Overview
- OHCHR estimates at least 300,000 people from 66 countries are being forced to run online fraud, concentrated in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines.
- Investigators document torture, sexual violence, forced abortions, food deprivation, solitary confinement and wage theft inside heavily fortified compounds.
- Satellite imagery and field reports indicate roughly 74% of known scam sites remain in the Mekong region, with operations also detected in parts of the Pacific, South Asia, the Gulf, West Africa and the Americas.
- Criminal groups increasingly deploy AI to scrape social media for targets, generate multilingual scripts and produce deepfakes, with scam profits estimated in the tens of billions of dollars annually.
- The UN cautions that trafficked workers are often misidentified as offenders during raids and calls for coordinated rescues, non‑refoulement, rehabilitation, anti‑corruption measures and financial network targeting.