Inside the crypto ‘prisons’ scamming Britons out of their life savings

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The Unit­ed States Insti­tute of Peace, which has been track­ing the explo­sion of human traf­fick­ing and pro­lif­er­a­tion of crim­i­nal­ly run zones in Myan­mar and across South­east Asia, has called it a “grow­ing threat to glob­al security.”

It esti­mates that crime net­works in Cam­bo­dia alone have drawn 50,000 to 100,000 peo­ple into slave-like conditions.

The insti­tute believes that in Myan­mar, the num­ber could be two to three times high­er, and point­ed to the “par­tic­u­lar­ly sin­is­ter” enclave called the KK Zone, locat­ed on the Moei River.

“By one account, as many as 10,000 peo­ple are enslaved there, tor­tured or, accord­ing to some accounts, threat­ened with hav­ing their organs har­vest­ed if they fail to gen­er­ate ade­quate rev­enue from oper­at­ing scams,” said USIP in a Novem­ber report.

The UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has long warned of the rise in crim­i­nal activ­i­ty in the Mekong region and in the so-called “Gold­en Tri­an­gle” – the area where the bor­ders of Thai­land, Laos and Myan­mar meet. 

Disrupting organised crime syndicates

Last year it esti­mat­ed tens of thou­sands of peo­ple were trapped by scam gangs, but the UNODC’s Jere­my Dou­glas acknowl­edged the region “has­n’t real­ly got a sense of the scale of the traf­fick­ing, except that it is obvi­ous­ly massive.”

“A region­al response is fun­da­men­tal,” he said. “Pres­sure applied in one coun­try will see them [the syn­di­cates] shift to anoth­er,” he said.

“The region real­ly needs to dis­rupt organ­ised crime syn­di­cates and take away the con­di­tions they use and look for to do busi­ness – if they don’t, not much will change.”

Last year, Stephan Wes­ley, 29, a graph­ic design­er from Tamil Nadu, India, found him­self trapped inside a large com­pound in Myan­mar sur­round­ed by elec­tric fenc­ing and guard­ed by armed hench­men, when he applied via social media for an attrac­tive $1,100 a month job in Thailand.

The recruit­ment process was elab­o­rate and per­sua­sive, start­ing out with an inter­view in the Dubai Invest­ment Park, before new recruits were flown to Bangkok and giv­en a tourist visa but promised a one-year work per­mit. They were then dri­ven to Mae Sot, a bor­der town in north­west Thailand.

“We were made to wait out­side a hotel and two Thai peo­ple came, armed with big guns. They took our lug­gage and made us get into a truck,” Mr Wes­ley told the Telegraph.

“They took us deep into the dark for­est and local peo­ple came and took us to a riv­er which I now know was the bor­der with Myan­mar. There were no fences or army per­son­nel there.”

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