Hundreds of young, university-educated Filipinos have been pulled into Asia’s scam online rooms, according to whistle-blowers, who say they are waved through Philippine airports by corrupt officials bound for jobs where their English-language skills are used to reel in targets across the world.
Witnesses rescued from the scam centres in the Mekong region say they left for what appeared to be legitimate call-centre jobs overseas, but instead resulted in them being forced into scamming people into joining fake cryptocurrency schemes.
More than 200 Philippine nationals trafficked into Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos to carry out scams returned home between last September and January this year, the Philippine government says. Most were forced to work at compounds and casinos run by Chinese gangsters.
