A new United Nations human rights report has laid bare the full scale of a global forced labour crisis hiding in plain sight, one where hundreds of thousands of people are being coerced into committing online fraud inside fortified compounds, generating an estimated $64 billion annually for criminal networks.
The report, titled “A Wicked Problem” and published in Geneva on Friday by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), draws on trauma-sensitive interviews with survivors trafficked from countries as varied as Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa. As of March 2025, victims from 66 countries had been trafficked into online scam centres, with at least 300,000 people estimated to be working under duress in operations across Southeast Asia alone.
A Business Built on Brutality
Survivors described vast compounds resembling self-contained towns, some spanning more than 500 acres, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed security personnel. Some facilities even contained supermarkets, restaurants, casinos and brothels. The defining feature across all operations, regardless of size, was control. Victims reported confiscated passports, constant surveillance and severe punishment for any attempt to flee.
The OHCHR report documents a chilling corporate logic underpinning these operations. Workers are assigned revenue targets and penalised for underperformance through beatings, fines and resale to harsher facilities. Morning assemblies often included low-performing teams being publicly subjected to torture as a warning to others. Promised wages were systematically eroded through fabricated debts and penalties.
Victims were coerced into perpetrating online fraud ranging from impersonation scams and financial extortion to romance schemes and cryptocurrency investment fraud. Proceeds were laundered through proxy bank accounts, converted into cryptocurrency and routed through layered digital channels before re-entering the formal financial system.
Corruption as Infrastructure
The report identifies corruption as deeply entrenched within these operations, with victims describing how they were fast-tracked through immigration by officers who appeared to coordinate with traffickers, and some reporting police entering compounds and receiving payments from managers. This official complicity effectively subsidises the scam economy, allowing it to scale while evading disruption.
Law enforcement raids have freed thousands of victims, including a February 2025 operation along the Thailand-Myanmar border that released approximately 7,000 people. However, observers warn that many crackdowns are ad hoc and compounds often resume operations or relocate.
Africa and the Gulf in the Crosshairs
While nearly three-quarters of scam operations remain concentrated in Southeast Asia’s Mekong region, the report confirms they have spread to Pacific island countries, South Asia, Gulf states, West Africa and the Americas. The expansion signals that no region, including Ghana and its West African neighbours, is insulated from the reach of these networks, both as sources of potential victims and as destinations for fraud proceeds.
The OHCHR is calling on governments to embed the non-punishment principle into law so that trafficked victims are not prosecuted for crimes they were forced to commit, to invest in trauma-informed rehabilitation, and to strengthen cooperation between states, digital platforms and financial institutions to disrupt recruitment pipelines and money laundering channels. The findings are being presented as a call to action ahead of the United Nations Crime Congress later in 2026.
