The Chinese criminal syndicates active in areas on the border between Cambodia and Thailand are turning out to be a major problem for law enforcement and other public agencies in Southeast Asian countries, a media report said.
The scale of the illegal activities of these groups has increased since the emergence of COVID-19, as many organized groups started taking advantage of vulnerable youth rendered unemployed due to the pandemic, The Irrawaddy reported.
The rise of Chinese-run scam operations is closely linked to the increasing economic integration between China and Southeast Asia over the past decade, which has seen a surge in Chinese investment in the region, the report said, adding that, as they grow in scale, these operations increasingly resemble an industry.
Such operations have been aided by weak legal frameworks and corrupt local elites in parts of the region, providing favourable conditions for illicit activities, the report added.
In a cross-border operation on April 10-11, the Thai and Cambodian police rescued 68 Thai workers from Chinese scam gangs that were running call centres in Sihanoukville in western Cambodia, the capital Phnom Penh and Krong Bavet on the border with Vietnam, the report said.
Similar operations have been exposed in the past as well. In November 2021, Cambodian police rescued 99 Thai workers from a building in Phnom Penh where they were held and forced into illegal work by a Chinese gang.
Chinese gangsters direct their victims, mostly poor workers, to scam at least 500,000 Thai baht (nearly USD 15,000) every month, failing which, they face the threat of being sold to another gang, the report said.
Those who refuse are subjected to various forms of violence and mistreatment including being whipped, electrocuted, beaten up or locked in dark rooms without food, the report added.
Hundreds of Malaysians, Filipinos and Indonesians have also been lured to Cambodia by organized crime groups based in and around Sihanoukville, a city notorious for lawlessness, casinos and Chinese criminal gangs, the report said citing, media reports from Southeast Asia.
Most of the kingpins are in China but they employ people down the line in neighbouring countries to run their wider Chinese transnational criminal activities, the report said.
Thai police estimate that over 1,500 Thais are still working in scam call centres in cities like Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville and Poipet, held against their will by the scam gangs, the report further said, adding that, They have already rescued 800 Thai nationals from criminal gangs in Cambodia since October 2021.
The exact workings of these rackets remain unclear, but there is mounting evidence that they are regionally coordinated and linked to other nodes of illicit activities, such as the massive drug-trafficking syndicates that operate in eastern Myanmar, the report said.
Many see it as a by-product of China's economic boom and increasing connectivity to once-remote parts of mainland Southeast Asia. But the biggest cause of such activities is poor law enforcement in border areas, both by Chinese authorities and the host countries, the report concluded.
( With inputs from ANI )
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