Scam trafficking - a double criminality

"They handcuffed me to a chair and made me stand for two days. Then they beat us and put us in the car."

Winta, 16 and now a survivor, was offered a fictitious job on a cruise ship and trafficked out of East Africa. Her story of being shuttled between compounds during Cambodia's police crackdown is more than one victim's ordeal - it offers a window into scam trafficking, one of the most complex, fastest-growing and least-attended forms of modern slavery.

Scam trafficking, also called trafficking for forced criminality or pig butchering trafficking, is a form of human trafficking wherein criminals use social media tools to frequently offer jobs to people, move them across borders, hold them in scam compounds, and force them to carry out online fraud against people across the world under duress. This includes romance frauds, crypto schemes and others. This way, it sits at the intersection of two heinous offenses: the trafficking of workers and the cyber frauds they are forced to commit. This writer, therefore, calls it double criminality.

Though the globalised and digitalised world might have offered transparency and promising privileges, they aren't freebies either. That is, as the world increasingly digitises, the line between virtual reality and fallacies is progressively becoming blurry. This blurry line is where people get allured and trapped, all in the name of promise. Of all manifestations, scam trafficking is becoming a growing concern for human rights bodies, academics, and every compassionate person of the world.

The UN Human Rights Office's flagship report on cyber-scam trafficking reveals that at least 300,000 people from 66 countries are currently forced to work in scam compounds, primarily in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines. Satellite imagery indicates that 74% of these compounds are clustered in the Mekong region, generating an estimated $43.8 billion annually, with global revenues reaching around $64 billion. Survivors described severe abuses including torture, sexual violence, forced abortions, food deprivation and solitary confinement. Corrupt border officials often exacerbated these abuses by aiding recruiters, while police extorted or threatened victims instead of protecting them.

Based on interviews with survivors, the report frames the crisis as human trafficking under international law and notes that conditions in some compounds, especially those involving the buying and selling of people, amount to outright slavery. Nearly three-quarters of those interviewed had no prior knowledge of scam compounds and were lured by fraudulent job advertisements promising legitimate roles in customer service, tech or online marketing. This report exposes the scant recognition the issue has received at the policy level and the limited role states have played in raising awareness and building a narrative against it.

Human rights bodies describe the acts of trafficking by transnational criminal syndicates recruiting and enslaving people and forcing them to commit online financial frauds under threats, violence, coercion, arbitrary detention, torture and servitude.

The factors that contribute to trafficking include deceptive recruitment, weak governance and conflict zones, high profitability, corruption and complicity, unemployment, and AI. The trafficking leads to severe human rights abuse, forced criminality, legal misidentification, psychological trauma, global financial harms and regional instability.

Given its human costs, the crisis warrants recognition as a distinct trafficking category, alongside sensitising the public, policymakers and states to its scale. Criminalisation, global legislation, victim protection, financial disruption and dismantling criminal syndicates and scam compounds are all needed. Public awareness and responsible journalism are equally vital in checking this crime against humanity.

Winta escaped; hundreds of thousands have not. Until governments treat scam trafficking as the crime it is - not the crime its victims are accused of - the compounds will keep filling faster than they empty.