Last November, 27-year-old Bea felt a wave of relief as she stepped onto a plane at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport heading back to her home in Central Philippines. It was the end of a two-year nightmare that began with a Facebook message.
In June 2023, Bea was teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) at a business process outsourcing center in the Philippines when she received a job ad over Facebook for a customer service position in Thailand. The recruiter, who had a convincing Facebook profile, said the company would pay her $1,200 a month—a huge pay increase—and provide free accommodations and airfare.
Yet when she arrived in Bangkok, a driver whisked her away to a compound across the border in Myanmar, where Chinese criminal gangs held her captive and forced her to scam unsuspecting victims in the US. If she didn’t meet their monthly quota, her captors beat her. Christianity Today is not using Bea’s real name due to fears that the criminal actors could find and threaten her for sharing her story.
For the next two years, she was trapped in the compounds, and she was sold twice from one scam operator to another. Then in October 2024, the International Justice Mission (IJM) was able to “leverage capital and collaborative networks” to help get Bea out, an IJM spokesperson told CT. She remembers two Burmese military officers arriving at the compound and asking to see her passport, which she had managed to hide from her captors. They brought her to a military facility before she could cross the border back into Thailand.
There, two workers from the Christian group Global Advance Projects (GAP) waited to receive her. GAP paid for her stay at a hotel in the border town of Mae Sot as she waited for the Thai government to accommodate her at a shelter. In the meantime, GAP helped her fill out forms and prove that she had been trafficked and had unintentionally overstayed her Thai travel visa. A month later, the Philippine embassy paid for her flight back home.
As she waited at the airport, she remembers thinking, “I really want to hug those people who helped me a lot because I feel like I need someone to … share everything.”
Recently, GAP, IJM, and another Christian group, Acts of Mercy International, have had their hands full, as the number of people freed from the scam centers has skyrocketed since February, when the Chinese, Thai, and Burmese governments cracked down on the cyberscam centers.
So far, 7,200 people, mostly from China, have been repatriated to their home countries since their release from the compounds, according to the Thai government. Another 1,700 people remain in Myanmar in camps run by ethnic militias.
Thai officials won’t allow them to cross the border unless their home governments have arranged for their immediate departure. In April, about 270 of them, mostly from Ethiopia, rioted and stormed the gates, desperate to cross over to Thailand.
“We’ve been warning [the Thai authorities] for weeks that they were getting very, very agitated and they might try to attempt to flee across the river into Thailand,” said Amy Miller, Southeast Asia regional director for Acts of Mercy International. Thai authorities estimate that another 100,000 people are still forced to work as scammers along the Thai-Myanmar border.
For the past two months, Miller’s team has been busy helping the released victims in Mae Sot. Along with other nonprofits, they give the victims food and water, help them fill out paperwork, connect them to their embassies, and provide personalized care after the trauma they’ve experienced.
“We are often the first face victims see when they come out,” Miller said. Amid a busy, bureaucratic situation, “I’m thinking about the experience of the potential victim.” She thinks to herself, “How can I be a kind, soft, human person for them in the midst of this kind of government-to-government interaction?”
Even before the criminal gangs released the first large group on February 12 Miller had worked to rescue individual victims who got in contact with her over the past two years. In January, Beijing began to push Thailand and Myanmar to crack down on the compounds after a high-profile case in which a Chinese actor was trafficked. Thailand’s government then cut electricity, internet, and gas to the border towns where the centers are located. The ethnic militia ruling the area escorted the people out.
On the day of the first big release, Andrew Wasuwongse, head of IJM’s Thailand office, was about to start an anti–human trafficking training for 100 Thai police officers when he saw a message from his colleague that 260 people from 19 countries had just been released to the Thai military on the border.
“Wow. All right. Great. It’s happening!” he said. It was what he had been hoping for since 2022, when he began helping people trafficked into scamming.
After his talk, Wasuwongse arranged for a group of four IJM staff members to drive to Mae Sot the next day. There, they began the monumental task of identifying victims of trafficking. The rescued victims meet with staff from nonprofits as well as Thai government officials. IJM members served as Thai-English translators and provided food to the freed survivors, along with addressing other immediate needs like access to medical services.
Many survivors dealt with physical and mental trauma: One 19-year-old Ethiopian national named Yotor spoke to Thai media and showed cuts along his leg, saying he had received electric shocks every day during his time at the compound. Some governments treat the released as criminals when they return home or ostracize them for the criminal activities they’ve taken part in.
Cybercriminal syndicates in Southeast Asia likely make $43.8 billion a year in profits, which is 35 percent of the combined GDP (gross domestic product) of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, according to a report by the Center for Strategic & International Studies. A 2023 FBI report found that Americans lost more than $12.5 billion to online fraud in 2023, a 22 percent increase from the year before.
The transnational nature of the crime makes it difficult to investigate and prosecute perpetrators, Wasuwongse said. Often, victims from all over the world are trafficked through a country like Thailand into another country, like Myanmar. Convictions are rare.
Miller said that on that day in February, they were expecting the operation to result in 50 people freed,only to find more than four times that number. As part of the screening process, the released are typically moved from one holding room to another in a highly official setting, which may come across as impersonal and cold, Miller said.
So Miller is mindful of how she and the staff of the Christian groups approach the victims. On at least one occasion, they brought journals with “gospel resources and messages of hope,” Miller said. “[We offer] that picture of humanity to look them in the eye, to give them dignity, to tell them God has a plan for their life.”
When victims’ home governments cannot repatriate them due to budgetary challenges, as is the case with the Ethiopian victims, Acts of Mercy International and other nonprofits raise money to pay for their plane tickets home. However, some embassies have told the victims that their names are not on Myanmar’s official list of people waiting for repatriation, meaning they may not be able to return home even if they have tickets.
“What I’m doing at that moment is just welcoming them back,” Miller said, “telling them we’re so glad that they’re free, we know that they’ve suffered a lot and endured a lot, and we’re very honored to get to walk alongside them.”
When Bea returned to the Philippines, she took time to rest, as she felt mentally and physically exhausted. The Philippine government provided some financial assistance. In February, she began searching for a job and is now working as an online ESL teacher again.
“I’ve also become more cautious when using social media, knowing there are people who try to deceive or trick others,” she said. “Whenever I see something suspicious, I report it and leave a comment to warn others that it might be a scam.”
Her community in the Catholic church she attends has helped her family cope. “Just recently, one of the nuns at the church asked my grandmother how was her grandchild who got scammed,” said Bea. She said her grandmother responded, “Finally, she’s … back here.”
