Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked into the Golden Triangle's scam compounds, where day-to-day life consists of forced labour, cramped living conditions and beatings. For women, there is the additional trauma of sexual abuse, as revealed by recent raids and survivor testimonies.
Survivor Stories Emerge from Laos and Myanmar
In October 2023, a woman named Sarah (not her real name) went into labour while working in a cyberscam compound in Laos' Golden Triangle. She had hidden her pregnancy, fearing the Chinese bosses would kill her if they found out. Grabbing the office's shared smartphone, she ran past a momentarily absent guard and used Google Translate to ask a taxi driver to take her to a hospital. Sarah, a 39-year-old former shopkeeper from Uganda, had been lured to Laos by a fake job offer as a social media manager and sold between three compounds starting in 2022. She had experienced sexual abuse in a "dark room" where a group of men were forced to rape her and three other women as punishment for refusing to scam more victims.
Gender-Based Violence Overlooked
Like the hundreds of thousands trafficked into Southeast Asia's scam compounds, Sarah endured forced labour, cramped conditions, and beatings. But she also suffered sexual abuse, a common yet overlooked reality reported by a growing number of female survivors. Run primarily by Chinese and Taiwanese criminal syndicates, illicit cyberscamming has expanded across Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia since 2020, leading to estimated fraud losses of tens of billions of dollars. While the workforce was long thought to be overwhelmingly male, government raids in Cambodia and Myanmar have freed tens of thousands, and female survivors are increasingly sharing stories of gender-based violence.
Sexual Violence as Punishment and Reward
The Guardian spoke with six women who described gendered exploitation, including sexual attacks, lack of access to sanitary products, and verbal abuse. Compound bosses use rape to punish women and as a reward for men who complete lucrative scams. Human rights groups have started tracking sexual violence. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) noted in a recent report that "sexual violence against female and male victims [has] reportedly increased dramatically since 2024," citing 12 women who were raped and impregnated in Myanmar, as well as a pregnant Filipina woman who was electrocuted. Amnesty International has also documented an increase in sexual abuse, including what regional director Montse Ferrer calls "extreme" cases of rape, forced abortion, and abortion-related deaths.
Drivers of Trafficking: Financial Burden and Deception
Women are often driven towards labour migration due to financial burdens from caring for children and ageing parents, says Ling Li, co-founder of EOS Collective, an anti-scam nonprofit. Many report being trafficked by family members or partners. Rachel (not her real name), a 29-year-old Kenyan single mother, borrowed 200,000 shillings (£1,150) in late 2024 to pay a broker who offered work in a Thai sweet factory. Instead, she was sold across two Myanmar scam compounds, working 18-hour days chatting with at least 100 potential victims. When she failed to respond fast enough, the boss punched her in the head, kicked her, and sexually abused her. "If I'd had someone who could tell me, 'Wherever you're going, it's not good' – I could have listened," she says. "But I had no idea about anything. I only wanted to go and work, and to earn for myself and for my family."
Fatal Consequences
Not all women return home. Lintang (not her real name), a 22-year-old from Indonesia's Riau province, was barely able to walk when admitted to a Cambodian hospital on 20 February. She told an NGO case handler that she had been repeatedly gang-raped. Diagnosed with HIV and tuberculosis, she died on 10 March after efforts to send her to Indonesia for treatment proved difficult.
Survivor's Warning
Sarah flew home to Uganda 40 days after her son was born with the help of an NGO. She now works as a tailor, earning about 7,000 Ugandan shillings (£1.40) a day, not enough to cover living expenses. She warns other women, especially single mothers, to think twice before travelling abroad for work, lest they return as "bodies." On days when there is no food or money for a doctor, memories of the Golden Triangle flood back. "When he's sleeping, when I don't have anything to feed him – that's when I think about it," she says.
