062.96. The embassy has already booked flights for them.
Pangcog will help them as he has helped recently the return of 16 Filipinos from the same scam centers as announced last Feb. 18, 2025. They, too, had been recruited by human traffickers online and lured with promises of high-paying professional jobs in Thailand but ended up detained in forced labor centers in Myanmar. Social media is filled with fake offers from criminal recruiters posing as legitimate employers but are, in fact, human traffickers.
Like other victims of human trafficking, they were instructed by their would-be “employers” through Facebook and mobile phone to get tourist visas when they landed in Thailand. They were picked up by a van after they exited the airport and driven for many hours to the north of Thailand. They became agitated and worried when they were led to a boat and crossed the river into Myanmar.
There, they were confined in a scam center building where many other English-speaking people from different countries were forced to work at a computer or mobile phone, scamming rich people in Western countries. The trafficking victims had a quota to earn money for the criminal syndicate that operated the center. They received threats if they missed their quota. They were forced to work for up to 20 hours a day setting up so-called romantic relationships with rich foreigners in Western countries. Other trafficking survivors were forced to sell cryptocurrency online and do money laundering and online illegal gambling.
They were forced to work without rest and were beaten with PVC sticks and subjected to electric shocks. Unable to leave without paying $15,000, they escaped and ran away and were assisted by an ethnic militia group to cross back into Thailand. About 250 survivors of different nationalities were received by Thai authorities after crossing from Myanmar’s Karen State. They walked to freedom at the border with Thailand at Phop Phra. After processing by the Thai authorities, they were brought to Bangkok and flown home to Manila. Hopefully, more trafficking survivors will be helped also.
There is no government authority in this region of Myanmar. When its military ended democracy and took over the government in a February 2021 coup, a resistance movement began. The many ethnic groups of armed fighters bravely fought the military and controlled a large part of Myanmar. However, other ethnic groups choose to take the opportunity to make money by protecting Chinese criminal syndicates running scam centers in enclaves in Myanmar. “The reason that this crime is thriving is that it’s operating in areas of absolute impunity,” said Andrew Wasuwongse, Thailand country director of the anti-trafficking organization International Justice Mission.
When the Covid-19 pandemic, these enclaves lost their Chinese illegal gambling customers, and they turned to online scams, online extortion, romantic scams and fraud and other crimes, earning billions of dollars, according to one researcher. For this, they needed English-speaking scammers and recruited Filipinos, among others.
Fortune Magazine said that “by June 2023, Interpol was warning that what began as a “regional crime threat” had morphed into a “global human trafficking crisis.” Later that year, it reported that law enforcement agencies had “rescued” people from 22 countries who had been trafficked into Myanmar.
The Filipinos and other trafficked foreigners found one of the several armed militias, the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA), when they escaped the scam center. They were turned over to the Thai authorities. They earn huge revenue from the criminal gangs that operate the scam centers and provide protection, and they allow the victims of human trafficking to be used in forced labor.
Recently, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra had a high-level meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and decisions were made for action to eliminate the scam compounds and scam business in Myanmar. China will do all it can to bring the Chinese citizens running the syndicates to justice. The Thai government has reportedly cut the Thai electricity power line to the scam towns and strengthened the rules for money transfer through Thai banks, and promised to implement stricter visa rules to control the flow of trafficking victims. Human trafficking is slavery in the world today. That age-old crime is with us in greater numbers than ever before. There were an estimated 150,000 known people victimized by traffickers in 2022 and many thousands more that will never be known.
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This column was first published in The Sunday Times (www.manilatimes.net) on March 9, 2025. Print, digital, and online republication of this column without the written consent of the author and of The Manila Times is strictly forbidden.
