UN calls for scam centre clampdown amid 'staggering' abuses
The UN human rights agency on Friday called on governments to clamp down on scam centres, which have mushroomed in Southeast Asia and where hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked into forced labour. The agency released a report documenting torture, sexual abuse, forced abortions, food deprivation, solitary confinement and other abuses. "The litany of abuse is staggering and at the same time heart-breaking," UN Human Rights high commissioner Volker Turk said, calling on governments to act against corruption that was "deeply entrenched in such lucrative scamming operations, and to prosecute the criminal syndicates behind them".
The UNHCR agency had already said in a 2023 report that hundreds of thousands of people were forced to work in the centres, that other investigations have found are responsible for billions of dollars of online fraud. The new report said satellite imagery and on-ground reports show that nearly three-quarters of the scam operations are in the Mekong region and have spread to some Pacific Island countries, South Asia, Gulf States, West Africa and the Americas.
Based on accounts from victims, police, and civil society groups, the report said forced labourers had described being held in immense compounds resembling self-contained towns, made up of heavily fortified multi-storey buildings with barbed wire-topped walls and armed guards. The report into forced labour at scam centres in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates between 2021 and 2025, reinforced reports of the deprivation that the scam centre workers are put through. "A victim from Sri Lanka related how those who failed to meet monthly scamming targets were subject to immersion in water containers (known as 'water prisons') for hours," said the report.
"Victims also recounted being forced to witness or even conduct grave abuse of others as a means to ensure compliance; one Bangladeshi victim said that he was ordered to beat other workers and a victim from Ghana recounted being forced to watch his friend being beaten in front of him." A Vietnamese woman told how she was starved for a week after trying to escape. People said that police and border guards were sometimes complicit in the scam centres. The UN said that many of the forced labourers were wrongly treated as criminals once freed.
The victims "require coordinated timely, safe and effective rescue operations, respect for the principle of non-refoulement, as well as available support mechanisms to ensure torture and trauma rehabilitation and address risks of reprisals or re-trafficking," said Turk.
