The nameless trap: human trafficking in an age of global fraud
This 30 July marks World Day Against Trafficking in Persons under the slogan ‘Caught in the Scam’. A slogan that highlights a rapidly expanding form of exploitation: people recruited with false promises of employment and confined to centres where they are forced, through violence and threats, to commit digital fraud on an industrial scale. But the slogan could also be interpreted another way: what happens when the system that should protect victims turns them into suspects?
A crime that evolves faster than the responses
To speak of human trafficking in 2026 is no longer to speak solely of women being sexually exploited in clandestine networks, although that reality remains devastating. It also means talking about young university students from Colombia, the Philippines or Kenya who receive a job offer in customer service or digital marketing, travel full of hope to Cambodia or Myanmar, and find themselves locked up in a guarded compound where they must meet daily quotas for telephone fraud under threat of physical punishment.
These are the so-called ‘scam centres’: illegal complexes run by transnational organised crime, mostly Chinese mafias, where forced labour takes the form of a keyboard and a screen. They emerged in the wake of Southeast Asia’s illegal casinos, pivoted to the digital ecosystem during the pandemic, and since 2022 have grown to what the UN describes as “industrial proportions”.
According to UNODC estimates, at least 100,000 people are working in exploitative conditions in centres of this kind in Cambodia and a further 120,000 in Myanmar. In February 2025, an operation on the Thai-Myanmar border freed some 7,000 people. Reuters reported in June 2026 that more than 5,300 remained trapped near that same border. The figures fluctuate. The centres move, are renamed, and reopen. Criminal networks are more agile than the institutional response.
What the slogan doesn’t say
The UN has chosen this year’s theme well. Scam centres represent one of the most visible forms of human trafficking in 2026 and, paradoxically, one of the least understood. But there is something that the slogan ‘Trapped Behind the Scam’ fails to make clear: many of these victims, when freed in a police raid, receive no protection. They are detained, fined for breaching visa regulations, or directly prosecuted for offences they committed under duress.
UN Human Rights documented this clearly in its February 2026 report: the ‘freedom’ that follows a rescue does not always mean safety. The ‘principle of non-punishment’ for victims of trafficking who committed offences under coercion exists in international law, has been enshrined in the Palermo Protocol since 2000, and is systematically ignored in practice.
The problem is not one of legal ignorance: it is one of priorities. Identifying someone as a victim requires time, resources and a willingness to look beyond the obvious crime. Deporting or prosecuting them is quicker, cheaper, and keeps the police statistics in order. The victim pays, once again, the price of invisibility.
Who falls victim and why: the myth of naivety
There is a persistent prejudice that victims of trafficking are poorly educated people, lacking resources and information, who failed to spot obvious warning signs. Scam centres brutally disprove this.
In its 2026 assessment, the OSCE notes that victims of this type of trafficking are often young adults with a university education, multilingual skills and digital expertise. These skills can actually increase the risk: fluency in English, sales experience or comfort using social media make a person a more valuable target for recruiters. In scam centres targeting Spanish speakers, recruiters specifically seek out people familiar with the culture and accent of Spain or Latin America to make the scams more credible.
Social media and messaging apps are the primary recruitment channels. Fake LinkedIn profiles offering customer service jobs in Bangkok, Instagram adverts promising ‘remote work with accommodation included’, and Telegram messages from purporting to be HR recruiters. The scam is designed to bypass the scrutiny of even the most cautious individual. It is not down to the victim’s carelessness: it is criminal engineering.
The figures that World Day fails to reveal
The UNODC’s 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, the most comprehensive ever published, with data from 156 countries, records a 25 per cent increase in the number of victims identified in 2022 compared with 2019. The number of child victims rose by 31 per cent, and by 38 per cent in the case of girls. For the first time in the report’s history, forced labour has overtaken sexual exploitation as the predominant form of trafficking.
Trafficking for the purposes of organised crime – a category that includes scam centres – rose from accounting for 1 per cent of identified victims in 2016 to 8 per cent in 2022. This figure is rising with every update. And it remains an underestimate: victims trapped in these centres do not usually contact the authorities, and when they do, they are rarely recognised as such.
At the same time, 61 per cent of victims identified globally continue to be women or girls. Trafficking is not a gender-neutral phenomenon: it feeds on structural inequality, the feminisation of poverty, and women’s greater vulnerability to violence and deception. Any analysis that fails to incorporate this dimension is, quite simply, incomplete.
An industry worth tens of billions that nobody calls an industry
According to conservative estimates cited by Harvard researchers, scam centres generate between 50 and 70 billion dollars annually in the Mekong region alone. Human trafficking as a whole generates around 150,000 million dollars a year globally. It is the third most lucrative criminal enterprise in the world.
And yet, it is rarely referred to as an industry. People talk of networks, mafias and criminals. But not of the economic structure that sustains it: the demand for cheap or free labour, the market for sexual services, the supply chains that do not ask where the goods they buy come from, and the digital platforms that monetise the reach of fake profiles without taking responsibility for their content.
Treating human trafficking as a border security issue, or as a matter of dismantling criminal networks without questioning the economic conditions that make it profitable and sustainable, is to treat the symptom whilst leaving the disease intact.
What would change if there were a genuine desire for change?
There is no shortage of legal instruments. What is lacking is the will to implement them. The Palermo Protocol is now 26 years old. European Directive 2024/1712 was due to be transposed by July 2026, yet Spain has still not done so. The UN Convention against Cybercrime, adopted in December 2024, provides a framework for cooperation in cases such as scam centres. The tools exist. What is lacking is genuine priority.
Some specific demands that do not require new treaties, but rather compliance with those that already exist:
› Apply the principle of non-punishment without exception. No victim of trafficking should be arrested, prosecuted or deported for offences committed under duress, regardless of the country in which they are rescued.
› Binding obligations for digital platforms. Recruitment takes place on LinkedIn, Instagram, Telegram and dating apps. The companies that operate these platforms must have legal obligations to detect and report such activity, not merely voluntary policies.
› Real funding for victim support. The UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking remains chronically underfunded. Declarations of intent do not pay the ransom.
› A gender-sensitive approach across the board. 61 per cent of victims are women or girls. Policies on prevention, identification and redress must reflect this structural reality, not merely mention it in introductions.
› Operational judicial cooperation, not just rhetoric. Traffickers operate on a transnational scale more efficiently than cooperation between public prosecutors’ offices.
This day is not enough. And it should be
30 July exists because, in 2013, the UN General Assembly decided that a day was needed to raise awareness of trafficking. Thirteen years on, we still need this day to remind us of what should not need reminding: that there are people, right now, locked away in some compound in Myanmar, Cambodia or Laos, staring at a screen, dialling the telephone numbers of elderly people in Spain or Mexico, forced to carry out scams to avoid being beaten.
That there are women trapped in networks of sexual exploitation. That there are boys and girls working in conditions that no adult would accept. That all of this generates tens of billions of dollars that flow into the global economy without anyone demanding too many explanations.
Commemorating World Day Against Trafficking without making those with the power to change these structures feel uncomfortable is, at best, insufficient. This article is a small step towards creating the necessary discomfort.
Annalisa Losapio, FIBGAR contributor
BIBLIOGRAPHY
UNODC (2024). Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Published on 11 December 2024. Available at: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/data-and-analysis/glotip.html
UN Human Rights / OHCHR (2026). Report on scam centres and human trafficking in South-East Asia. Published in February 2026. Available at: https://news.un.org/es/story/2026/02/1541171
INTERPOL (2025). Scam centres: globalisation of trafficking-fuelled online fraud. Crime Trends Report. Lyon, June 2025. Available at: https://www.interpol.int
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UN — General Assembly (2024). United Nations Convention against Cybercrime. Adopted in December 2024.
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