Police in the Philippines have rescued more than 1,000 people forced to fake online romances from a massive scam hub. [Image: Shutterstock.com]
Likes Tinder scammer But on an industrial level, police in the Philippines rescued more than 1,000 people forced to fake online romances from a scam center run by human traffickers.
according to BBC NewsAmong those liberated by police from the center in the Philippine municipality of Bambam They included 838 Filipinos, 202 Chinese nationals, and 73 others.
They all owed their freedom to an escaped Vietnamese man who police said “showed signs of torture, including electrocution.” The man scaled the wall of the fraud centre, swam in the river, and hid on a farm before reporting it to the police.
Asks about their day and “what they ate for their last meal.”
Traffickers lured the unnamed man from Vietnam to the Philippines with the offer of a job as a chef. However, upon arrival, he joined other prisoners who were forced by a human trafficking ring to have online romantic relationships with victims using fake identities. will–The chef and others would reach out to unsuspecting lonely hearts, asking about their day and “what they had for their last meal.”
Police raided the center with two search warrants against Chinese-owned Zun Yuan Technology Inc, and seized firearms and live ammunition.
A spokesman for the Philippine Presidential Commission against Organized Crime stated that the fraud center contains “36 separate buildings, each three to seven stories high.”
Human traffickers lure thousands of victims to Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines with promises of jobs, confiscate their passports and mobile phones upon arrival and force them into complex online scams, including dating, casinos and cryptocurrency schemes. In 2023, the international organization estimated that criminal gangs illegally trafficked “tens of thousands” of people to work in fraudulent complexes in the region.