The kidnapping and cross-border rescue had all the flavor of the kind of action script that struggling Chinese actor Wang Jing had come to expect — just not as a reality star.
Wang, 22, moved to Bangkok earlier this month after receiving an unsolicited offer to appear in a film shot in Thailand.
There was no movie.
Instead, like hundreds of other Chinese men, Wang was duped by a job offer as part of a trap set by a criminal syndicate, which he later admitted sounded too good to be true. . Like others desperate for work, she was kidnapped and put to work at an online scam center that operates just across the Thai border in Myanmar, her details given by police in China and Thailand And according to the statements.
But unlike most Chinese trafficking victims, whose families wait in quiet agony, Wang had a powerful lawyer at home.
His girlfriend, known by the nickname Jiajia, broadcast details of Wang’s kidnapping and launched a social media campaign documenting her fight to bring him back to China, garnering millions of followers and support from Chinese celebrities.
When Wang was released on January 7 by Thai police, who said he had been found in Myanmar but gave few details about his release, he joined other Chinese people still detained in Myanmar scam centers. Desperate families began posting details of their own cases. Attempt to attract attention.
Within days, the rare grassroots effort had collected the names of nearly 1,800 Chinese nationals who family members said had been smuggled into Myanmar from the border areas of China and Thailand. The scam complex has spread rapidly amid chaos and widespread civil war in Myanmar since the military seized power in a 2021 coup, where workers are often treated brutally.
The United Nations says hundreds of thousands of people has been trafficked In an industry that defrauds people around the world and generates billions of dollars a year for organized crime groups, many of which are of Chinese origin.
The count, which organizers said had been handed over to Chinese authorities, soon became the most detailed census of Chinese victims of the syndicates, which lure people from towns like Myawaddy on Myanmar’s border with Thailand into online scams. Let’s trap.
In an unusual statement issued Friday, China’s Ministry of Public Security said it was making “every possible effort” to crack down on scammers and “rescue trafficked people.”
On Tuesday, China’s state broadcaster said Beijing had reached a consensus with Thailand and Myanmar to arrest the syndicate’s leaders. To eradicate Scam Centre.
Beijing initially moved to combat Myanmar fraud compounds in 2023, following a surge in crimes targeting Chinese citizens, resulting in the arrest of thousands of Chinese citizens suspected of being involved in illegal trade. According to groups fighting human trafficking, this reflects China’s approach of treating trafficking victims primarily as suspects rather than victims.
“It is difficult to get a definitive count of Chinese people trafficked into scam complexes,” said Meena Chiang, founder of anti-trafficking group Humanity Research Consultancy.
Unable to file a police report
Reuters spoke to family members of four people listed as missing in Myanmar and identified in the database, which was named by Wang’s first name, Xing, or Star. None would agree to be identified by full name for fear of angering authorities and slowing efforts to release the victims.
Of the approximately 1,800 victims identified in the “Star Homecoming” campaign, about 93% are men. The average age is 27, with the majority aged between 15 and 45. Most of them told stories of economic hardship — indebtedness, struggling to make ends meet as gig economy workers, job losses amid a nationwide construction industry recession — that they jumped at when the scam centers came calling.
Chinese law does not consider men as potential victims of human trafficking, and about half of the families said they were unable to file missing person reports with local police, according to a Reuters analysis of a crowd-sourced spreadsheet.
“At first I wanted to lodge a police report, but they said missing reports are only for women and children,” said a woman whose 30-year-old husband disappeared after accepting a scam job offer because That debt needs to be repaid.
Another woman, the wife of a missing 22-year-old electrician, said Chinese police had told her they could not accept his missing report because he was traveling with his passport.
Several family members who posted descriptions of the missing men said they hoped bringing attention to the cases would force the Chinese government to change its focus and bring trafficking victims home.
Last week, after organizers stopped the spreadsheet from taking new names, China’s Foreign Ministry called on other Southeast Asian countries to do more to crack down on fraud rings.
Back home, actor Wang publicly thanked China for successfully working to free him. Separately, in a now-deleted article in the media outlet Renwu, he said he noticed that his girlfriend Jiajia had left a hair band in his luggage and he worried he would never see her again.
Wang said, “He asked me to try to decline the work offer midway, but in the end, I still went.”
