Trafficked Into a Scam Compound, Then Charged as an Offender on the Way Home
Stories about scam compounds along the border are usually told through money: where the stolen funds go, how they are laundered, and who profits.
This article tells the other side, the side of the people sitting at the computers inside those compounds, because a great many of them did not go willingly.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report on this in August 2023. It describes the recruitment method: people are primarily recruited to these operations, often via advertised professional roles such as programmers, marketers or human resource specialists.
The hiring process appears legitimate and can even be elaborate, sometimes including more than one round of interviews as well as language or other tests.
The report records that many saw the advertisement on a social media platform, including some of the best known. The conditions offered in these fraudulent advertisements are typically very attractive, promising a high salary, regular bonuses, free accommodation and food, and the jobs are often said to be based in Bangkok or other regional hubs.
"Migrants may have been assured of a work visa on arrival, and some have reported not being aware they have crossed another international border."
On arrival, the report continues, migrants are typically received by the traffickers who collect them from the airport or other port of entry and take them to temporary accommodation or transfer them directly to the gated compounds where the scams operate, watched over by security guards who are often heavily armed. At some point after arrival, the traffickers take possession of their passports.
Source: https://bangkok.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/2025-01/online-scam-operations-2582023.pdf
What Happens Inside
The same report records the conditions inside. People are deprived of their liberty and in some cases are unable even to move between different floors of the compound in which they are confined. Reports have also been received of people being chained to their desk.
Many report that their passports were confiscated, often along with their mobile phones, or that they were otherwise prohibited from contacting friends or family, a situation UN human rights experts have described as detention incommunicado.
The report records descriptions of torture and of cruel and degrading treatment, including the threat or use of violence, particularly where people resist orders, disobey compound rules, or fail to meet expected scamming targets.
The mechanism that keeps people from leaving is debt. The traffickers hold an ever-increasing debt over the migrants, claimed to be for costs such as travel, quarantine on arrival, training, living costs and performance-related fines, which they are told they must pay before they can be freed. The report calls this a situation of debt bondage.
Source: https://bangkok.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/2025-01/online-scam-operations-2582023.pdf
The Scale, and How to Read the Numbers Correctly
Figures in this field are frequently misquoted, so each one has to be read for what it actually counts.
The 2023 report states that the number of people who have fallen victim to online scam trafficking in Southeast Asia is difficult to estimate because of its clandestine nature and gaps in the official response.
It then records that credible sources indicate at least 120,000 people across Myanmar may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams, while credible estimates in Cambodia have similarly indicated at least 100,000 people forcibly involved in online scams.
What has to be understood precisely is that these two figures are not counts of victims already rescued, and not annual flows. They are estimates of the number of people held in such conditions at the time of estimation, and the report itself prefaces them by saying the number is difficult to estimate.
In its 2026 report, the OHCHR states that recent credible estimates of the scam workforce point to the involvement of at least 300,000 people originating from 66 countries.
Source: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/trafficking/report-a-wicked-problem.pdf
The Hardest Line to Draw: Victim or Offender
The hardest problem in this field is how, once someone leaves a scam compound, to determine who is a victim and who is an offender.
Because some did know from the outset that they were going to do fraudulent work.
The OHCHR answers this directly in its 2026 report: even in those cases where people entering the compounds may have known that they would be expected to conduct online fraud or other illicit activity, most were not aware that they would be detained in the centres and subjected to severe violence.
The report continues that whether they entered willingly or unwillingly, victims describe being refused permission to leave, in some cases even after they had completed the agreed contract period.
In law, the 2023 report states the principle in a single sentence: consent is legally irrelevant to cases of trafficking in persons.
The reason lies in the three elements of the offence. The act: the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons. The means: the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability. And the purpose: exploitation.
Where all three are present, the fact that a person once agreed to go does not make the offence disappear.
In practice, however, this is not what happens. The 2023 report records that people are instead being erroneously identified as criminals on the basis of their work as a scammer, without consideration that they were forced to carry out this work, or are charged under immigration laws for being in irregular migration status or not having a work permit.
It adds that countries in the region do in theory have policies and procedures to screen for trafficked persons, but that these may not be applied in cases of trafficking for forced criminality.
Source: https://bangkok.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/2025-01/online-scam-operations-2582023.pdf
Where Thailand Sits in This
The 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report of the United States Department of State places Thailand on Tier 2, stating that the Government of Thailand does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so, and demonstrated overall increasing efforts compared with the previous reporting period.
On scam operations specifically, the report records that traffickers often use Thailand as a transit country for online scam operations located primarily in Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia and the Philippines.
It further records that traffickers recruit individuals from more than 70 countries with fraudulent promises of high paying jobs in Thailand, then transport them to neighbouring countries where these operations are located.
In February 2025 a large event occurred. The report records that ethnic armed organisation security forces in Burma released approximately 7,000 individuals from scam compounds located along the Thai border.
That figure has to be read carefully. It was a release by armed groups inside Myanmar, not a rescue by Thailand, and the report says the group included victims of forced criminality, which means not everyone among them was a trafficking victim.
Thailand's own figure is that the government repatriated approximately 6,258 foreign victims throughout Thailand, in coordination with and at the expense of their home countries' embassies or civil society, across the reporting period.
In the same month, Thai authorities cut electricity, internet and fuel exports to five areas along the Burma-Thailand border known to supply some scam centres, and strengthened border security in Mae Sot.
The report records that these actions potentially increased operating costs for these compounds and contributed to increased pressure on compound operators in Burma that led to the release of some trafficking victims. It also records that civil society reported scam compounds continued to operate and expand in the area following these actions.
Source: https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/thailand
The Hardest Fact in This Story
The same report records that in March 2025 the Royal Thai Police and Thai embassies worked to facilitate the repatriation of 119 Thai nationals who escaped or were released from online scam operations in Cambodia.
In the same sentence, it records that the authorities ultimately charged 100 of them with fraud and similar offences.
The report also explains why screening broke down in that period. Due to resource constraints and the number of individuals waiting to cross the border into Thailand to return to their home countries, Thai authorities were unable to fully implement the National Referral Mechanism to identify trafficking victims, and adopted an abbreviated standard operating procedure that prioritised rapid repatriation.
Observers noted, the report continues, that the expedited process often grouped individuals by nationality, and that authorities often designated whole groups as either trafficking victims or perpetrators.
The report further records that some officials lacked understanding of forced labour in online scam operations and stated those exploited could not be trafficking victims, despite widespread reports indicating most individuals recruited for these operations faced conditions indicative of forced labour.
Source: https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/thailand
What Happens After Getting Out
The OHCHR 2026 report records that most victims who manage to leave the compounds are not able to access effective and trauma-sensitive screening and identification procedures. As a result, victims described being subjected to police arrest as well as immigration detention immediately after their release, for periods ranging from days to many months.
In Thailand specifically, the report records that civil society organisations reported assisting some 34 victims who had been arrested and detained, sometimes for years, on criminal charges following their release from scam centres.
In July 2025 the Chiang Rai Provincial Court cleared eight of those victims of charges including involvement with a transnational criminal organisation, human trafficking, cyber-crime and unlawful detention.
The report also records that some were able to access screening in Thailand through its National Referral Mechanism and receive official recognition as victims of trafficking, thereby lifting immigration penalties.
Yet even individuals who were identified as trafficked persons were often left on their own to arrange and finance their return home, without compensation or support.
Source: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/trafficking/report-a-wicked-problem.pdf
Lessons for Thailand
First, the point that decides a person's fate in this story is not the compound. It is the screening desk after they get out. Two people with identical experiences can end up in completely different places depending only on how carefully the screening was done that day.
Second, when large numbers come out at once, screening quality collapses immediately, which the report records as having actually happened in February 2025. This is therefore as much a problem of staffing and budget as of knowledge. If further large releases can be anticipated, preparing screening capacity in advance is the most direct measure available.
Third, grouping people by nationality and judging the whole group together is fast but wrong by its nature, because each person's status depends on facts particular to them: how they were deceived, how they were confined, and whether they asked to leave and were refused.
Fourth, the understanding of frontline officers is a variable that training can fix. The report records that some officials believed a person who worked as a scammer could not be a trafficking victim, which contradicts the legal principle that consent is irrelevant once the elements of trafficking are made out.
Finally, a point for the general public. A job advertisement offering an unusually high salary with free accommodation and food, in a role requiring no experience, and pressing for a quick decision, is the pattern these reports describe consistently. Verifying that the employer genuinely exists and establishing where the workplace actually is, before travelling, is the cheapest and most effective safeguard there is.
Good knowledge should not stay in the library. It should be used to build a safer world.
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