Scammed, enslaved, arrested: The triple tragedy of Thailand’s cyber scam victims
- Photography by Luke Duggleby
Nanthaphan Yaemmanat inside a rundown apartment block in Bangkok in January 2024 which he rented whilst attempting to prove his innocence of being a victim of forced criminality. Photo: Luke Duggleby/HaRDstories
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- 19 min read
Prapas and Nanthaphan escaped the scammers’ compound, but their nightmare was far from over. Their rescue marked the start of a new battle for justice.
Clinks of manacles presaged the arrival of eight men in prison garb, shuffling their chained ankles as they were escorted into a courtroom. They stood accused of heinous crimes: colluding with scammers across the border to defraud unsuspecting Thais and foreigners.
Throughout 2023, the men worked alongside a group of transnational cyber criminals from the township of Laukkaing, in Myanmar’s northeast, the prosecutor told the court in Chiang Rai, where their trial was held.
Their arrests and trials came just as Thailand is grappling with the epidemic of telefraud, which has caused incalculable damages in financial losses as well as mental anguish in the kingdom, with many victims having been fleeced of their entire life savings. According to one tally by the national police force, at least 540,000 people have lost a collective 63 billion baht (about 1.77 billion USD) to scammers in the past two years alone.
But two of the defendants told HaRDstories that their alleged roles in the operations had been misrepresented by the authorities. Speaking to a reporter from the courtroom, the pair said they were victims themselves, having been duped by bogus job notices into what they described as slave labour for the cybercriminals.
“I was fooled into working for them, but I never hurt or scammed anyone,” Prapas Kittiloes said. “I was also trying to contact the embassy and ask for help on behalf of other Thais who were being held there.”
Another defendant, Nanthaphan Yaemmanat, told a similar story of being baited by an innocuous-looking job ad online in May 2023, only to find himself prey to the network of scammers and human traffickers across the border.
“Everyone who was held there was assigned a role,” Nanthaphan said. “If we don’t do what we’re told, they would torture us.”
As the Thai authorities come under increasing pressure to crack down on the scourge of telefraud and punish those responsible for the cybercrimes, campaigners and aid groups say overzealous legal measures may end up misidentifying potential human trafficking victims as criminals, and harming the very people the laws are meant to protect.
They also warn that the screening protocols – which are supposed to separate forced workers from willing collaborators for the law enforcement – are marked by confusing bureaucracies, uneven application, and a lack of understanding or compassion from authorities involved in the process.
“Many officials in charge of the screening process still lack the expertise,” said Jaruwat Jinmonca, co-founder of the Immanuel Foundation, which works alongside local authorities to tackle human trafficking.
He points to stories from individuals like Prapas and Nanthaphan, who found themselves under criminal investigation and facing lengthy jail times despite having been initially identified as victims by the official screening process.
“What’s happening to Prapas and Nanthapan is unfair,” Jaruwat said. “Police arrested them without considering whether they were victims or perpetrators.”
Forced criminality
For their alleged roles in the cyber scam rings, both Prapas and Nanthaphan have been charged with a litany of offences, including fraud, transnational crimes, and human trafficking. The most serious charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
The two men remain imprisoned while their trial is ongoing; the court has deemed them as a flight risk due to the severity of the charges they’re facing.
But Nanthaphan, who spent six months inside the scam operation centre in Laukkaing, said he had no choice but to follow orders from his captors, lest they resort to cruelty and abuse. Nanthaphan also insisted he did what he could to alleviate the conditions for his fellow Thais during their captivity.
“Whenever they wanted to punish the staff in the group that I oversaw, I always told them I’d handle it myself,” Nanthaphan said. “That’s because the Chinese bosses liked to dish out cruel punishment, but I would just order the offenders to stand for a long time, so they wouldn’t be hurt by the Chinese bosses.”
His co-defendant, Prapas, also said he fell victim to the scammers after he responded to what looked like a legitimate ad on Facebook seeking a Thai-Chinese translator in July 2023. By the time he met his prospective employers, Prapas said he was imprisoned and forced to work – without any pay – as an interpreter for his Chinese captors under threats of violence.
In a recent report, a United Nations regional office in Southeast Asia notes that forced criminality, where individuals are deceived and coerced into participating in scams and frauds, is a rising threat that must be urgently addressed by law enforcement authorities in the region.
“These scammers and call centre criminals, which are mostly funded by influential Chinese individuals, keep changing their methods all the time,” Jaruwat, who co-founded the Immanuel Foundation in 2011, said in an interview.
“Those methods now include posting job notices on Facebook and duping people into working for them.”
Run by 15 staff members and volunteers, the Immanuel Foundation has spent the past decade caring for victims of human trafficking and supporting law enforcement investigations to punish the perpetrators. Since 2021, the charity has opened a helpline for Thai nationals who had been duped into forced criminality in Cambodia and Myanmar, and coordinated with the authorities for their rescues.
Yet a number of those detainees ended up being treated as alleged criminals upon their return to Thailand. Jaruwat said his foundation is currently assisting 34 individuals who found themselves in such predicament, including Prapas and Nanthaphan.
Many of them are now locked in lengthy and costly legal battles, far from the media attention that once greeted their ostensible rescue; at the witness examination for Prapas and Nanthaphan in Chiang Rai, for instance, HaRDstories was the only media present inside the courtroom.
“Human trafficking is increasing in 2024, and more people are being forced into cyber criminality than ever,” Jaruwat summed up the situation.
Facebook as the hook
A study conducted by the United States Institute of Peace traces the roots of the current plethora of transnational cybercriminals to the shady network of loosely regulated casinos and online gambling operations that proliferated throughout some parts of Southeast Asia in the 2000s.
Over time, these business empires gradually evolved into sophisticated industrial-scale scam syndicates preying on vast numbers of people across the region and beyond; the USIP estimated that the funds stolen by these criminal syndicates likely exceeds 43.8 billion USD a year – nearly 40 percent of the combined GDP of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar.
“The scamming operations are powered by hundreds of thousands of people, many duped by fraudulent online ads for lucrative high-tech jobs and trafficked illegally into scam compounds, where they are held by armed gangs in prison-like conditions and forced to run online scams,” the study notes.
The 2021 military coup in Myanmar and the civil war that followed pushed the country even further into a breeding ground for the cybercrime syndicates, with scam compounds operating in the open along Myanmar’s border with China. Crackdown and pressure by the Chinese government later forced these facilities to relocate toward the Thai border, where many Thai nationals were ensnared by the traffickers, including eight individuals interviewed by HaRDstories.
All of those individuals identified Facebook as the method used by the scammers that tricked them into slavery in Myanmar, such as Prapas, who worked as a Chinese language teacher at a school in Udon Thani province until a lack of permanent contract drove him to quit his post.
Prapas then landed a new job as an interpreter for a Chinese e-commerce firm, which earned him about 25,000 baht a month. But shortly after he was lured by a job ad on Facebook seeking an interpreter in Myanmar with the advertised salary of 70,000 baht.
Nanthapan, who was unemployed at the time, also came across a job notice posted on Facebook for the position of a casino manager in Myanmar touting a monthly salary of 50,000 baht.
Upon expressing interest in these job notices, the victims told HaRDstories, someone claiming to be HR officers would contact the applicants and conduct interviews online for the purported roles, as well as promising lucrative benefits to sweeten the deals. For a semblance of credibility, scammers typically list major commercial cities in Myanmar, like Mandalay, as the locations of their companies.
When the victims agreed to the jobs, their travel to Myanmar would be arranged and sponsored by the supposed employers, according to testimonies given to HaRDstories. By the time the job seekers arrive at the destination, they would be imprisoned and their travel documents confiscated, before being put to work inside the scam compounds.
In a statement to HaRDstories, a representative of Meta, which owns Facebook, said it launched a new alert system for the Asia-Pacific region in early 2023 dedicated to weeding out potential fraudulent job ads that risks exploitation and trafficking. The measure led to the removal of more than 436 million posts flagged as harmful spam in the first quarter of 2024, Meta said.
Good guys, bad guys
Growing media reports about the fate of Thai nationals being held captive by the scammers in Laukkaing amid the heavy fighting between Myanmar’s warring factions eventually prompted the Thai authorities to mount a joint rescue operation in November 2023.
Prapas was among the first group of 41 Thai nationals repatriated back to Thailand via a crossing in Chiang Rai, where he went through the official screening process that established him as a human trafficking victim, liable for mental rehabilitation and compensation from the state.
But his world turned upside down once again just two weeks later, when police abruptly showed up at his home in rural Nan and informed Prapas that he was now a criminal suspect, then placed him under arrest.
Nanthaphan was likewise cleared by the screening process upon his arrival in Thailand, only to find himself under arrest a few weeks later, a change of fortune that led him to question why the law enforcement authorities changed their mind so quickly.
“When we were held in Laukkaing, there were both people who liked us, and people who didn’t like us,” Nanthaphan said. “The latter might have told the police that I was a willing participant in the scams, and police could use that testimony as key evidence for my arrest.”
Pattarapon Wongdow was another Thai who spent months in servitude at the scam compound in Laukkaing until he was freed by the rescue effort. In an interview with HaRDstories, he maintained that both Prapas and Nanthaphan were victims of forced criminality and should be treated as such.
“Prapas and Nanthaphan were put in the same room with me. They were the ones who helped me in every way, including sending messages to call for help,” Pattarapon said. “So what did the police arrest them for?”
After his repatriation back to Thailand, a panel of screening officials affirmed Pattarapon as a victim of human trafficking. Driven by his own experience in Laukkaing, Pattarapon is now working with trafficking victims and advocating for their wellbeing as an investigator for the Immanuel Foundation.
One of his main roles is providing legal advice to other individuals freed from the scammers’ enslavement who are now accused as criminals in the court of law, but his mission is often obfuscated by Thailand’s byzantine web of bureaucracy, Pattarapon said.
He pointed to the Immanuel Foundation’s attempt to prove the innocence of Prapas and Nanthaphan by securing the screening panel’s report that firmly established the two men as victims. Yet when he visited the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, which oversees the process, he was told that the document is being stored by another government agency, the Crime Suppression Division.
The division has yet to respond to the foundation’s request for the document, Pattarapon said, while Prapas and Nanthaphan continue to languish in prison.
A flawed screening process?
Another mission pursued by Immanuel Foundation is an overhaul of the current screening process for individuals extracted from the scam compounds.
First introduced in September 2023 – just a few months before officials mounted the joint rescue effort in Laukkaing – the screening process was designed to protect victims of forced criminality while punishing those responsible for frauds and human trafficking.
According to a manual of the protocols seen by HaRDstories, screening interviews are conducted by a panel of officials from various agencies, such as the police, the justice ministry, the labour ministry, the interior affairs ministry, and the social development ministry.
Individuals who are revealed to have colluding roles in the scam or trafficking operations would be turned over to the law enforcement, while those established as the victims may choose to enter a “reflection period” of 30 days, during which they are afforded with a safe accommodation, medical treatment, rehabilitation, and advice that they may require. They are also entitled to financial compensation for their plight.
But in reality, the screening process is often sprung on potential victims when they were just fresh from their ordeal and unprepared for such interrogation, according to Pattarapon, the former victim who now works at the Immanuel Foundation.
He added that the interviews rarely involve NGOs or aid groups, despite their deeper understanding of human trafficking issues compared to rank-and-file security officers or civil servants.
“There were three, four tables of officials waiting for us,” Pattarapon spoke of his own encounter with the screening period, shortly after he arrived back in Thailand. “We had no idea who they were, what agencies they were from.”
A high-ranking official in charge of the human trafficking unit at the Department of Special Investigation acknowledged that the screening process in place needs to be improved.
“The problem right now with the screening process is that it could be rather scattered,” Police Major Siriwish Chantechasitkul said in an interview. “There are so many agencies involved in the interrogation. This problem still exists.”
The police major cited the rescue operation in Laukkaing as a poignant example. Although the 200 Thai nationals were extracted from the same site, they were somehow sent to various panels of the screening process, and officials involved in the interviews do not necessarily communicate with the law enforcement about their findings, he said.
As a result, a screening panel in one province may clear someone as a victim, but a team of investigators based in another province may charge the same person with trafficking offences.
“The process should be more integrated,” Siriwish said, adding that his department has no power to alter the existing protocols. “If they want different agencies to work on it, they should work on it together, not separately from each other.”
The lack of clarity in the procedures is underscored when HaRDstories reached out to the Chiang Rai City Police Station, which was responsible for arresting and bringing charges against Prapas and Nanthaphan.
When asked why Prapas and Nanthaphan ended up as criminal suspects even after screening officials confirmed them as victims, an officer in charge of the station said the decision to prosecute the two men was made by yet another police agency in Chiang Rai, and his force had no knowledge of their circumstances.
No other choices
At a dilapidated lodging in Chiang Rai’s Mae Sai province that has neither electricity nor running water, Somboon Panthakit, a stateless man, and his Myanmar wife Nan Hon Noon take up whatever meagre jobs they can to support themselves and feed their newborn baby. They’re also doing their best to heal the mental scars as former victims of forced criminality across the border.
Somboon and Nan said they were baited into working for the scammers by a bogus job ad they saw on Facebook in 2023, just as they were both out of work and Nan was expecting. The pair was also desperate to save up money for her delivery.
“I used to work in construction, but my employer cheated me of my salary, so I decided to quit,” Somboon, who is a member of the Lahu ethnic group, said in an interview. “So I posted on a Facebook group for job seeking in Chiang Rai. Someone named Jack contacted me and invited me to work as a [Facebook page] administrator with him. I talked with him for two days before I agreed to take the job.”
Somboon and Nan said they were brought to Laukkaing by traffickers on 19 October 2023, while she was six months pregnant. Having heard tales of other women who had forced abortion in the scam centres, Nan hid her pregnancy by wearing baggy clothes. Her fear proved to be well founded: she recalled seeing another Thai captive who was forced to terminate her pregnancy by the Chinese jailers.
Nan and her husband later managed to seek help from the Immanuel Foundation, who paid for their journey back to Thailand in late November.
“When I arrived home, I hurried to see my parents. They just burst out in tears,” Nan said. “I would never dare taking up jobs in faraway places like this again.”
Although Somboon and Nan were afforded the status of victims by the screening process, they said no compensation was ever offered to them – not even the fare for their bus home. Six months after their return to Thailand, the pair is now scraping a living as garbage sorting workers, earning 280 baht a day, or less than the national minimum wage.
“At least I was lucky that I wasn’t assaulted,” Somboon said. “But I know a friend whose sister was sold to another group of traffickers as sex worker. I never saw her again.”
Financial destitution, insecure employment, and the pressure to support one’s families are often cited by former victims of forced criminality as the reasons that drove them toward the snare laid by the human traffickers.
Many also appear to hail from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities, which experts said made them even more vulnerable to the cybercriminals, and less likely to win any sympathy from media establishments.
Take the case of Prapas, one of the defendants on trial for his alleged involvement with the scammers in Laukkaing. A member of the Hmong ethnic group, Prapas grew up in a remote community close to the Laotian border in the mountainous province of Nan.
Despite the poverty afflicting his neighbourhood, Prapas is highly educated, having graduated with a bachelor’s degree and recently secured a scholarship for a master’s degree at a university in China, thanks to his Chinese language skill, according to his mother, Mo Kittiloes. But Prapas was ensnared by the traffickers before his higher education could begin.
“My son was fooled into working for those people. He was beaten, his hands were bound,” Mo said of her son. “After he was home for several days, he was arrested and taken away from me again.”
To ensure his best chance at winning freedom again, Mo spent 100,000 baht of her life savings to hire legal counsels for her son, and she’s taking up extra work to find another 150,000 baht that she still owes to the law firm. Mo’s family said no government agency has ever offered them access to free or affordable legal defence, and the Immanuel Foundation said it has no funding to pay for these fees.
Bereft of any other choice, Mo, at 60 years old, labours on her small plot of farm to grow ginger and other vegetables that she hopes will fetch some money for her son’s legal costs. She also resorts to subsisting on humble meals of rice, a wild variety of lemongrass and salt most days to save money.
“The life of hoping for my son to come back to me is so difficult,” Mo said. “It’s breaking my heart.”
Global menace
From a small road straddling the Moei River, a cluster of buildings could be clearly seen on the Myanmar side of the natural border. Gesturing at the distant structures as she took a reporter for a drive along the river, NGO worker Mechelle Moore explained that the complex is an online scam compound run by influential Chinese business people, one of many that populate the lawless borderlands.
Moore, who works for a charity combating human trafficking called Global Alms Incorporated, said the Chinese-funded scam compounds are often situated close to private ferry crossings servicing the banks of the Moei River, which number about 52 piers by her count. Much of the cross-border traffic goes unnoticed by local border authorities.
It is from these facilities that an enslaved workforce of multiple nationalities is conducting a worldwide scam operation. According to the USIP, victims come from more than 60 countries around the world, while the United Nations rights body estimates that up to 120,000 people are being forced to carry out online scams from Myanmar alone, with another 100,000 operating out of Cambodia.
Moore, whose organisation runs helplines and emergency response teams for victims of human trafficking and forced criminality, said the same economic desperation that sends unsuspecting victims in Thailand to the scam compounds is playing out elsewhere on a global level.
“People in Asia and Africa are determined to work and earn money in better places because their countries do not have enough jobs,” Moore explained as the car zoomed down the road. “After COVID-19, when the world reopened for travel, they tried to look for jobs, and they had already tried to verify that such jobs actually exist.”
She added that her organisation recently secured the freedom of a certain foreigner, who was lured to Thailand by what looked like a legitimate job notice for an international school based in Tak province.
The person even went through three separate online interview sessions with the people masquerading as human resources officers for the school before agreeing to take the job and flying to Thailand – it turned out to be a scam operation.
“The people we help often don’t return to a good life. Many of them suffer from psychological impacts. Some face legal cases, while others lose their families. Some return with nothing left in their lives,” Moore said.
The International Organization for Migration has identified victims of forced criminality from at least 37 nationalities, mostly from the African continent, said Saskia Kok, the IOM Head of Protection Unit in Bangkok. Kok said the victims tend to be 20 to 35 years old, fluent in English or Chinese, and relatively educated.
More than 1,000 foreigners have been rescued from the scam compounds in Southeast Asia since 2022, Kok said, but many former victims still run into troubles with regional law enforcement authorities, who charge them for immigration violations, fraud, and even human trafficking.
While Kok said he had no exact number of such cases, anecdotes from victims in countries like Cambodia and Malaysia suggest that the problem seems to be widespread. Her assessment is shared by Bridget Welsh, a researcher from University of Nottingham Malaysia.
“Many Malaysian victims are categorised as criminals in Malaysia due to the way they are perceived and identified based on their involvement in these cybercrime centres,” Welsh said. “This issue is not limited to Thailand, but also affects other countries in the region.”
Fighting for freedom once again
As cyber fraud continues to target Thais from all walks of life on a daily basis – a report by an anti-scam tech company counts 79 million text messages or calls originating from scammers throughout the year 2023 – the government has pledged a raft of measures to catch up with these criminals in the high stake game of cat-and-mouse.
They include calls for tougher enforcement of anti-money laundering laws, crackdowns on the proxy bank accounts run by telefraud cartels, known in Thai as “horse accounts,” working with banks to implement more security, as well as educating the public about the ever evolving tricks used by the scammers.
In August, then-Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said his administration will also raise the matter of transnational cybercrime at an upcoming summit for the Mekong – Lancang Cooperation, which counts Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and China as the member states.
But anti-trafficking aid groups like the Immanuel Foundation say any efforts to tackle the plague of cybercrime must include reforms of the screening process and ending the practice of criminalising former victims freshly rescued from the trafficking rings.
Once they entered the legal battle, these former victims also have a slim chance of securing a bail release due to the lengthy jail term associated with the charges, which meant that many of them were locked behind bars as the trial goes on.
“As things stand right now, the screening process is deeply flawed,” Jaruwat from the Immanuel Foundation told HaRDstories as he arrived at the courthouse in Chiang Rai earlier this year; Prapas and Nanthaphan were due for a witness examination, and his organisation hopes to take the stand as a witness to testify for their innocence.
“Thailand still doesn’t have a government agency that is directly responsible for human trafficking,” he added. “That’s why we are still far from successful in preventing and tackling human trafficking.”
Pattarapon, the former detainee in Laukkaing who’s now working for the Immanuel Foundation, suspected that investigators may have lacked the understanding of how scam compounds are run, leading to a misjudgement of both men’s roles.
“The police may have learned that they [Prapas and Nanthaphan] were closer to the Chinese bosses than the rest of the group, that’s why they were arrested,” Pattarapon said. “But actually Prapas was always trying to send out messages for help on our behalf in every way. None of us wanted to be there and scam people. All of us were punished and beaten at some point.”
Speaking of his role at the foundation, Pattarapon said he hopes he’ll be able to speak out for other former victims – people who once shared his plight – who are now fighting a different battle for their freedom.
“There were indeed a few people who willingly went there with the intention of defrauding people, because they wanted the money. But there were many more who were fooled into those roles,” Pattarapon maintained.
At the end of the session, the foundation was denied a chance to take the stand after the judge ordered the witness examination to be postponed. As the defendants were escorted out of the courtroom to the waiting prison van, Nanthaphan pleaded with Jaruwat and Pattarapon to keep working on his case, while Prapas bid farewell to his mother.
“Don’t worry about me. I didn’t do anything wrong,” he called out encouragement to his mother just before he was led out of her sight.
Edited and Translated from Thai by Teeranai Charuvastra
Nathaphob Sungkate is a feature writer from Thailand focusing on human rights issues. His work is informed by a year spent in India. Nathaphob is committed to in-depth reporting to shed light on underrepresented stories.
Luke Duggleby is a Bangkok based photographer. He regularly works on stories related to human rights, the environment and the impact of pollution and development on local communities.
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