Behind a Slave Rescue From a Cambodian Scam Operation

[geovalin]

A Vietnamese family took out loans against their family home to help their son escape enslavement in Cambodia. They scrambled to organize a cross-border rescue from a scam syndicate accused of torture and trafficking, asking VOD for assistance.

 

Nguyen Van Lam*, an informal worker who sells Vietnamese spring rolls online, sweated bullets. His brother Nguyen Van Bao* had just told him he needs $6,000 to escape a scam syndicate in Sihanoukville. “He just texted me this afternoon that they are demanding ransom, so if we don’t gather enough money soon and send it to him, they are going to sell him to Thailand,” Lam said.

 

Bao’s communication with his family had been on and off for about five months after leaving to Cambodia with the promise of lucrative work. But with his text message in late July, Bao revealed his desperate situation to his family — and suddenly his brother, Lam, was scrambling to organize a cross-border rescue attempt.

 

The moment was a flash point in 23-year-old Bao’s story after he became caught up in a vicious circle: human-trafficking victims under the thumb of Chinese-run criminal operations feasting on scam victims across the globe. Bao was a trafficking victim forced to work as a fraudster in “pig-butchering” scams, gradually “fattening up” people they met online to entice them to invest in fake platforms and cheat them out of growing sums of money, according to the family.

 

read more https://vodenglish.news/behind-a-slave-rescue-from-a-cambodian-scam-operation/