MANILA: The recent rescue of 206 Filipinos from a scam hub in Myanmar has shed new light on how they have been recruited and trafficked by criminal gangs, which Philippine officials say are increasingly targeting middle-class professionals and graduates.
Several thousand people from various countries were freed in late February and March from online scam centers run by syndicates operating along Myanmar’s border with Thailand, where many of them are believed to have been forced to deceive strangers online into transferring large amounts of money.
They were released in a weeks-long, highly publicized crackdown by Thai, Myanmar and Chinese forces.
Among the freed people were the Filipinos, who arrived in their homeland last week. They were lured by well-paid job offers in Thailand.
“But when they got to Thailand, they were taken to another place where they ended up with scammers,” Department of Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Eduardo De Vega told Arab News.
“All right, what they would do is pretend to be women, beautiful women who would lure people via the Internet to send money, and then they would disappear. And if they didn’t meet their quota of clients, or if they failed to scam someone, they would be given corporal punishment.”
The rescued Filipinos were held by scammers at an office complex in the town of Myawaddy — one of the many such compounds in the region, where the UN estimates that more than 100,000 people have been trafficked to generate income from online gambling, fraudulent investment schemes and romance scams.
Those in Myawaddy were repatriated after their scam hubs were forced to close after Thailand cut off electricity, Internet and fuel supplies to the area and local armed groups transferred them to Myanmar authorities, which allowed them to cross the border river and exit to Thailand.
At least a few dozen Filipinos remain at another scam center, trapped in an area held by rebels fighting Myanmar’s ruling junta, according to the Philippine embassy in Yangon.
“They think there are about 59 or 60 left. They can’t move from their location,” De Vega said. “They need to be rescued ... Our embassies are working on it.”
Investigations show that while some people volunteer to work in the scam compounds, most are lured by promises of well-paying office jobs — a new trend which in the Philippines became visible in 2022, when the first reports and complaints started to be filed by victims or their relatives.
“The victim profile has significantly changed from what it was before. Before, you would get people from remote areas, those that were economically deprived,” Department of Justice Assistant Secretary Jose Dominic Clavano IV, spokesperson for the Interagency Council Against Trafficking, told Arab News.
“The victims that we found in Myanmar were more from the middle class, educated, not necessarily unemployed when they were here in the Philippines, but looking for greener pastures abroad.”
The jobs they were offered — usually through unofficial channels such as social media — were at call centers, in marketing, customer sales, or as chat support agents at companies in Thailand.
But after being transported through the Thai border, they were forced to work in scam centers — settlements with new office buildings suddenly popping up in rural areas.
“Actually, it wasn’t the worst conditions. It was a community, a self-sustaining community within a compound in a remote area ... There are restaurants, there are accommodations, obviously the office space, and forms of entertainment as well,” Clavano said.
“They were very organized. One section would be dedicated to just reaching out to people and trying to get them to hook onto the whole conversation. And then once they’re hooked, they’re passed to a different division ... And then, finally to another division, where they’d send the money and they’d never see that again.”
The Philippines Bureau of Immigration said earlier this week that its probe shows the repatriated Philippine nationals developed a new model to target Filipino migrants in the US, tricking them to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrency accounts.
They used different scamming methods, including investment scam, crypto scam, and dusting scam — attacks on cryptocurrency wallets that send tiny amounts of cryptocurrency, known as “dust” in order to uncover the identity its owner and allow phishing and extortion.
Work at the scam centers resembled the models that Filipinos know from POGO hubs — companies in the Philippines offering online gambling services to players outside the country.
While some POGOs are legal and licensed by the government, there are also illegal ones linked to online scam.
“People think that they are earning an honest living when in fact, they’re illegally impacting other people’s lives .... We fall prey to these big syndicates who represent themselves as dutiful employers who are offering real jobs,” Clavano said.
“And it’s become a perennial problem. It’s been a lot more prevalent over the past few years because, precisely, of the advent of technology and social media.”
