Note: The news is unrelated! However, this incident is said to have occurred in the same place, which is called the golden triangle.

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA —
The young man has been handcuffed to the ceiling, beaten until his buttocks turned purple, and received electric shocks to his feet. That’s how his captors treat him inside a scam compound in Myanmar where he has been trapped since October, according to his mother, who showed VOA a photograph sent by her son’s captors of what she says is his beaten body.

The mother, who asked that her name and that of her son not be published for fear of retaliation by the captors, says her 24-year-old Malaysian son traveled to Thailand for a vacation. She doesn’t know how he ended up in neighboring Myanmar.

However, a few weeks ago, his family expected his release after they paid about $16,000 in ransom, but his mother said that they were tricked by the criminal syndicate and that there’s no end in sight for this ordeal.

“I lost all my money and still did not get him back,” the mother said. “It’s very heartbreaking. I have been crying for many days.”

In parts of Southeast Asia, this story has become all too common.

“Over the last several years, hundreds of thousands of people have been brought to the region, many of them via various forms of coercion, deception and human trafficking, to be involved in a very lucrative global industry of organized cybercrime,” said Jake Sims, a visiting expert at the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace.

“The main hubs for these scam compounds are in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos because of corruption, governance gaps and an absence of effective rule of law,” he said.

The governments of Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have not replied to VOA requests for comments.

Sims said the trafficking victims come from around the world, but most are from East Asia and Southeast Asia. The United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime has described Southeast Asia as “ground zero for the global scamming industry.”