By Poppy McPherson and Napat Wesshasartar
BANGKOK (Reuters) -Lured to Cambodia, tortured and forced to defraud strangers online, a Thai teenager said he barely survived after he threw himself from an eighth-floor window last year in a desperate bid to escape one of the Southeast Asian nation’s prison-like scam compounds.
The 18-year-old, who asked to be identified only by the nickname Louis, told Reuters he endured brutal conditions for about a year, alongside children as young as 13, in an operation run by Chinese criminals.
Trafficked workers lived like “slaves”, he said, forced to work from early in the morning until midnight in buildings surrounded by high walls and barbed wire where they were subjected to brutal punishments and guarded by men with electric batons.
The transnational scam industry emerged in Southeast Asia during the pandemic and is believed to generate billions of dollars a year for organised crime as people across the globe are defrauded of their life savings.
Louis spoke to Reuters in the Thai capital of Bangkok, a day before London-based rights group Amnesty International published a report on Thursday accusing the Cambodian government of “deliberately ignoring” human rights abuses by cybercrime gangs, allegations the Cambodian government rejected, saying the report was “exaggerated”.
Reuters was unable to independently verify Louis’ account but details matched other accounts by trafficking survivors published by numerous groups including United Nations agencies.
While Louis declined to share his full name, he was willing to be interviewed by Reuters TV.
A HIGHLY PAID JOB
A softly-spoken teenager, Louis said he was 17 when a woman contacted him on Facebook offering him a well-paid role, meals and accommodation after he posted that he was looking for work.
She persuaded him to travel to Bangkok – the first time he had left his rural home province – but he was then told to go to the border where he was taken to one of at least 53 scam compounds in Cambodia identified by Amnesty.
Louis was put to work using deepfake video software to dupe Thai women into sending money.
He said he “felt pressured” and after a week he was sold to another compound near the Vietnamese border that looked “like a prison”.
ESCAPE
In a room with eight Thai men and women, Louis said they were ordered to scam at least one million baht a month (about $30,000) and shocked with electric batons if they were late, rested too much, or failed to meet the quotas.
Louis said he decided to escape after he was confined to a dark room. Breaking through a window, he crashed down several storeys and smashed his chin.
“My mouth filled with blood, it was everywhere, and my teeth were broken. Then I passed out,” he said.
The bosses stripped him naked, but took him to hospital. From there he managed to get home.
Louis said he wanted to tell Thai people looking for work not to go to Cambodia.
“It’s for your own safety … You might never come back.”
(Reporting by Poppy McPherson and Napat Wesshasartar; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
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