About 200 people were recently rescued from illegal casinos in Myanmar. Radio Free Asia reported that 61 of the trafficked workers were Vietnamese citizens, tricked into working at the fraudulent operations.
The nationalities of the others weren’t clear at press time, and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pham Thu Hang did not say where the casinos were located.
An August 29 United Nations report said hundreds of thousands of people have been coerced into working at illegal casinos and performing other online scams in Southeast Asia. It said Myanmar and Cambodia are hotbeds of such activity, run by organized criminal gangs who lure victims from across the ASEAN region, including Vietnam, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even Africa and Latin America. It described many of the victims as well-educated, tech-savvy and multilingual.
“The scam centers generate revenue amounting to billions of U.S. dollars each year,” the UN report said. “Public health measures closed casinos in many countries and in response, casino operators moved operations to less regulated spaces including conflict-affected border areas and Special Economic Zones, as well as to the increasingly lucrative online space.”
According to UN rights chief Volker Türk, often the scam perpetrators are “victims, not criminals.
“People who are coerced into working in these scamming operations endure inhumane treatment while being forced to carry out crimes,” he said. Workers face a range of serious human rights violations and abuses such as torture, forced detention, sexual assault and forced labor.
