The hustle started like it often does, with a post on Facebook promising job seekers generously paid customer service positions in Cambodia, no experience necessary.
Soraton Charehkphunpol, a Thai cook scraping by in a restaurant in Bangkok, couldn’t resist the offer to earn more than double his $470 monthly salary.
Late one evening last year, after another grueling shift, Soraton answered the ad. Within hours, a man arrived at his door to take him to the Cambodian border city of Poipet.
It wasn’t long before Soraton realized he had made a mistake. Dumped in a high-rise building above a casino, he was turned over to mobsters who seized his passport and put him to work bilking gamblers on a sham sports betting app.
“The bosses said if I tried to leave they would just sell me to another gang,” said Soraton, a rail-thin 20-year-old from the central Thai city of Nakhon Pathom. “That’s when I realized I was a slave.”
In a dystopian nightmare come to life, the Cambodian government has given Chinese crime syndicates free rein to bring in tens of thousands of foreign men and women who — according to human rights organizations and their own accounts — are held captive to work in crowded cyber scam mills.
Lured by the promise of legitimate employment, they are instead forced to run online and telephone rackets targeting people…
