Slaves of the cyber scammers.
Ravi travelled to Thailand dreaming of a better life for him and his new wife.
Instead, the 24-year-old Sri Lankan found himself trapped in the Myanmar jungle, being tortured for refusing to help trick lonely, rich men out of thousands in so-called romance scams.
"They stripped off my clothes, made me sit on a chair and gave my leg electric shocks. I thought it was the end of my life. I spent 16 days in a cell for not obeying them,” he continued. “They only gave me water mixed with cigarette butts and ash to drink.”
But that was not the worst of it, he says. Five or six days in, two girls were brought in and gang raped in front of him.
“When I witnessed it, I feared, 'What will these people do to me?' It was then that I doubted they would let me live,” Ravi said.
In August 2023,
the UN estimated that more than 120,000 people, most of them men from Asia, had been forced to work in scam centres in Myanmar like the one Ravi found himself in.
The centres are fed by a steady stream of aspiring migrant workers from all over the world. The Sri Lankan authorities say they know of at least 56 of its citizens alone who are trapped in four different locations in Myanmar, although the Sri Lankan ambassador to Myanmar, Janaka Bandara, told the BBC that eight of them had recently been rescued with the help of the Myanmar authorities.
Ravi was one of those aspiring migrants, tempted by the promise of a job in data entry with a basic salary of 370,000 rupees ($1,200). The computer specialist jumped at the chance - it was money he couldn’t dream of in Sri Lanka, which has been hit by an economic crisis. And so, he took out a loan of 250,000 rupees ($815) to pay the recruiter.
Ravi arrived in Bangkok in early 2023, but was immediately sent to Mae Sot, a city in western Thailand.
"We were taken to a hotel, but soon handed over to two gunmen. They took us to Myanmar crossing a river," Ravi explained. ...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw076g5wnr3o
'
