Myanmar, Cambodia centers for slave-run, industrial scale, online scamming in South Asia

 

Inside Cambodia's cyber-scam centres,

where workers are victims of human trafficking

Asia / Pacific

Issued on: 15/10/2024 - 13:31

By:William DE TAMARIS|Aruna POPURI|Justin McCURRY

From the show

It’s happened to us all: a message arrives on our phone that looks genuine but turns out to be a scam. The internet has enabled scammers worldwide to find and contact potential victims. In Southeast Asia, the problem has reached alarming proportions and generates billions of dollars. FRANCE 24's William de Tamaris, Aruna Popuri and Justin McCurry report from Cambodia and the Myanmar border. 

Warning: this report contains graphic content.  

In Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands of people are employed by online scam centres to extract as much money as possible from victims. Mainly based in Cambodia and Myanmar, these cyber-scam hubs generate billions of dollars.

But the employees, too, are victims. They are trafficked by Chinese mafia groups as cheap labour. These workers are tortured, deprived of food and threatened with sexual abuse to force them to work.

Our reporters managed to get to the heart of one scamming operation and speak to some of the people whose lives have been ruined but who managed to escape.

Islam - Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow > Surprising Origins of Turks and Other Disturbing Questions

..

Now Even Science Demonstrates Islamic Aggression

08/12/2021 

by Raymond Ibrahim

Along with Islamic doctrine and history, one can now add science to the list of things that demonstrate Islamic aggression.

Ancestry.com, a company that operates a network of genealogical and historical records, and provides DNA ancestry kits, recently asserted what history already knows: most of the denizens of Turkey are not Turks but rather the descendants of Christian peoples, mostly Greeks, who lived in Anatolia well over a millennium before the Turks invaded, but converted, due to Islam’s three choices (conversion, jizya/submission, or death).

As might be expected, many Turks, who tend to be zealous over their heritage, are outraged at finding that their ancestors were not conquering Turks but conquered infidels.  This finding also underscores a vicious cycle I’ve discussed before: most of those Muslims who today persecute the indigenous Christians in their midst—and Turks rank among them—are themselves the descendants of Christians who converted to Islam to cease their own persecution.

One wonders how long before DNA studies reveal another, even more unflattering fact: the bloodline of conquering Muslims—Turks chief among them—is further adulterated with the blood of European concubines, sex-slaves, many millions of which were imported over the centuries by Turks, Tatars, Barbary corsairs, and various other Muslim peoples. The historical record is clear on this.

As one example, in 1438, Bartolomeo de Giano, an Italian Franciscan, witnessed the Turks’ slave raids throughout the Balkans.  From Hungary, 300,000 were enslaved and “carried off in just a few days,” he wrote; from Serbia and Transylvania 100,000 were “led away in iron fetters tied to the backs of horses. . . . [and] women and children were herded by dogs without any mercy or piety. If one of them slowed down, unable to walk further because of thirst or pain, O Good Jesus! she immediately ended her life there in torment, cut in half.”

As one historian observes, “The massive enslavement of slavic populations during this period gave rise, in fact, to our word ‘slave’: in Bartolomeo’s time, to be a slave was to be a Slav.”

Similarly, the Greek historian, Doukas (1400-1462), writes the following about the palace of Ottoman sultan Bayezid:

[T]here one could find carefully selected boys and girls, with beautiful faces, sweet young boys and girls who shone more brightly than the sun.  To what nations did they belong?  They were Byzantines [Greeks], Serbs, Wallachians, Albanians, Hungarians, Saxons, Bulgarians, and Latins….  He himself [Sultan Bayezid] unceasingly gave himself over to pleasure, to the point of exhaustion, by indulging in debauchery with these boys and girls.

Nor, as some of these passages suggest, were European slaves used only for pleasure; Muslims regularly procreated with them as well.  Even that one Turk most celebrated by Erdogan’s Turkey—Bayezid’s great-grandson, Muhammad II, the conqueror of Constantinople—was born of a Christian slave mother.  This did not change the fact that he became an avowed enemy of Christendom—the “forerunner of antichrist” as he was described.

Is he called the “forerunner of antichrist” because he was the first Muslim to stand in the Hagia Sophia after a thousand years of it being the center of Christianity in the world? (Search this blog for 'Hagia Sophia' for several stories.)

Matt 24:14-16

"This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.

"Therefore when you see the ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains.

Has Erdogan's appearance, leading prayer in the same Hagia Sophia in 2020, the actual abomination of which Jesus spoke?

Moreover, as Darío Fernández-Morera, author of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, explains:

Such was the impact of Christian slaves on Islamic lands, that many of the Umayyad rulers of Islamic Spain, as the sons of sexual slaves, were blue-eyed and blond or red-haired; and the founder of the “Arabic” Nasrid dynasty of Granada was called al-Hamar, “the Red One,” because of his reddish hair and beard. … Arabist Celia del Moral observes that in Umayyad al-Andalus the most coveted and therefore expensive sexual slaves were blond and red-haired females from the Northern Christian regions.

In fact, according to the calculations of Spanish Arabist Julian Ribera, due to the constant sexual intercourse with European slave women, the genetic Arab component of each generation of Umayyad rulers was reduced by half, so that the last Umayyad, Hisham II (976-1013), was approximately only 0.09 percent Arab.

Nor was this phenomenon limited to Muslim elites—caliphs, sultans, emirs, and the like—because they could afford “well-staffed” harems.  Naturally, it is they whose doings are recorded, because it is they—the rulers, not the lay Muslim—that chroniclers recorded.  Even so, history makes clear that European sex-slaves were, depending on time and place, abundantly available to the average Muslim.

Thus we learn that the slave markets of Adrianople (Edirne), formerly the Ottoman capital, were so inundated with European flesh that children sold for pennies, “a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse.”

Similarly, considering that sixteenth century “Algiers teemed with Christian captives, and it became a common saying that a Christian slave was scarce a fair barter for an onion,” little wonder by the late eighteenth century, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”

Will Ancestry.com or similar organizations ever demonstrate this other unflattering fact concerning Muslim bloodlines through DNA?  Unlikely.

Quoted material in the above article was excerpted from and is documented in the author’s book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.

Persecution of Christians Intensifies in 2017: 3,066 Were Killed

Although it seems to be a thing of the past, people are still killed for believing in God and, unfortunately, many of them, 3,066 to be exact, in 2017. 

The NGO Open Doors' report shows alarming numbers for another year. In 2017, persecution of Christians worsened to the extent that, each month, 322 Christians were killed for their faith. In total, in the 50 countries analyzed by the organization, some 250 million Christians suffer some form of violence that ranges from hostility or discrimination to extreme persecution or murder. 

The report reveals that one out of every three people in the world live in a country without religious freedom. There are five countries in which widespread persecution of Christians exists. In Pakistan, antiblasphemy law has become a tool for the constant oppression of Christians. In Sudan, Christians are frequently accused of espionage, and the government wants the Church to be under its control. In Somalia, conversions cost lives. A converted Christian can be killed by his or her own family. In Afghanistan, there are very few Christians and, when a Muslim converts, he or she receives death threats or is assassinated. At the top of the list is North Korea, where the simple act of having a Bible puts an entire family in danger. Thousands of Christians fill concentration camps because, to the Kin Jong-un regime, Christians are enemies of the state. 

Not even a mention of Egypt where Muslims blow up Coptic Christians for sport, or Nigeria where murdering Christians and kidnapping Christian girls for use as slaves and sex slaves happens quite regularly.

There's also reason for hope, though. There are places where, after darkness, there has been a new step into the light, like in Iraq. Open Doors is one of the Christian organizations that works to give back what extremism has robbed of thousands of people. This protestant organization collaborates with the Syrian-Catholics of Mosul.

In Syria as well as Iraq, the defeat of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has alleviated the pressure on Christians, but both countries still remain at the top of the black list. 

Members of Traveller Family Jailed over Modern-Day Slavery Camp

Traveller is another name for gypsies in the UK and Ireland.

Several members of a traveller family have been sentenced to jail for running a modern-day slavery camp.

Ten men and one woman belonging to the Rooney family were convicted at Nottingham Crown Court on Tuesday for exploiting vulnerable people on a site in Drinsey Nook, Lincolnshire.

Nine members of the family were sentenced to jail for a total of almost 80 years in prison.

The family recruited unemployed, vulnerable, often homeless men from across the country to work for meagre wages in their various businesses.

Almost all of the 18 victims were found to have mental health or drug and/or drink problems.

The court heard the victims, all adults aged between 18 and 63, were beaten and left without running water and toilet facilities while living in squalid caravans.

In one case, a man had been exploited by the family for 26 years. He said he was once made to dig his own grave in case he failed to pledge life-long servitude to the family.

In another case, a victim told the police he sometimes felt he was treated no better than one of the family’s dogs, as leftovers were thrown at him to pick up from the ground.

In sentencing, Judge Timothy Spencer QC called it the "wholesale exploitation of vulnerable men".

He told the family: "Violence is a consistent theme in this case.

"Your victims had reached a position where they were cowed into submission.

“They knew that any resistance to you was futile - it would have been met by you recruiting more family members to deliver more violence.

"These offences are chilling in their mercilessness."

The judge also compared the family’s lavish lifestyle to the debased one of their “labourers”.

Senior investigating officer from Lincolnshire Police Chief Superintendent Nikki Mayo said: "While their 'labourers' were suffering, this family were [buying] luxurious holidays to Barbados, Australia, Egypt and Mexico…high performance BMWs, spa days and even cosmetic surgery.

"The greatest positive of this case is that so many of the victims have now got their lives back, they've got a real second chance at some peace and happiness and to grow and flourish in their communities - it's very much deserved,” Mayo said.

Drinsey Nook, Lincolnshire, UK

Franklin Graham Unloads on Obama for His 'Religion of Peace'

Rev. Franklin Graham: Islam isn't a religion of peace

The November edition of Decision magazine, published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), asks, "is Islam really a religion of peace?"

In his article, Franklin Graham, who runs both the BGEA and Samaritan's Purse, gives the answer: no.

President Obama's comment that "Islam teaches peace" was "baffling," writes Graham.

But he was just getting started.  He recounts the prayer vigil held the next day, across from the White House, for the Iranian American pastor who has been held in an Iranian prison for two years.  At the event, Franklin Graham spoke to the president via the media and loudspeakers in Lafayette Park:

“Mr. President—followers of a peaceful religion do not cut off the heads of innocent people in the barbaric fashion (as) the world has watched recently. 

“Mr. President—believers in a peaceful religion do not kidnap 300 young schoolgirls as Boko Haram did in northeastern Nigeria in April and reportedly [sell] them to men to be sex slaves. 

“Mr. President—men who practice a peaceful religion do not detonate bombs on an American street during a marathon race to kill and maim innocent people. 

“Mr. President—no one who belongs to a peaceful religion would even consider hijacking jet airliners and flying them into buildings occupied by thousands of innocent people beginning their workday, as happened in this country and in this city on 9/11. 

“Mr. President—no peaceful religion would tolerate, let alone practice, female circumcision, require a woman to have her husband’s permission to leave her home and take up employment, and restrict her ability to receive justice in the case of sex crimes. 

“Mr. President—a peaceful religion would not condone and allow a father to drown a daughter in a swimming pool in front of the family in the name of family honor because she might have stayed out late in the evening with her boyfriend. 

“Mr. President—why haven’t the 3.5 million Muslims in North America rejected this gross, barbaric and despicable behavior by their fellow Muslims on American soil?”

Dubai - Built by Slaves Living in Obscene Conditions, Trapped for Life

A snippet of an article about Dubai from the Independent, written by Dr. Subramanian Swamy:

Dr. Subramanian Swamy is a very influential writer, politician and economist in India. He frequently comments on foreign affairs.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here.

They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

These living conditions remind me of the old walled city of Hong Kong.
Arguably the worst slum in the world until it was torn down in 1993-94.

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says.

Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised.

If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. 

The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The walled city of Kowloon, Hong Kong

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.

The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

The "ringleaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."

Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."

This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.

Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts.

A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.

At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stands, oblivious.

There is No Limit to Man's Cruelty to Man, or Woman, or Child

Up to 30,000 Eritreans have been abducted since 2007 and taken to Egypt's Sinai to suffer torture and ransom demands, new research says.

The study, presented to the European parliament, says Eritrean and Sudanese security officers are colluding with the kidnap gangs.

At least $600m (£366m) has been extorted from families in ransom payments, it says.

Victims are kidnapped in Ethiopia, Sudan and Eritrea and taken to Sinai.

Eritrea has denied its officials are involved in the kidnappings.

Most of those targeted are Eritrean refugees fleeing the country, says the report - The Human Trafficking

Almost every Eritrean knows somebody who has been held hostage”, says Meron Estefanos, rights activist.

Meron Estefanos Rights activist

 "Their captors are opportunistic criminals looking to profit from their vulnerability," the report says.

"[The victims] are then taken to the Sinai and sold, sometimes more than once, to Bedouin groups living in the Sinai."

The report was authored by Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean human rights activist in Sweden, and Prof Mirjam van Reisen and Dr Conny Rijken of Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

The report says Eritrea's Border Surveillance Unit (BSU) and Sudanese security officials are among the "actors" colluding with the gangs that hold people hostage in the the largely lawless Sinai.

"[The hostages] are chained together without toilets or washing facilities and dehydrated, starved and deprived of sleep," the report says.

"They are subject to threats of death and organ harvesting... Those who attempt to escape are severely tortured." 

This is hardly believable, and yet, there is no limit to man's cruelty to man, or woman, or child.

Ms Meron told the BBC's Focus on Africa radio programme that one of her cousins was freed after a ransom of $37,000 was paid.

The cousin was abducted in Sudan, before being taken to Sinai where her captors tortured and raped her, Ms Meron said.

"Almost every Eritrean knows somebody who has been held hostage. It's a very common thing," she told the BBC.

The report said the trafficking would have been impossible without the direct involvement of Eritrean security officials, given the "restrictions on movement within the country, the requirement of exit visas at the border and the shoot-to-kill policy for illegal border crossings".

However, Eritrea's UK ambassador, Tesfamichael Gerahtu, said Eritrea was a "victim of human trafficking".

The government was "working hard" to arrest and bring to justice criminal gangs operating along its border, he told Focus on Africa.

The UN estimates that 3,000 Eritreans fled their repressive and impoverished country each month last year.

Many headed for the swollen refugee camps of neighbouring eastern Sudan, now home to more than 90,000 people.

Horrific Torture of 14 Year Old Bride Because She Won't be a Prostitute

An article today on BBC News revealed that Sahar actually managed to escape from the cellar where her new family tortured her. However, she was returned to her family by neighbours.

Afghan girl tortured by her in-laws for refusing to become a prostitute.

Sahar Gul was married off to a 30-year-old man around seven months ago, when she was just 14 years old. In the video, as Sahar is taken to hospital in a wheelchair, she is asked who beat her. She names her father-in-law, her husband, her sister-in-law, her brother-in-law and her mother-in-law. The 15-year-old says her hair and her nails were pulled out by her mother-in-law.
Police say that she had had her nails and clumps of hair pulled out. In addition they say she had chunks of flesh cut out with pliers.

Under Afghan law, the earliest age for marriage for girls is 16. However, almost half of Afghan women are married when they are younger.

How long, Oh Lord, how long? What an incredible girl to refuse to prostitute herself after absolutely inhumane torture. Such integrity belongs to heroes. May God help her heal.