Philippine authorities on Saturday said they rescued more than 1,000 people from several Asian nations who were trafficked into the country, held captive and forced into working in fraud operations, while Indonesian officials yesterday said they freed 20 of their nationals who were trafficked to Myanmar as part of an online scam.
Philippine authorities rescued 1,090 people from several Asian nations who were trafficked into the country, held captive and forced to run online scams, an official said.
International alarm has grown in recent months over online scams in the region often staffed by trafficking victims tricked or coerced into promoting bogus cryptocurrency investments.
Photo courtesy of Philippine National Police Anti-Cybercrime Group via AFP
Officers raided a cluster of buildings on Thursday in Mabalacat, about 90km north of Manila, Philippine national police spokeswoman Michelle Sabino said.
Sabino said the victims were forced to target unsuspecting people in the US, Europe and Canada.
Their passports were confiscated and they were made to work up to 18 hours a day, with salary deductions for interacting with colleagues or taking extended breaks.
Photo courtesy of Philippine National Police Anti-Cybercrime Group via AFP
“You’re like a prisoner without a cell. You’re not even allowed to talk to your roommates,” Sabino said. “They’re not allowed to leave outside the bounds of the gate. After 18 hours of work, they’re brought to their dormitory.”
The victims were mostly Chinese nationals, Vietnamese, Filipinos and Indonesians, police said in a separate statement.
Authorities also rescued people from Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Myanmar, Hong Kong and Nepal.
Sabino said the workers were trained to entice strangers into buying cryptocurrency or depositing money into bogus bank accounts after establishing fake romantic relationships.
“They will build up a promise of a good future together. Let’s buy a house, buy a car, let’s invest money or let’s do business together,” she said.
At least 12 suspected ringleaders of the scheme have been arrested and are set to be charged with human trafficking. They include seven Chinese nationals, four Indonesians and a Malaysian, Sabino said.
Sabino also said the police operation was the result of a plea by the Indonesian ambassador in Manila for help locating distressed nationals.
Meanwhile, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that its embassy in Yangon, with help from local networks, had released the victims from Myawaddy township and brought them to the Thai border on Saturday.
The Indonesian embassy in Bangkok is working closely with Thai authorities to repatriate the victims, the statement said.
Fraudulent recruiters had offered the Indonesians high-paying jobs in Thailand, but instead trafficked them to Myanmar to perform online scams for cryptocurrency Web sites or apps, Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Judha Nugraha said.
The situation drew a national outcry in Indonesia after a video made by one of the victims went viral on social media last month. It showed dozens of grim-faced Indonesian workers in a dormitory room asking their government to help them out of “the war zone” where they often witness violence.
“Please help us back to Indonesia, because our life here is very miserable and threatened,” one person said, describing how they had been transferred from one company to other companies over the past eight months before being stranded in Myawaddy.
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