Every year on 30 July, a day is set aside on the international calendar for people who have been bought, moved, coerced and held. A date carries no weight on its own. What it does is hold a space open long enough for us to look directly at something most of us keep at the edge of vision for the other three hundred and sixty four days.
This year that looking has to account for a different picture than the one many of us still carry. The United Nations has named the 2026 theme Trapped Behind the Scam, and it marks a shift in how the crime is being described at the highest level. The image most people hold of exploitation belongs to an earlier decade. A border crossing at night. A locked room. A debt that grows faster than anyone can pay it down. Those things have not stopped. Alongside them now sits something built out of fibre optic cable and job advertisements.
The Shape of It
A person applies for a customer service role in a neighbouring country. The salary is good, better than anything at home. The company arranges the flight. On arrival the passport goes into a drawer and the work turns out to be running investment and romance scams against strangers on the other side of the world, twelve hours a day, under guard, with beatings for anyone who fails to meet targets. The compound is a workplace and a prison at the same time.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime calls this trafficking in persons for forced criminality. The recruitment happens through fake job adverts promising legitimate work abroad. The control happens through confiscated documents, surveillance, debt bondage and violence.
The scale is difficult to hold in the mind. The UN Human Rights Office put credible estimates at three hundred thousand people working inside these operations across Southeast Asia, with victims drawn from sixty six countries. An earlier assessment counted at least a hundred and twenty thousand people held in Myanmar and around a hundred thousand in Cambodia. IOM figures released this week place the annual losses from scam offences across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand somewhere between eighty eight and a hundred and fourteen billion US dollars for 2025 alone.
Thailand sits inside this map, not outside it. The February 2025 operation along the Myanmar border released around seven thousand people.
The Legal Trap
This form of exploitation has broken most of the assumptions that anti-trafficking systems were built on. The person who escapes a scam compound has, on paper, committed crimes. They defrauded people. Their name is attached to accounts and messages. Police and immigration officers meet them as suspects rather than survivors, and the legal category they fall into shifts depending on which side of a border they are standing on. Victim, witness and alleged offender, sometimes all three at once.
UNODC has published key indicators to help officials identify trafficking in these cases, and the UN Human Rights Office has pressed states to write forced criminality into anti-trafficking law and to guarantee the non-punishment principle for victims. Recognition remains uneven. Research published this year by Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation and EOS Collective found survivors consistently read as offenders, even where coercion and violence were established.
Trapped Behind the Scam: A Regional Conversation
To mark the day, Asia Freedom Network is hosting a webinar bringing together the United Nations, frontline organisations, mental health practitioners and people with lived experience of the scam industry.
The programme covers:
The Changing Face of Human Trafficking, with Dr Sylwia Gawronska, Regional Programme Advisor for Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling at the UNODC Regional Office for Southeast Asia and the Pacific
A Deep Dive into the Scam Industry, with Simon Dagnachew Milikit, lived experience expert, EOS Collective
On the Frontline: When Systems Don’t Recognise Survivors or NGOs, with Dr Caitlin Wyndham of Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation and Mechelle B.J. Moore of Global Alms Incorporated
Beyond Victimhood: The Hidden Psychological Impact, with Helen Avadiar-Nimbalker of Asia Freedom Network
Victim, Witness and Alleged Offender: Navigating Legal Complexity, with Dr Sylwia Gawronska
A moderated panel discussion follows, chaired by Ling Li.
The people on this panel come at the same problem from very different distances. Dr Gawronska has spent years inside the UNODC regional response and helped draft the indicators officials now use to identify these cases. Dr Wyndham leads research at Blue Dragon, which has rescued more than two thousand people in Vietnam and neighbouring countries. Mechelle Moore runs Global Alms out of Mae Sot, on the Thai side of the Myanmar border, close enough to the compounds to receive people the week they get out. EOS Collective, co-founded by researchers who interviewed close to a hundred survivors for their book Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, works on the criminal architecture and on the people left stranded after raids.
The Part That Outlasts the Rescue
Helen, who founded Mosaic Market, is speaking in her role as Regional Director of Asia Freedom Network. She is a clinical trauma therapist and CEO of Rise Foundation Asia, and she hosts The Human Trace podcast.
Her session goes to the part of this work that receives the least attention and outlasts everything else. Rescue makes a headline. Recovery does not. The psychological weight a person carries out of a compound does not resolve when the paperwork does. Survivors return home indebted, stigmatised, and often still pursued by recruiters. The label of victim, useful as it is for accessing services, becomes its own kind of confinement when a person is ready to be something other than what was done to them.
Why This Sits With Us
Mosaic exists a long way from a scam compound. We are a café and a shop on Changklan Road. The distance is shorter than it looks.
Almost everyone recruited into these compounds was looking for honest work. That is the recruitment mechanism. Not force in the first instance, but a job offer aimed at someone who needs one. UN human rights experts have been direct about this, pointing to poverty, the absence of decent working conditions, and the shortage of safe migration routes as the drivers that push people into reach. Exploitation grows in the gap between what a person needs and what is legitimately available to them.
Which makes the ordinary work of fair employment less ordinary than it appears. The Akha families in the northern highlands who grow the coffee we roast for Mosaic Brew are paid properly for it. The women sewing Thrive garments here in Chiang Mai earn a fair wage, keep their skills, and go home at the end of the day. The makers behind every brand on our shelves are in the same position. None of this is dramatic. It is simply the presence of a real option, which is the thing that recruiters rely on being absent.
Come and order a cup of coffee and you are part of that arithmetic, in a small and unglamorous way. It is the same arithmetic, worked from the other end.
Join the Conversation
The webinar is open to anyone working in anti-trafficking, organised crime, victim support, mental health, migration or policy, and to anyone who wants to understand what is happening in this region right now.
30 July 2026
2:00pm Bangkok, 3:00pm Kuala Lumpur
Online
Registration is open here
Further Reading
From our Human Trace Editorial Series:
Inside the Scamming Compounds: The Human Cost We Never See
False Criminality: When Trafficking Victims Are Treated as Criminals
TIP Report 2025: Progress on Paper, Realities Still in Question
Global Shocks and Trafficking Risks
Primary sources:
United Nations, World Day Against Trafficking in Persons
UNODC, Trapped Behind the Scam campaign
OHCHR, report on abuses in scam centres, February 2026
