China families appeal to free relatives held by scam gangs in Myanmar

(This Jan. 22 story has been corrected to fix the age of Wang Xing from 22 to 31 in paragraph 2)

By Larissa Liao, Kevin Krolicki and Poppy McPherson

BEIJING/BANGKOK (Reuters) - The abduction and cross-border rescue had all the makings of the kind of action script struggling Chinese actor Wang Xing had hoped to land – only not as a reality star.

Wang, 31, flew to Bangkok earlier this month after getting an unsolicited offer to join a film that was shooting in Thailand.

There was no movie.

Instead, like hundreds of other Chinese men, Wang had been duped by a job offer that he later acknowledged appeared too good to be true, as part of a trap set by a criminal syndicate. Like others desperate for work, he was kidnapped and put to work in one of the online scam centres that operate just across the Thai border in Myanmar, according to his account and statements by police in China and Thailand.

But unlike most trafficked Chinese whose families wait in quiet anguish, Wang had a powerful advocate back home.

His girlfriend, who goes by the nickname Jiajia, broadcast details of Wang's abduction and started a social media campaign documenting her battle to get him back to China, picking up millions of followers and the support of Chinese celebrities.

When Wang was freed on Jan. 7 by Thai police, who said he had been found in Myanmar but gave few details about his release, frustrated families of other Chinese people still detained in the Myanmar scam centres began to post details of their own cases in an attempt to capitalise on the attention.

Within days, the rare grassroots effort had collected the names of nearly 1,800 Chinese nationals that family members said had been trafficked into Myanmar from border areas of China and Thailand. Scam compounds, where workers are often treated brutally, have proliferated in Myanmar amid the chaos and widening civil war since the military seized power in a 2021 coup.

The UN says hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to scam centres in Southeast Asia since the COVID-19 pandemic in an industry that defrauds people across the globe and generates billions of dollars per year for organised crime groups, many of Chinese origin.

The tally, which organisers said had been handed over to Chinese authorities, quickly became the most detailed census of Chinese victims of the syndicates that trap people into working online scams from towns like Myawaddy, on Myanmar’s border with Thailand.

In an unusual statement issued on Friday, China's Ministry of Public Security said it was “making every effort” to crack down on the scam compounds and “rescue trafficked people."

On Tuesday, China's state broadcaster said Beijing had reached a consensus with Thailand and Myanmar to arrest the syndicates' leaders and eradicate the scam centres.

After a surge in crimes targeting Chinese citizens, Beijing initially moved in 2023 to combat the Myanmar fraud compounds, resulting in the arrest of tens of thousands of Chinese nationals suspected of involvement in the illicit business. That reflected China's approach to treat those trafficked primarily as suspects rather than victims, according to groups that fight human trafficking.

“It’s difficult to get a confirmed number of Chinese people trafficked to scam compounds,” said Mina Chiang, founder of the Humanity Research Consultancy, an anti human trafficking group.

UNABLE TO FILE POLICE REPORTS

Reuters spoke to family members of four people listed as disappeared in Myanmar and identified in the database, which drew its name from 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 nearly 1,800 victims identified in the “Star Homecoming” campaign, about 93% are men. The average age is 27, with the vast majority between the ages of 15 and 45. Most of them told stories of economic hardship -- indebtedness, the struggle to make ends meet as gig economy workers, job loss in the construction industry amid a nationwide downturn -- that made them jump when the scam centres came calling.

Chinese law does not consider men as potential victims of human trafficking, and about half the families said they had been unable to file a missing person report with local police, according to a Reuters analysis of the crowd-sourced spreadsheet.

“At first I wanted to file a police report, but they said missing persons reports were only for women and children,” said one woman, whose 30-year-old husband disappeared after accepting what turned out to be a scam job offer because he needed to pay back debts.

Another woman, the wife of a 22-year-old electrician who went missing, said Chinese police had told her they could not accept a report on his disappearance since he had been travelling with his passport.

Several family members who posted details of men who had disappeared said they hoped the attention on the cases would force China’s government to shift focus and bring trafficking victims home.

Last week, when organisers shut down the spreadsheet from taking new names, China’s foreign ministry called on other Southeast Asian nations to do more to crack down on fraud rings.

Back home, actor Wang publicly thanked China for freeing him. Separately, in a now deleted article in media outlet Renwu, he said he noticed a hair band his girlfriend Jiajia left in his luggage and worried he could never see her again.

"She asked me to try to refuse the work offer halfway, but in the end I still went," said Wang.

(Reporting by Larissa Liao in Beijing and Beijing Newsroom and Poppy McPherson in Bangkok; Editing by Kevin Krolicki and Kate Mayberry)