Five Hong Kongers have been arrested for allegedly setting up job scams in which victims were lured to Southeast Asia and then held against their will, police said yesterday.
Alleged victims in recent months have reported traveling to countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos on false promises of romance or high-paying jobs, and then being detained and forced to work.
Authorities on Thursday set up a task force to help trafficked residents who had fallen prey to the scams.
Photo: AFP
Almost all of the 36 requests for police help were related to job scams, said Tony Ho, senior superintendent of the organized crime and triad bureau.
Police have arrested three men and two women suspected of tricking Hong Kongers into accepting “highly unrealistic” job offers abroad, Ho said.
Twenty-two victims are believed to still be ensnared in Cambodia and Myanmar, and nine among them have not contacted their families or the Hong Kong police, he said.
Alleged victims were given flight tickets, and most had their passports taken when they landed, before being sent to a scam center and forced to defraud others, Ho said.
Politicians from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong party yesterday said that a victim’s family sought help from them as the Hong Konger had been trapped for about a month in a human trafficking hotspot in Myanmar’s Kayin State.
“His family suspect he was physically abused,” said Woo Cheuk-him, a politician who received the request for help. “He said he has been forced to work more than 10 hours a day... If he didn’t perform well, he wouldn’t be given enough food.”
Human rights lawyer Patricia Ho said on Thursday that Hong Kong’s laws are not strong enough to tackle such scams, as the territory has no legislation that specifically outlaws human trafficking and forced labor.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the