MalayMail-Sept 29
Modern slavery, as unbelievable as it sounds, exists in 2022. It is described as severe exploitation of people for personal or commercial gain, and its prevalence — in the form of job scams which promises high wages for simple work overseas — has only increased over the past year post-Covid-19, which destroyed thousands, if not millions of lives and livelihoods and forced people to take risks in order to make ends meet and support their loved ones through the hardest of times. The alarm in Malaysia has now rung loud and clear after a 23-year-old Malaysian citizen named Goi Zhen Feng became Malaysia’s first recorded death from overseas job scams. He died on May 11 at the Mae Sot Hospital, in Mae Sot, Thailand, a city in the west of Thailand that shares borders with Myanmar. This has set an urgent tone in Putrajaya to end these scams and bring back the hundreds of other Malaysians who have fallen prey to these syndicates before they end up like Goi.
These job fraud syndicates are supposedly led by gangsters from China who run their scams from secure compounds mainly found in Sihanoukville, a coastal town at the tip of an elevated peninsula in Cambodia’s south-west on the Gulf of Thailand, but also have outposts in the casino border towns of Laos and Myanmar, where they can easily transport those they have ensnared to and fro. They operate through sophisticated fake profiles and shadow websites, and post job opportunities overseas via social media to lure debt-saddled youths from Malaysia and other South-east Asian countries with promises of high salaries in online sales or eternal love, before enslaving them to carry out scams themselves or risk being beaten to a pulp, sold off to another syndicate or having their organs harvested. Victims of these scams were made to work 15 hours a day, often times starved, beaten or electrocuted by electronic batons, drugged, raped or even murdered if they do not comply with their captives or do not meet their “sales” targets. Read more at: https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2022/09/29/why-are-malaysians-falling-for-deadly-job-scams-in-cambodia-and-what-is-putrajaya-doing-to-prevent-more-victims/30593
