A new form of human trafficking has rapidly taken root in the ASEAN region.

Individuals are recruited into what are presented as legitimate jobs in digital marketing, customer services and other areas such as construction and translation, and then largely forced to work in scam centres.

These centres use deceptive means to recruit workers, largely from abroad, to form online relationships with people in other countries, who are then scammed, for example by encouraging them to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrency transactions.

INTERPOL describes the phenomenon as having developed from a regional-level crime to a global human trafficking crisis, noting that it involves two sets of victims: the workers subjected to forced labour, debt bondage and grave physical abuse, including torture, beatings and rape; and the victims of the online financial scams, which the victims of human trafficking are forced to perpetrate (INTERPOL, 2023).  

The intricate fraud schemes are described using the Chinese term Shāzhūpán, pig-butchering scams, so-called because they ‘fatten up’ their targets before going in for the ‘slaughter’ and stealing their money (McCready, 2022).

An organisation that has been set up to identify, support and rescue individuals forced to work in the scam centres is collecting statistics from people who have been scammed.

The organisation has recorded 1,652 victims, with a total loss of $285-million, an average of $173,000 per victim (McCready, 2022).

In its 2022 Crypto Crime Report, Chainanalysis reported that globally $7.7-billion was stolen through cryto scams in 2021, an increase of 81% from 2020, though it is unclear how much of this is from scam centres (Chainanalysis, 2022).

Estimates of the revenue generated by scam centres in one South-East Asian country range from $7.5 to 12.5-billion (UNODC, 2023). 

Report by ASEAN-ACT and ODI