Foreign workers and tourists stranded in Cambodia during the Covid-19 pandemic have been trafficked and forced to work in sophisticated Chinese-run online scams, a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation has found.
In interviews, nine trafficking victims said they were lured by social media adverts promising well-paid jobs in call centres. Instead, they ended up in shuttered hotel casinos and guarded compounds where they had their passports confiscated before being put to work online.
The victims, mainly from Africa and Asia, said they were ordered to create fake profiles on Tinder, WhatsApp and Facebook to entice people into fraudulent investment schemes involving cryptocurrencies, foreign exchange and shares.
