A police raid on a Philippines online organization highlights not only the ongoing digital crime boom in Southeast Asia but also the increasingly blurred line between cybercrime and ordinary gangsters.
Police raided the premises of the Tarlac Pogo firm following a complaint filed by a Vietnamese worker who bore signs of having been recently tortured in the form of electrocution scars. The police discovered 875 people, including 504 foreigners, who had been lured to work for what purported to be an online gaming company, but was actually a forced labour camp operating romance scams.
Filipino police rescued 875 “workers” – including 504 foreigners – in a raid late last week on a firm that posed as an online gaming company but, in reality, operated a forced labor camp that housed scam operators. The “workers” allegedly had their passports confiscated and were forced to operate the kind of heartless scams that are designed to separate lonely and gullible people in countries like the US and the UK from their life savings. According to local media, those who failed to meet quotas were allegedly physically harmed, deprived of sleep, or locked in their rooms.
The industrial scale of cybercriminal workshops such as these across South-East Asia has already this year attracted the attention of the United Nations (UN). In January, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) published a report: Casinos, Money Laundering, Underground Banking, and Transnational Organized Crime in East and Southeast Asia: A Hidden and Accelerating Threat.
Cyberfraud gangs mushrooming across SE Asia
The report details how online casinos and cyber fraud have mushroomed across Southeast Asia. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cybercriminals and digital scam artists in the region are now also starting to mimic the behavior of the big drug cartels by locating their operations in lawless locations beyond the future reach of the authorities.
“Concerningly, as law enforcement and regulators stepped up their efforts against casinos, illegal online gambling, and cyberfraud in Southeast Asia, organized crime has started migrating operations into inaccessible and autonomous armed group territories and other pockets of criminality in and around the Golden Triangle. Ongoing pressure is likely to motivate criminal groups to innovate and move further into the shadows,” reports UNDOC.
Just as the activities of South American cartels have impacted Western countries such as the US and the UK by flooding their cities with illegal and harmful class-A substances, so cybercriminals are now starting to locate their operations where they can target Western economies while remaining immune from arrest. This marked change in their behavior and their ruthless use of what amounts to the widespread use of slave labor also finally puts paid to the myth that cyber fraud can be regarded as a relatively ‘victimless’ white-collar crime.
