In Thai villages, Chinese gangs recruit desperate for phone scams
Thai police say they have rescued some 700 Thais held against their will by Chinese gangs in Cambodia
The brokers arrived with promises of high-paying online sales jobs in Poipet, a Cambodian border town just an hour’s drive from Teerapat and Dao’s home in eastern Thailand, Qazet.az reports.
After more than two years of pandemic-induced poverty, Teerapat and Dao were willing to take virtually any work away from their remote, rural village.
But by the next day, the couple began to realise they had made a terrible mistake.
After being driven deep across the border to the crime-ridden Cambodian beach town of Sihanoukville, Teerapat and Dao allege that they were ordered to stay inside a guarded 12-storey compound where Chinese “bosses” laid out their instructions via an interpreter.
Their “job” quickly revealed itself as a scam, according to interviews with the pair and corroborating police information.
Instead of online sales, Teerapat and Dao say they were directed to make unsolicited phone calls posing as customs officers, policemen or potential investors looking to secure a bank transfer.
The couple allege they were each expected to scam at least 500,000 baht ($15,000) every month along with dozens of others at the compound, all the while facing the threat of being sold to another gang if they failed to make the numbers.
“I normally don’t trust people easily,” Teerapat told Al Jazeera, speaking under an alias for fear of reprisals.
“But we were both desperate for money so when the broker said we could make up to $2,000 a month – with everything paid for, transport and room and board – we were convinced.”
“Had I known that my job was to scam other Thais, I would have never gone,” Teerapat added.
Thai police say there could be more than 1500 Thais trapped in Sihanoukville, held against their will by the scam gangs.
Two dozen of them were rescued on Sunday from a 10-storey townhouse sealed behind razor wire and covered by security cameras, according to Thai authorities, following a long negotiation between Thai police who travelled to Cambodia and a group of Chinese men.
“With our Cambodian counterparts we have managed to rescue 700 Thais in total so far,” Lieutenant General Surachate Hakparn, a senior Thai police officer, said in a statement. “We’ve issued human trafficking warrants for international organised gangs as well as prosecuted brokers who smuggled Thais through illegal border crossings into Cambodia.”
Media reports from across Southeast Asia allege hundreds of Malaysians, Filipinos and Indonesians have also been lured to Cambodia by organised crime groups based in and around Sihanoukville, a city notorious for its lawless reputation, casinos and Chinese criminal gangs.
In Thailand, it is normal for brokers to travel between poor villages offering locals jobs, especially once the harvest is over and underemployment is rife.
Many farmers seek their fortunes in better-paying jobs, sometimes overseas. But others end up working on fishing boats and factories operated by criminal syndicates that pay little – or even nothing at all.