Critical Questions by Lauren Burke Preputnik, Julia Dickson, Aly Senko, and Andrew Friedman

Published December 12, 2024

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Last year, the Human Rights Initiative published a Critical Questions on human trafficking to forced scamming centers, sometimes called "fraud factories." This is part one of a two-part follow-on series. This part explores the changing human trafficking operations that populate these centers as well as the emergence of new centers in Southeast Asia and beyond. Part two explores the scams emanating from these centers, including the resultant national security threats and the scammers' embrace of new technologies.

So-called "fraud factories" have their roots in Southeast Asia's gambling industry and are closely tied to Chinese organized crime groups. When the casinos built by Chinese transnational criminal groups were effectively shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic, the criminal organizations were forced to seek out other means of generating income. In many cases, abandoned casinos and hotels were converted into large-scale forced scamming centers, where trafficking victims are forced to scam unsuspecting individuals across the globe.

Victims of this form of trafficking are usually job hunters who respond to fraudulent employment opportunities in fields such as customer service, information technology (IT), and computer programming. Traffickers pose as job recruiters and target individuals with exploitable technological or language skills, convincing victims of their legitimacy with interviews and live communication. After the victims travel to the location of the "job," traffickers confiscate their passports, lock them in heavily guarded compounds, and force them to conduct scams. For more information on the scams emanating from these centers, see part two.

Although the coordinated efforts of law enforcement agencies have successfully shut down some of these scam centers and rescued trafficking victims, criminal gangs are learning to adapt quickly and relocate their operations to evade detection and government crackdowns. Law enforcement must adapt as well, broadening their activities to include a wide range of partners-including other nations, civil society groups, and tech companies-implicated in this complex process.

Q1: Beyond Southeast Asia, what other countries and regions are affected?

A1: People from over 100 countries have been trafficked to Southeast Asia's fraud factories. The U.S. Department of State's 2024 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report specifically highlights the trafficking of victims from Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Peru, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among other countries. Many of these victims are young and tech-savvy and hail from regions where unemployment rates are high and there is a surplus of freshly-minted ﷟tech graduates.

To staff these centers, criminal groups collaborate with traffickers from around the world, many of whom traffic individuals for a wide variety of purposes and industries. In 2022, for example, Kenyan police issued an arrest warrant for a Kenyan citizen suspected of trafficking approximately 100 Kenyans to compounds across Southeast Asia through connections with Chinese, Thai, and Indian citizens. Local and international law enforcement agencies are increasingly collaborating to better map these networks, but more should be done to understand this new and expanding ecosystem.

Though media coverage often focuses on Southeast Asia, scam centers have also been discovered as far away as Ghana, Peru, the UAE, and Mexico. Many, though not all, of these centers can trace their ownership back to Chinese-speaking criminal groups. For example, law enforcement freed 43 Malaysian citizens from a compound in Peru that was tied to Taiwanese criminals. Similarly, in 2023, over a dozen Nigerians were rescued from a scam center in Ghana where they were forced to "catfish and scam western women," but it is unclear if this center has a connection to Chinese-speaking criminal networks. The emergence of copycat centers would represent a worrying expansion of this issue, introducing entirely new criminal organizations and tactics to an already elusive threat.

Q2: How has the expanded geographic scope and changing tactics affected the profile of the victim trafficked?

A2: It is impossible to generalize a single victim profile because individual scam centers have become incredibly specialized over time. According to Mina Chiang, the founder and director of the Humanity Research Consultancy, the majority of centers are owned by a Chinese-speaking "landlord" who maintains the property and rents the space to one or more "tenants," often criminal groups with varying scam specialties. Each tenant oversees trafficking victims who are forced to conduct a specific illicit online activity such as conducting impersonation fraud scams, data harvesting, or money laundering. Larger scamming components even have human resource departments, finance departments, and commissions.

Traffickers are also leveraging emerging technologies in their scams. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) highlighted that the need for victims with language skills is being surpassed by a need for victims with information technology skills who can develop new programs. INTERPOL similarly found that the keywords mentioned in the fake work advertisements have expanded from requiring basic skills such as "phone operator" for "call center" jobs to requiring technical skills to supposedly recruit "information technology workers" and "digital sales executives." Scam center operators also seek to traffic individuals with IT skills such as data scientists, software developers, digital marketers, and social media managers to help them further integrate emerging technologies and "professionalize" their operations. The director of Global Advance Projects shared the story of a computer engineer from Myanmar who was forced to help criminals develop and integrate AI capabilities into their operations. Upon being freed, the engineer noted that the scam center's technology was "more advanced than anything she had seen in the world, anything she had ever studied." At the same time, people with only a basic grasp of technology can use software like ChatGPT and translation services to craft convincing messages in multiple languages, which has expanded the potential pool of victims considerably.

Because these victims fail to conform to a single profile, survivors of forced scamming often face insufficient or inappropriate law enforcement responses when their exploitation is not recognized. Law enforcement needs to constantly update its training on trafficking targets and schemes and best practices for survivor repatriation and reintegration into society. In 2023, INTERPOL reported that police officers trained to look for the signs of trafficking to scam centers were able to intercept nearly 800 potential victims. However, this number represents a fraction of the more than 220,000 trafficking victims that experts estimate are held in scam operations in Myanmar and Cambodia alone. This highlights a critical need for increasing both broad awareness-raising efforts and law enforcement training.

Q3: What are stakeholders around the world doing to combat this variant of human trafficking, and what more can be done?

A3: The 2023 TIP report was the first to flag trafficking into cyber scams as a "topic of special interest," calling this form of trafficking "a trend that has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry over the last two years." This indicates the nascency of the phenomenon and the need for further research, which the Department of State has committed to supporting. The human trafficking operations that populate scam centers are rapidly changing, making it difficult to keep up with the expanding victim profile. In past work, CSIS emphasized the importance of four priorities in the fight against forced scamming: prevention of fraudulent recruitment, protection of victims, shutting down scammers, and combating corruption. As the situation continues to evolve, the authors offer the following additional recommendations:

Increase Multistakeholder Collaboration: The onus should not be primarily on potential victims to spot fraudulent advertisements; job platforms and social media companies must also intervene to prevent traffickers from abusing their products. Fraudulent job offers are increasingly hard to spot as traffickers grow more specialized and create their own "human resources" departments. As one survivor-who possessed multiple advanced degrees, spoke three languages, and had worked abroad previously-explained, the interview process seemed legitimate throughout, involving multiple rounds where he "spoke to real people in multiple languages," answered "questions relevant to the job he was applying for," received documents that looked legitimate, and checked their website, which listed "multiple staff members that all propped up this illusion that it was a real company."

Multistakeholder coalitions that include both company representatives and trafficking experts, like Tech Against Trafficking, should continue prioritizing this issue, raising awareness amongst member organizations, and building innovative new tools to counter trafficking and assist survivors. Such coalitions can also work to improve participants' ability to recognize, remove, or report fraudulent job postings. AI or machine learning (ML) can help the fraudulent ad detection process. Researchers at MIT, for example, developed ML algorithms that analyze whether online commercial sex ads are likely connected to human trafficking operations. Similarly, Unseen, a UK organization, uses AI-related technology to help responders analyze and detect patterns in data that might reveal changes in trafficking activity. In another positive example, in 2021, the U.S. Agency for International Development created an online network of over 1,200 civil society organizations to share best practices in combating human trafficking, including trafficking related to cyber scams. Such awareness-raising can save lives.

Center and Support Survivors: Countries should update their anti-trafficking legislation to protect trafficking survivors, and laws that run contrary to the non-punishment principle should be changed. Civil society actors and governments should ensure victims of human trafficking are provided access to protection services and not penalized for the crimes they were forced to commit. The UNODC non-punishment principle stipulates that victims of human trafficking "should not be subject to arrest, charge, detention, prosecution, or be penalized or otherwise punished for illegal conduct that they committed as a direct consequence of being trafficked." This principle is not always upheld in practice, however, and the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights noted in a 2023 report that three of the ten member states' anti-trafficking laws (notably including Cambodia) "do not contain explicit non-punishment provisions." Furthermore, in most ASEAN states, the scope of non-punishment protections is limited, and those forced to scam often fall outside of these protections. Correcting this injustice and protecting survivors from further maltreatment is both morally essential and a boon to the willingness of survivors to cooperate with investigations. Without such protective laws, catching and punishing traffickers and preventing future trafficking is extremely difficult, as is cooperation between states on anti-trafficking work.

In addition to legal reforms, countries in the region should also ensure that anti-trafficking teams receive specialized training and are adequately staffed and resourced so they have the capacity to address survivors' complex needs. As part of survivor rehabilitation, governments and NGOs should support trafficking survivors as they seek legitimate employment, which can be challenging due to the unexplained gaps in their resumes and the psychological repercussions of their traumatic experiences.

Address Root Causes and Enabling Environment: Cyber scamming is a multibillion-dollar industry, and in some Southeast Asian countries, revenue from scamming is equal to between 40 and 50 percent of their formal GDP. Profits from scam centers not only line the pockets of corrupt elites in the region but also help finance the activities of the Myanmar military regime, which routinely commits egregious human rights abuses. As long as scam centers remain profitable and operate with impunity, traffickers will continue to devise new approaches in pursuit of profit. As such, it is important that law enforcement and other stakeholders not only track these shifting tactics and update their anti-trafficking efforts accordingly but also work together to address the governance gaps and corruption that allow these scam centers to flourish.

Lessons can also be drawn from disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration efforts in the wake of conflict. While support for survivors must be prioritized, traffickers and those who facilitate scams cannot be left without options other than returning to criminality after they have been held accountable for their actions. Efforts to reintegrate rehabilitated criminals into society, including through job training and social reintegration, must be a part of any lasting solution to forced scamming and other forms of trafficking.

A comprehensive response to forced scamming will require the formulation of interventions targeting both the traffickers and the enabling environment; coordinated action across regions and diverse stakeholder groups; ongoing research and analysis around nascent forms of trafficking and prevention; and the enforcement of the international laws that protect the human rights of trafficking survivors.

Lauren Burke Preputnik is a former senior program manager for the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Julia Dickson is a research associate for the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at CSIS. Aly Senko is a former research intern for the Human Rights Initiative at CSIS. Andrew Friedman is a senior fellow in the Human Rights Initiative at CSIS.

The authors would like to thank the Humanity Research Consultancy for their support and contributions to this piece.

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