Indonesia and Cambodia crack down on ‘aggressive’ Chinese-run job scams as more victims emerge
- Jakarta and Phnom Penh to enhance cooperation between police departments, speed up handling of human trafficking cases
- Indonesian authorities to tighten supervision of migrant workers at border checkpoints, educate public about lawful migration
In cases that have been reported in countries like Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, victims are forced to work long hours running online scams, and are held against their will by employers that sometimes sell these workers to another criminal enterprise. The migrants are usually drawn in by the false promise of high salaries in US dollars, but in reality get paid little or not at all.
“It is so easy for recruiters these days to lure workers,” said Bobi Anwar Maarif, general secretary at the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union. “They could just become members of job vacancy-related groups on social media, such as Facebook, with hundreds of thousands of jobseekers, and publish their vacancies there.”
Indonesian victims were employed as online scammers for fraudulent investment companies or online gambling websites. Their passports were seized by their employers, who had to pay the commission for the recruiters that lured these workers.
Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi on Thursday said Indonesian and Cambodian authorities had agreed to work more closely together, including by “exchanging contacts of each other’s police departments to make it easier to handle [the case] if similar accidents happen again”.
In total, 446 Indonesians fell victims to the scams from January to August 2022, a sharp increase from a total of 119 last year, Retno said. All the victims were rescued and repatriated, including 225 Indonesians held captive in the seaside town of Sihanoukville. All the victims used tourist visas, instead of work visas, to work in Cambodia.