By Sebastian Spadafora, RSC intern
In July 2025, the independent Jordanian newspaper Al Ghad reported a raid on a compound in the city of Irbid. Jordanian investigators had opened it as a joint case between the cybercrime unit and the anti-trafficking unit, treating it from the outset as both a suspected financial fraud operation and a possible trafficking case: fake investment applications that promised real returns and vanished the moment funds were deposited. What they found were 15 individuals of Asian nationality running the scams. INTERPOL later confirmed what the investigators had only suspected: the workers had themselves been trafficked, recruited under false job promises, stripped of their passports on arrival, and forced to work under threat. Two suspected organizers were arrested.
This raises an uncomfortable question: how many people, right now, are being abused, sold and forced to run these scams, in cases that haven’t yet been found?
A Growing Global Crisis
This is not an isolated case. Online scam operations have surfaced across nearly every region, though the forced criminality powering these scams has remained heavily concentrated in one place: Southeast Asia, where 74% of identified scam-center trafficking victims worldwide were brought, according to INTERPOL. These scams have caused between US$18 billion and US$37 billion in losses in East and Southeast Asia in 2023 alone, according to the UNODC. By early 2025, INTERPOL’s own data showed victims from 66 countries had been trafficked into online scam centres, with no continent left untouched. Human trafficking and online fraud have merged into an interconnected global criminal economy, no longer confined to its dominant hubs in Southeast Asia, expanding to the Middle East and West Africa. Irbid is a small data point against numbers like these, but this case exactly shows that this industry, which has predominantly been a regional problem, is becoming a global one.
On the 30th of July, the UN marks World Day against Trafficking in Persons, and this year’s theme names that same nexus directly: “Trapped Behind the Scam”. The day draws attention to a rapidly expanding form of trafficking, one in which organized groups traffic people into forced criminality, coercing them to run industrial-scale financial fraud on victims around the world. At ARDD, a civil society organization founded in Jordan, we are writing this because this problem no longer belongs only to headlines about Cambodia or Myanmar. It describes something that has already happened inside our own borders, once – that we know of. Not everyone who works in these operations is trafficked. Some choose the work, understanding what it is, and in some cases are paid highly for it. This piece is about the people who did not choose it: those who were deceived, coerced, and trafficked into running these scams. It turns to the original hub of Southeast Asia, where years of documentation and survivor testimony show what these operations look like once fully established: who they recruit, how they’re run, and why, even after crackdowns, they keep spreading.
Inside the Scam Centres of Southeast Asia
Almost every account begins the same way, with a job offer that looks too good to pass up. Amnesty International interviewed a Thai woman named Lisa. She was 18, looking for work during a school break, and was offered a high salary in administration and shown pictures of a swimming pool. Upon arrival, she was taken across the border to Cambodia, where she spent 11 months working against her will in different online scam compounds under the threat of violence, forbidden to leave, and constantly monitored by security guards. The Associated Press documents a similar case. Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil and his best friend had responded to a job offer encouraging tourism to Thailand. However, upon arrival in Bangkok, a car took them not to a hotel but to the border with Myanmar, where armed men took them across. A testimony by Abdus Salam shows how personal these networks can be: recruitment doesn’t always come from a stranger. While living a self-described ordinary life in Bangladesh, with an Engineering degree, Abdus was looking for a job to support his family when one of his closest school friends reached out and offered him a well-paying job in Cambodia. Upon arrival, his passport was taken under the pretext of extending his visa and providing a work permit, after which the broker was paid a large sum of money by his new employer, and he was driven to a compound far from the capital. Some victims, once trapped, are made to do the same to others: recruiting friends and family into the same deception, sometimes by force, sometimes for pay. These three stories are not exceptions; they are examples of an industry that currently holds an estimated 300,000 people in scam centers across Southeast Asia, most of them lured in the same way, with fraudulent job offers, most often for roles in online casinos, customer service, and financial trading.
In these scams there are two victims: those trafficked into running them, and those defrauded by them. Trafficked workers are made to approach strangers online, slowly drawing them into what feels like a real friendship or romance, a process known as “pig butchering”. Once enough trust is built, the conversation turns to money: an investment opportunity, a cryptocurrency platform, a chance to grow their savings together. Abdus Salam recalled the fake trading apps he was forced to use, available only in English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese, built entirely around the person being targeted, not the person running them. He was promoted to Team Leader after successfully convincing a target to invest. Being good at this was not a choice, as failing came at a price. Just as friends were made to recruit friends, skilled victims were made to train, lead, and trap others in turn. Some worked at an industrial scale. On a single shift, Koorimannil impersonated fictional women across dozens of profiles at once, chatting with more than a hundred people simultaneously. In one month, he was made to target roughly 50,000 people across 17 countries. Both men worked under the same condition: fail, and there would be consequences.
Those consequences are difficult to read about. They should be. One Amnesty International interviewee was taken to a “dark room,” a space reserved for punishment, where four men held her down while one struck the soles of her feet with a metal pole, warning her they would not stop until she stopped screaming. Koorimannil was beaten for failing to scam people convincingly enough, leaving his body “red and swollen with lashes.” Another survivor, a young Taiwanese woman, was threatened with a stun gun, locked in a room, and raped within hours of arriving at her compound. What happened to them is not an exception; it is how these compounds are run. Bodies of tortured workers have turned up in dumpsters in Cambodia, and others have been blinded in beatings. Yet, it doesn’t end when the beatings stop. Survivors carry psychological and emotional scars long after escape, often compounded by societal stigma and shame. Beneath all of this sits a different form of control: more than half of the survivors interviewed by Amnesty International reported being sold, witnessing a sale, or being threatened with one – bought and traded like property, not employees: modern slavery.
Those who want to leave rarely can, as passports are confiscated on arrival, and movement is tracked by armed guards, surveillance cameras, and facial recognition systems covering nearly every space in the compound. Debt does the rest. Survivors report owing between US$5,000 and US$30,000 just for having been brought there, on top of so-called “breathing fees” charged simply for staying alive inside the compound. These debts are designed never to be paid off, and escaping thus requires settling them anyway, under the constant threat of violence.
While crackdowns keep happening, the industry continues to grow. Myanmar’s civil war has left large parts of its border regions outside effective state control, and in Cambodia weak governance has let the industry take root and stay there. In parts of Myanmar, the U.S. Treasury has found that armed groups profit directly from these operations, leasing land to compound operators, providing security, and even supplying the electricity that keeps them running. In July 2025, Cambodia claimed to have shut down more than 200 compounds and arrested dozens of high-profile figures. The reality, according to Amnesty International’s own investigation, is far less reassuring. Of the 86 compounds it had identified, there was evidence of state intervention at only 24. In three separate cases, they found people still being abused at sites police had supposedly already intervened at. Even when a compound is raided, it rarely means the operation ends. Reporting from The Conversation found that large operations are tipped off in advance and simply relocate – to a new compound, a new province, and sometimes an entirely new country – or rebuild from scratch if they have to, since the tools, the know-how, and the capital all survive the raid intact. A study by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found that recent crackdowns have led to significant displacement, with compounds relocating further inland in Myanmar or shutting down in one place only to move or recruit abroad, warning that the “genuine success” of these crackdowns “remains in question.”
A Global Perspective on Trafficking and Fraud
None of this is surprising once the numbers are laid out plainly: scams of every kind are estimated to have generated over US$1 trillion globally in 2024, and Southeast Asia’s trafficking-linked compounds are a significant part of that total. Shutting down an industry this large is nearly impossible anywhere, let alone in a region where the people who could stop it so often benefit from it instead, and similar operations have already surfaced in the Gulf, Latin America, and West Africa. Whether the case in Irbid reflects this same dynamic – an operation that relocated, or one that saw an opportunity – is impossible to say from a single case.
What This Could Mean for Jordan
It is important to note that Jordan has several fundamental protections in place to prevent forced labor and trafficking in persons more generally. Article 3 of the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Law No. 9 of 2009 defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, harboring, or receiving of persons for exploitation through threats, force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, or abuse of power. Article 77 of the Labour Law and Article 23 of the Passports Law of 1969 separately prohibit employers from seizing a worker’s travel documents. Under Article 29 of the Labour Law, a worker who is beaten, degraded, or sexually assaulted by an employer is legally entitled to leave the job, and the Ministry of Labour has the authority to shut the establishment down entirely. Jordan has also ratified both of the ILO’s core conventions against forced labor. On paper, the kind of abuse documented throughout Southeast Asia’s scam compounds, from confinement, to violence, and confiscated documents, are illegal in Jordan, several times over. And yet Irbid happened: fifteen people trafficked, their passports taken, and forced to run scams under threat. However, these protections held in the sense that once the trafficking was identified, two suspected organizers were arrested, exactly as the law provides for.
At the same time, a broader structural risk is worth naming. Across much of the Middle East, sponsorship-based labor systems tie a migrant worker’s legal status to a single employer. This dynamic is commonly known as the Kafala system, most formally applied in the Gulf states. Jordan does not formally apply a system called Kafala, yet the Council on Foreign Relations counts it among the countries where the same basic mechanism operates in practice: a worker’s residency and work permit remain tied to their employer, who can cancel either without their consent. Jordan is also home to a large existing migrant workforce that already lives inside this dependency.
This is not a comment on how Irbid was handled. The case was caught, and handled correctly. It is a comment on what made a case like it possible at all. Jordan has the conditions in place that could allow trafficking into forced labor to take hold: a large foreign workforce, and a sponsorship system that ties workers to a single employer, both of which could be misused. That combination deserves closer attention now. While Irbid remains, for now, a rare case, it should serve a warning.
Conclusion
This is what “Trapped Behind the Scam” is asking the world to see this year: not a phenomenon confined to a single region, but a system, flexible and profitable enough, to appear anywhere. Somewhere right now, someone is trapped behind a screen, exhausted and afraid, made to type the words that will drain a stranger’s savings. Whether at risk of being trafficked, at risk of being scammed, or simply knowing someone who is, almost no one is entirely unaffected. Every story in this piece is a reminder of what is at stake in letting this continue: the beatings, the psychological damage, the years spent trapped inside a compound, working under threat. Worse still, the industry is not standing still, it is evolving and spreading faster than most people realize, and it demands attention now, before new hubs take root. Laws alone are not enough, as Irbid itself shows: they existed, and the crime still happened. A sponsorship system that ties a worker’s legal status to their employer does more than create vulnerability on paper, it makes reporting abuse genuinely risky, since doing so can mean losing residency altogether. One case has been found in Jordan. There is no reason to believe it was the last one, and no way to know how many people are still waiting to be found.
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