Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked into the Golden Triangle's scam compounds, where day-to-day life consists of forced labour, cramped living conditions and beatings. For women, there is the additional trauma of sexual abuse.
Women increasingly report gender-based violence in compounds
Late one evening in October 2023, Sarah felt labour pains starting. At the cyberscam compound inside Laos’ Golden Triangle, workers were logging on for a long night shift, scamming Americans online. Sarah, a 39-year-old former shopkeeper from Uganda, was lured to Laos by the promise of a job as a social media manager, before being sold between three Golden Triangle compounds starting in 2022.
Workers sat at their computers until the early hours, building fake profiles of glamorous women on Facebook and Instagram. Sarah trawled the web to find older men to target with messages, leading conversations towards crypto investments and sharing fake screenshots of profits. This form of scam, known as “pig-butchering”, is now so profitable that entire compounds have been set up by criminal groups.
Sexual abuse as punishment and reward
A few months after arriving, Sarah experienced several days of sexual abuse inside what workers called the “dark room” – separate quarters in which compound bosses doled out beatings and rapes. A group of men were forced to rape Sarah and three other women as a joint punishment after they refused to scam more victims. She had hidden her pregnancy, terrified the Chinese bosses would kill her if they found out. Sarah grabbed the office’s shared smartphone and ran downstairs, using Google translate to ask a taxi driver to drive her to a hospital.
“I can’t even believe it, because I just went out,” Sarah says, now in Kampala, as her two-year-old son plays on the floor next to her. “Maybe God helped me to go.”
Growing evidence of sexual violence
Run primarily by Chinese and Taiwanese criminal syndicates, illicit cyberscamming has expanded across Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia since 2020, leading to estimated fraud losses of tens of billions of dollars. Experts have long understood the workforce to be overwhelmingly male, but as government-led raids in Cambodia and Myanmar have freed tens of thousands of workers in recent months, female survivors are increasingly sharing stories of gender-based violence.
The Guardian spoke with six women, all former compound workers, who described gendered exploitation, including sexual attacks, lack of access to sanitary products and verbal abuse. Compound bosses use rape to punish women, they said, as well as a reward for men who successfully completed lucrative scams.
Human rights groups track increase
Human rights groups and other organisations have started tracking sexual violence inside the compounds. The UN office of the high commissioner for human rights (OHCHR) noted in a recent report that “sexual violence against female and male victims [has] reportedly increased dramatically since 2024,” citing 12 women who were raped and impregnated in Myanmar, as well as a pregnant Filipina woman who was electrocuted. Amnesty International has also documented an increase in sexual abuse over the past year, including what its regional director, Montse Ferrer, calls “extreme” cases of rape, forced abortion and abortion-related deaths.
Overall, women made up about half of the nearly 80 survivors interviewed by Amnesty International over the past year, compared with about one quarter the year before.
Women driven by financial burdens
Women are often driven towards labour migration because of financial burdens linked to caring for children and ageing parents, says Ling Li, co-founder of EOS Collective, an anti-scam nonprofit organisation. Four of the scam workers interviewed by the Guardian are single mothers. Rachel, a 29-year-old Kenyan, borrowed 200,000 shillings (£1,150) in late 2024 to pay a broker who offered her work in a Thai sweet factory. Instead, she was sold across two Myanmar scam compounds, where she worked 18-hour days chatting with at least 100 potential scam victims at a time. When she failed to respond fast enough, the boss punched her in the head, kicked her and sexually abused her, she says.
“If I’d had someone who could tell me, ‘Wherever you’re going, it’s not good’ – I could have listened,” says Rachel, who supports her parents and young son. “But I had no idea about anything. I only wanted to go and work, and to earn for myself and for my family.”
Deaths and struggles after escape
Not all women return home. Lintang, a 22-year-old scam worker from Indonesia, was barely able to walk when she was admitted to a Cambodian hospital on 20 February. Lintang told an NGO case handler that she had been repeatedly gang-raped. She was diagnosed with HIV and tuberculosis, according to the Indonesian embassy. Several NGOs tried to send Lintang to Indonesia for treatment, but it proved expensive and difficult. She died on 10 March.
As Sarah laboured in the hospital, the health staff demanded payment for her treatment. “I had nothing, not even clothes,” she says. She had a friend, Ketsana, a Lao citizen who was trafficked into a Golden Triangle scam operation in 2022. Ketsana sent a taxi to pick up Sarah and her baby, and for the next month, the trio shared a two-room apartment. Sarah flew home to Uganda 40 days after her son was born with the help of an NGO. She has since trained to work as a tailor, earning about 7,000 Ugandan shillings (£1.40) a day, but it is not enough to cover living expenses.
She warns other women – often other single mothers – that they should think twice before travelling abroad to work, lest they return as “bodies”. On days when there is nothing to eat in the house, or no money for a doctor’s visit, a mix of emotions washes over Sarah: frustration over her finances, love for her son – and memories of “the many things I went through” in the Golden Triangle.
“When he’s sleeping, when I don’t have anything to feed him – that’s when I think about it.”
