Technology-facilitated trafficking: How Bangladeshi migrants become victims of recruitment in Cambodia

Filed 57m ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Heavy Heart

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: CBP Photography · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

A data journalism report traces how thousands of Bangladeshi migrants, drawn by WhatsApp and Facebook job ads promising well-paid work in Phnom Penh, arrive in Cambodia only to have their passports seized within days. Investigators describe a three-tiered network of recruiting agencies, travel operators, and middlemen who move victims into compounds where they are forced to run scams against strangers abroad, with people bought and sold between operators for sums up to USD 4,000.

Official migration costs are quoted between USD 654 and USD 1,258, but brokers actually charge victims USD 2,835 to USD 4,450, against an average Bangladeshi monthly salary of about USD 329. Bangladesh has no consular presence in Cambodia, leaving migrants without embassy support when the promised jobs vanish. Families report being extorted for thousands of dollars for a relative's release, and returnees describe violence and torture inside holding facilities, with most victims unable to produce the paperwork needed to pursue legal cases.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

The arithmetic alone tells you nobody involved believed the advertised jobs were real. When the going rate to get scammed runs three times the official cost estimate, the middlemen aren't cutting corners, they're pricing in the con. A country with no embassy in the destination country and citizens paying strangers their family's savings is a system built to be walked into and hard to walk out of.

Source: Read the original at Global Voices → Scored: Heavy Heart · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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