Sihanoukville Human Trafficking-US MSM Silence is Deafening
Sihanoukville. If you are following US MSM most of you may have no idea what it is. Indeed aside from one article by The Guardian the media seems to be ignoring it.
This is a huge scandal relating to human trafficking by Chinese gangsters in Cambodia exploiting young men and women who are lured from places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam and then subject to forced labor, slavery and torture
Seems a good opportunity to get the propaganda machine running full speed to play up Chinas involvement in enslaving Taiwans youth. Yet its nothing but crickets.
Initially when the story broke a couple of weeks ago I was not very interested. Its sad but there is just too much going on, my brain isn’t big enough to look into it everything.
It was only when I came up empty doing a search for US coverage that I became interested and that was fueled when I heard organ harvesting might be involved as well (although the english language press in Asia is avoiding this).
As many of you know human trafficking along with drug trafficking has been connected with various intelligence operations of different countries over the years to destabilize other countries and fund covert operations. I have no idea if this is the case in Cambodia but the silence is deafening
I also found out the Cambodian dictator Prime Minister Hun Sen as chair of ASEAN attended a uS-ASEAN summit in DC this May
Biden is rolling out the red carpet for the Southeast Asian leaders – including Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen who has wiped out any domestic opposition to his rule and, in his role as the current chair of ASEAN, ruffled feathers by becoming the first foreign leader to visit Myanmar since the February 2021 coup.
The first official engagement on May 12 will be a visit to the Capitol, where the ASEAN leaders will meet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and have a working lunch with both Democrat and Republican members.
After that, they will meet Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai as well as senior business leaders to discuss deeper economic cooperation.
In the evening, the leaders will join President Joe Biden for an “intimate dinner” at the White House.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/12/us-asean-summit-explainer
It doesn’t seem like this subject came up.
I am also somewhat baffled as to how this only seemed to become big news in Taiwan in the past couple of weeks since the problem was known going back to at least March with over a thousand young Taiwan people heading to Cambodia each month and not returning. Most of them were lower income snd unskilled, many of them aborigines who were especially hard hit by COVID and its impact on tourism and restaurant industries where they would work.
Of course, Taiwan is in a rough position being isolated as it is. Not a member of interpol and not having diplomatic relations with pro-Beijing Cambodia is a problem. Still, I think a better job could have been done going after those handling and recruiting the victims in Taiwan and putting out warnings
Anyways, I have dug out a few stories of interest and provided some excerpts
Sihanoukville, which has received massive Chinese investment in recent years, has emerged as one of the primary destinations for labour trafficking
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3137941/vietnamese-being-trafficked-chinese-nationals-work
9-6-21
Ongoing investigations by Khmer Times have revealed that approximately 25,000 people are in bonded captivity and one-third of them are housed in The China Project in Sihanoukville .
At its peak, the 10-building complex held some 12,000 people and, depending on the season, between 8,000 to 10,000 people are believed to be working there.
“In the last four months there have been lots of suicides,” said a former vendor who sold goods in front of the compound. “The last one was in August… If an ambulance doesn’t go inside at least twice a week, it is a wonder.”
The individual who committed suicide last month is believed to be a Chinese man.
Corpses are said to be transported in a vehicle to a nearby junction where they are transferred to a van. Forensics or post-mortem examinations are reportedly not conducted.
Businesses are allowed to set up shop free in front of the complex in front of a construction site.
They are ordered to turn a blind eye to the activities inside The China Project by private security guards.
Unsubstantiated rumours say operators are alleged to have murdered employees for not performing their jobs adequately or skimming from the top of earnings.
They reportedly wait until tides are low and leave corpses on the beach to be washed away.
https://khmertimeskh.com/50929672/sihanoukvilles-dirty-secret-dark-rumours-and-inside-information-raise-questions-about-the-china-project/
March, 2022
SIHANOUKVILLE — The Cambodian government has been told to urgently address “a crisis of forced labor, slavery and torture” after warnings were issued by at least five Asian embassies amid persistent reports detailing kidnapping and extortion rackets, particularly on this country’s south coast.
Thirty-five civil society groups said reports indicated that thousands of people, mostly foreign nationals, had found themselves trapped in large compounds and forced to work after being kidnapped, sold, trafficked, or tricked into accepting jobs in Cambodia.
“Workers who escape report having faced physical and mental threats and violence at the hands of their captors,” they said in a joint statement, calling for a coordinated mass response between the Cambodian and foreign governments, and international organizations including the United Nations.
Most of the alleged victims were put to work in online scamming operations, targeting foreign nationals who live outside the country, primarily based from here in the southern port town of Sihanoukville, which has a long held a reputation as a notorious haven for criminals who operate with impunity.
The group of 35 organizations – including Adhoc, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, Licadho, the International Justice Mission, and Transparency International – added that the embassies of Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, and China had all issued warnings about the situation.
Last month, more than 160 Indonesians were rescued by Cambodian authorities. Among them a group 44 who were “traded like cattle” within a syndicate of Chinese companies and forced into scamming people through online gambling syndicates.
A report by the Khmer Times found, “If the recruited workers failed to reach the bare minimum, their lives became a living hell. In order to leave the company, the syndicate operators demanded that the workers or their families pay between $3,000-$5,000 as compensation money.”
Another widely circulated report told how a Chinese man claimed he had been imprisoned and had his blood drained and sold by a gang in Sihanoukville. But Cambodian police have told the Chinese embassy in Phnom Penh that the “blood slave case” was a hoax.
In response Minister of Interior Sar Kheng has put criminals on notice, warning he will put an end to such crimes in Sihanoukville before the mid-year commune elections. But also said that he had rejected a request from the Chinese government for special powers to arrest its own nationals involved in criminal activity.
“The above proposal of the Chinese side is not acceptable,” he said. “If we give this sovereignty to China, it will also be given to other countries that have offices in Cambodia.
Video shows a shirtless man cuffed on the ground being beaten with a stick while two more captives, handcuffed to a nearby window grill, watch on in terror. In a third, a grounded man, a foot on his neck, writhes in pain as he is electrocuted with a Taser.
The videos provide a window into the dark world run by transnational criminal networks able to smuggle people from China, through Vietnam and into Cambodia and Myanmar.
The networks, which are known mainly for running online gambling operations, force their captives to perpetrate online scams.
They grew out of an influx of online gambling groups and casino operators, mostly from China, who flocked to the coastal city of Sihanoukville in 2016. They found in Cambodia a haven of low taxes and lax regulations after a clampdown in the Philippines.
Catering mostly to the community in mainland China, where all gambling except state-run lotteries is illegal, Sihanoukville quickly attracted aspirational labels like "the Macao of Southeast Asia."
At its peak in 2019, the city's online gaming sector was generating several billions of dollars annually, according to one expert, and employing tens of thousands. Demand for space soared, kicking off an unprecedented building boom, which drew more workers from China.
But as the city rapidly grew, the criminality at the core of many gambling networks became plain to see, spilling out into the street with fights, shootings and murders.
The bubble burst later that year when Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, pointing to the threat of organized crime, announced a ban on online gambling.
The ban was widely seen as a result of pressure from Beijing, Cambodia's largest source of aid and investment, which has pursued a yearslong crackdown against online gambling operators.
Mostly from China, but also other Southeast Asian nations, victims are kidnapped by these groups, held captive and forced, under threat of violence, to perpetrate web scams.
Getting a clear picture of the numbers is difficult. "This is something where there's clearly no oversight," said Jason Tower, the Myanmar country director for the United States Institute of Peace. Li estimated at least 30,000 people have been trafficked to Cambodia, while Chhay Kim Kheoun, a spokesman for the Cambodia National Police, denied the number of victims was in the thousands. He said he could not give a figure but acknowledged "some" cases have happened.
Tower, who has studied the activities of online gambling companies in China and Southeast Asia, estimated victims of these types of internet scams in mainland China could range between 100,000 and half a million.
He said there were "hundreds" of job advertisements on social media every day, attempting to lure Chinese workers to places in Cambodia and Myanmar associated with the criminal networks.
On his second day in Cambodia, Hua* realized he was a captive.
"The Macao of Southeast Asia" is becoming known for more than gambling. (Photo by Vann Soben)
The 29-year-old was somewhere in the coastal province of Preah Sihanouk, but he could not see the ocean. He guessed there were about 1,000 people in the walled compound, made up mostly of two-story buildings that looked to him like a neighborhood from his native China. There was little else around.
A supervisor gave him a cellphone, showed him to a computer and told him to download Chinese social networking apps. Each day, until the early morning, he was told to befriend women in China, gain their trust and entice them to invest in bitcoin
The networks are mostly headed by Chinese nationals, but there are also groups run by people from elsewhere in Southeast Asia. According to details of cases shared with Nikkei, they are able to buy the protection of some local authority figures in Cambodia.
The scale of this illicit industry is large but hard to pin down. Since 2020, Chinese police have arrested more than 130,000 people linked to 24,000 cases of cross-border gambling. However, the statistics, reported by Chinese state-run Legal Daily, do not refer specifically to trafficking crimes connected to the networks.
The Chinese and Vietnamese embassies in Cambodia this year have issued warnings about the threat posed by trafficking groups that lure victims with offers of high-paying jobs. In January, China urged its citizens to sign formal labor contracts before going to Cambodia to work.
"Otherwise, what awaits you is not a high salary, but the illegal imprisonment and kidnapping by online gambling dens," the Chinese embassy wrote.
In June, China and Cambodia announced that their joint law enforcement office would launch a crackdown after complaints about kidnapping, extortion, online gambling and fraud.
The head of the task force, Wu Jianmin, warned Chinese criminals behind such operations would be arrested and repatriated, even those who had become naturalized Cambodian citizens.
In the past 18 months, some 468 mainland Chinese and 37 from Taiwan were granted Cambodian citizenship, according to figures cited by local outlet the Cambodia China Times. During the same period, 83 people from other countries were naturalized.
"Cambodian nationality ... will not make Cambodia a safe haven for them," Wu said at a virtual news conference attended by Cambodia's National Police Chief Neth Savoeun and China's Deputy Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong.
China's mounting pressure on these groups in Cambodia forms part of a broader clampdown against online gambling networks. They are linked to more than $145 billion in illicit outflows from the mainland, according to comments last year by Liao Jinrong, the director-general of the International Cooperation Department of China's Ministry of Public Security, cited in state-run media.
Tower cited three main factors motivating the Chinese government's crackdown: The networks victimize Chinese citizens, are linked to large illicit outflows and their operations harm the country's reputation.
"It's creating a lot of national security threats on several levels," he said. "[Chinese President] Xi Jinping has really staked a lot of his legitimacy on the Party's ability to deal with crime, to deal with corruption and with these sorts of problems. The criminal networks operating in Southeast Asia are a source of major embarrassment."
COVID-19 border restrictions has meant traffickers were changing their smuggling methods and increasingly using boats rather than overland routes.
In July, Cambodian authorities intercepted 36 Chinese nationals and two Cambodians who had entered the country illegally in a boat after traveling more than 2000 nautical miles from China's Fujian Province.
The pandemic has also made it tough for rescued victims to return to China, with the price of plane tickets, and the cost of following COVID-19 protocols, making the trip too expensive.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Cyber-slavery-inside-Cambodia-s-online-scam-gangs
Cambodia’s troubles with human trafficking have escalated significantly after investigations by Taiwanese authorities, who fear thousands of Taiwanese have been trafficked into the Southeast Asian country and forced to work for criminal syndicates.
Amid harrowing reports from trafficked victims, the National Police Agency (NPA) conducted an investigation based on flight records, revealing that about 1,000 Taiwanese travelled to Cambodia per month for much of this year but on average only 100 returned home.
Based on that, police and politicians say at least 2,000 Taiwanese are still stranded in Cambodia against their will, but this number could be as high as 5,000 because of blind spots in the data. That is significantly more than the previous estimates that hundreds of Asians had been reportedly tricked and then sold here.
An inter-ministerial task force has been set up to deal with trafficked Taiwanese and there have already been press conferences with victims who escaped. A similar patternemerged in Malaysia in April when its ambassador in Phnom Penh wrote to local police seeking help.
In March, a group of 35 organizations told the Cambodian government to urgently address “a crisis of forced labor, slavery and torture” after warnings were issued by five Asian embassies; Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, and China. Malaysia followed soon after.
“Dozens of media reports and numerous victim accounts collected by local and international organizations suggest that thousands of people, mostly foreign nationals, are entrapped in these situations,” they said, bluntly, five months ago.
These types of operations – based mainly in the notoriously lawless southern port town of Sihanoukville – are similar to “boiler rooms,” which were not uncommon in Cambodia 10 to 20 years ago when Westerners were far more prominent in this country.
Back then boiler rooms were typically run by English-speaking Europeans who recruited from the ranks of backpackers and unsavory elements in the expat community who would target the wealthy and retired in the West with dodgy investments.
The difference between then and now is today’s operations are being run mainly by Chinese syndicates who trick unwitting Mandarin speakers, among others, into this type of scam with false promises of high pay. They are kidnapped on arrival and held in fortified compounds.
And these operations are nasty.
Beatings and torture by electrocution are common, according to victim accounts. People are held in third or fourth floor rooms. Some jump and, obviously, injure themselves. They have been ransomed, with families expected to pay thousands of dollars for their release. Many are sold onward.
Pip, a nickname, told Focus Taiwan that she applied for a high-paying job in Cambodia, but after arriving she was imprisoned in an industrial compound and resold four times in seven days. She escaped with help from a Cambodian provincial governor and an anti-fraud organization.
https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/taiwan-frets-for-thousands-trafficked-into-cambodia/
Taipei, Aug. 11 (CNA) An inter-ministerial task force has been set up by the Executive Yuan to tackle the issue of a large number of Taiwanese citizens having been lured to Cambodia by the promise of high-paying jobs and stuck there as human trafficking victims, Cabinet spokesperson Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said Thursday.
[seems that shoukd have been done in March]
Amid a series of reports of Taiwanese being lured to Cambodia, Myanmar, and other countries with lucrative job offers before being forced into illegal work while being subject to abuse, several legislators, including Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, held a news conference on Thursday calling for a task force to tackle this problem to be set up.
In response to this request, Lo said later on Thursday that a Cabinet-level task team had been set up and its top priority will be to have people who were trapped in Cambodia rescued and returned home.
https://focustaiwan.tw/society/202208110015
Taipei, Aug. 21 (CNA) Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said Sunday that the government is working to assist with the return of hundreds of Taiwanese allegedly being held hostage by human traffickers in Cambodia, after China made a similar offer.
Exercising consular jurisdiction overseas is part of Taiwan's sovereignty, "a job the Taiwan government will never outsource to another country," MOFA said in a press release, after the Chinese embassy in Cambodia offered to help free the Taiwanese victims there.
MOFA said the Taiwan government is currently doing its best to enhance cooperation between law enforcement authorities in Taiwan and Cambodia, in an effort to bring home the Taiwanese being held hostage there, as soon as possible.
As of Sunday, some 370 Taiwanese were stuck in Cambodia, after being lured there by criminal groups on promises of high pay for tech jobs, the Taiwan government said, citing information it had received from families seeking help.
The situation, however, has been complicated by the fact that Cambodia is a close ally of China, which sees Taiwan as part of its territory, and Phnom Penh does not recognize Taiwan or engage in any official contact with Taipei.
Taiwan's Cabinet has said that a task force comprising officials from MOFA, the Ministry of Justice, and the Criminal Investigation Bureau has been assigned to tackle the human trafficking issue. The task force will focus on helping to safely bring home the Taiwanese victims in Cambodia, and it will also provide public information on the risks related to traveling and working in Cambodia, the Cabinet said.
https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202208210008
Hundreds of Taiwanese are among unknown numbers of victims being held captive and forced to work in telecom scam networks by human trafficking operations in south-east Asia, authorities have said.
Police forces in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Vietnam have launched major operations to rescue their citizens and shut down the trafficking syndicates.
The traffickers, many connected to well known triads, are targeting mostly young Asian people via social media, offering well paid work and accommodation in countries including Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. On arrival, their passports are taken and they are often sold on to different groups and forced to work in offices running illegal phone or online scams.
The largest cohorts of victims appears to be from Vietnam and Taiwan. Taiwan authorities say almost 5,000 citizens have been recorded travelling to Cambodia and not returning. Police said they had identified at least 370 of them as being held against their will, but victims have said the number is likely to be much higher.
At least 46 people have returned to Taiwan in recent months, with some reporting they or others were forced to sign contracts, and were assaulted, raped, denied food and water, and frequently threatened. Rescues have been stymied or complicated by inadequate policing and corruption in Cambodia. Varying reports have said the perpetrators include Taiwanese, Chinese, Thai and Cambodian individuals.
News of the trafficking ring has been widely reported in Asia over recent weeks. Last week a viral video purported to show dozens of Vietnamese people fleeing a casino just inside the Cambodian border. The crowd of people were chased by guards wielding sticks as they ran from a building and jumped in a river to swim over the border to Vietnam. One 16-year-old reportedly drowned in the escape.
Yu Tang, a young Taiwanese woman who did not want to publish her surname, told the Guardian she was contacted via Facebook in April by a Taiwanese woman, who found her in a group for people seeking work. She was offered work overseas in call or assistance centres for online gaming and casino industries. When she expressed scepticism they offered to pay for a return flight and agreed to meet her in person.
“I didn’t believe them but then we met in public,” she said. The man appeared “normal”, Yu Tang said. She agreed to take the job and was met at the airport by different individuals, as well as several others also seeking work.
They were met again at Phnom Penh airport by others who “said they were travel agents but looked like gangsters”. The agents took the groups’ passports, claiming it was to organise sim cards, but did not return them.
“I knew if I wanted to call for help, I needed a sim card,” Yu Tang said. “In that moment we were imagining we’d be sold.”
All records of conversations with the traffickers were wiped off the victims’ phones, Yu Tang said, and they were taken to Sihanoukville and told they would be working in a phone scam operation. They were also told they would have to recruit others in order to pay US$17,000 if they wanted to be released. Yu Tang said when one man objected he was beaten unconscious and shocked with a stun gun. She said that man remains on Taiwan’s list of missing people.
Yu Tang said she was able to obtain a sim and immediately began to research the trafficking operation, finding details for a local politician’s office, who she contacted through Facebook.
The following day police and army officers arrived on site to collect her. She alleged the boss offered to pay them to “pretend nothing had happened”, but they refused. She has since returned to Taiwan.
Yu Tang said she believes many more Taiwanese remain trapped in Cambodia than authorities have confirmed, noting she saw at least 50 others being held in the same office where she was taken, and that the area was full of similar buildings. She said many people were forced to sign contracts which would be shown to any authorities questioning an individual’s status, and that people grew more fearful of speaking up the longer they were held.
“The longer they stayed the more horrible things they heard and saw, and got scared,” she said.
This is the only hit from a search with CNN and Sihanoukville going back to 2019
The Financial Action Task Force, a crime-fighting organization founded by the G7, recently placed Cambodia on its gray list of countries vulnerable to money laundering, citing the lack of regulation of its casinos, which the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has warned could be used to launder the proceeds from organized crime, including methamphetamine trafficking.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/04/asia/cambodia-chinese-investment-intl-hnk/index.html