Across remote borderlands of Southeast Asia, a vast machinery of human exploitation has taken root — one that reaches across more than 80 nations to ensnare the desperate and the hopeful alike. The United Nations migration agency warns that tens of thousands of people, lured by the oldest of false promises, have been trafficked into scam compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, where they are stripped of their freedom and forced to defraud strangers half a world away. It is a crisis that implicates not only the criminals who run these operations but the governance failures, digital vulnerabil
U.N. warns of surge in human trafficking to Asian scam compounds
Tens of thousands of people trafficked and forced into criminal operations; many subjected to sexual abuse, violence, threats, solitary confinement, and psychological trauma.