Sihanoukville is reportedly a center of human trafficking, with workers forced to toil under abusive conditions at the city’s casinos. As a result, Vietnamese officials are warning their people to disregard too-good-to-be-true job offers promising between $800 and $1,000 a month.
In recent weeks, the Vietnamese Embassy in Cambodia posted the warning on its Facebook page, saying some who respond to the ads are taken to casinos or hotels in the coastal city to work under difficult conditions.
Asia Gaming Brief reports that the workers, trained to recruit online gamblers, sometimes work as much as 16 hours a day and are physically assaulted if they try to escape. Those who refuse to work have been beaten and forced to take on thousands of dollars in debt. All of it is taking place in a country that banned online gaming more than 18 months ago, but apparently reintroduced it during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Kristin Parco, of the UN’s International Organization for Migration in Cambodia said the economic effects of Covid-19 have created a “fertile recruitment ground for traffickers.
“Covid-19 has created new vulnerabilities as well as exacerbated existing ones and increased risks of exploitation of individuals and communities to trafficking networks,” she told the South China Morning Post. “Traffickers have adjusted their business models by exploiting modern communications technologies. Online trafficking and exploitation have evidently spiked since the beginning of the pandemic in the region.”
