Latest news with #Ethiopians
The Citizen
2 days ago
- The Citizen
A child lost to evil: The horror of human trafficking
Human trafficking is on the rise in SA, tearing apart families and robbing victims of their futures and hope. It is almost inconceivably evil that a mother could sell her child and then remain silent about where the buyers may have taken her. Yet that is what Kelly Smith – mother of abducted six-year-old Joshlin – has done. Despite being sentenced yesterday to life in prison, the tearful and emotional Smith said nothing which may have helped the authorities locate Joshlin. That silence leaves two horrifying possibilities: that the child was murdered and her body cut up for muti or… that she was whisked into one of the underground channels of human trafficking. In a way, it might be better if Joshlin was dead – not only to spare her whatever horrors the trafficked life might hold, but also so her family has closure. There can be nothing worse than knowing a child – your child – will forever be lost to you. ALSO READ: Joshlin Smith sentencing: Kelly and co-accused handed life sentences This is what the families of the six girls who were reportedly abducted by Pretoria paedophile Gert van Rooyen and his partner, Joey Haarhoff, have had to endure for almost 40 years. It's the agony that Kate and Gerry McCann have had to endure since that day in 2007, when their three-year-old daughter Madeleine disappeared while the family was on holiday in Portugal. The Joshlin Smith case has shone the spotlight on trafficking – not only of children, but of adults – which has become one of the most profitable organised crimes in the world… and is on the increase in South Africa. We report today of a group of Ethiopians who were rescued from a house in northern Joburg where they were held captive by human traffickers. Some of them were initially mistakenly arrested and put in handcuffs, adding to their trauma. Trafficking is abominable. It seeks to steal not only the body, but also the soul – and future – of a person. NOW READ: WATCH: The moment Joshlin Smith's mother was sentenced to life in prison
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Prometric Launches Workforce and Global Placement Initiative in Ethiopia with PAES and Ethiopia's Ministry of Labor and Skills
BALTIMORE, May 29, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Prometric, a global leader in credentialing and skills development, today announced a major new initiative to expand access to internationally recognized certification opportunities in Ethiopia. Launched in partnership with Pan African Educational Solutions (PAES), Ethiopia's exclusive partner to the Ministry of Labor and Skills (MoLS), the effort marks a tremendous milestone for international certification and workforce development in the region. 'Prometric is proud to stand alongside Ethiopia in advancing a bold and inspiring vision for workforce transformation,' said Stuart Udell, CEO of Prometric. 'Together, we're not only expanding access to global employment pathways – we're unlocking human potential at scale. This work is about more than credentials; it's about equipping the next generation with the tools to drive economic mobility and national progress.' This transformative effort is guided by a formal agreement with MoLS and reinforced by a Memorandum of Understanding with Ethiopia's technical and vocational training institutions (TVTIs). The initiative aims to embed world-class certification and training infrastructure directly within public institutions, creating direct pathways for Ethiopian youth to access global employment markets. Through its certification and testing division, Visionary Solutions, PAES will lead the delivery of globally standardized exams in priority sectors such as IT, healthcare, finance, and essential skills. These certifications are critical enablers for Ethiopians to access competitive job markets both locally and internationally, furthering Ethiopia's goal of becoming a regional center of workforce excellence. With national deployment already underway, PAES has launched its first testing and training center in Addis Ababa and is developing additional hubs inside government TVET institutions. Five integrated centers are planned nationwide to make certification more accessible to all Ethiopians. To support exam readiness and workforce enablement, HubBits – PAES's innovation and training platform – offers short-term, industry-aligned learning programs and affordable co-working spaces, nurturing Ethiopia's growing ecosystem of remote professionals and BPO services. 'This program is a national mission,' said Mekdam Aberra, CEO of PAES. 'As the exclusive partner to MoLS and with Prometric's global certification capabilities, we're equipping Ethiopian youth with the credentials and confidence to pursue international careers. Our embedded approach in TVET institutions means this is not just a vision - it's a system already in motion.' Program Highlights: National Certification Delivery: Visionary Solutions, the certification division of PAES, delivers Prometric exams in fields critical to global workforce needs. Global Job Access: Certified candidates are linked to international job opportunities, particularly in areas with acute labor shortages. TVET Integration: Five national hubs are being embedded in public TVET institutions, with two centers already secured and operational. HubBits Workforce Enablement: Practical, short-term training and remote workspaces prepare candidates to succeed beyond certification. Key Impact Goals: Certify 150,000 Ethiopians by 2025. Launch five national certification and training centers within TVET institutions. Enable international placement for certified professionals in IT, healthcare, and skilled trades. Position Ethiopia as East Africa's leading talent hub. Working together, Prometric and PAES are laying the foundation for a scalable, sustainable model that not only empowers Ethiopian learners today, but positions the country as a future leader in global talent development. ABOUT PAN AFRICAN EDUCATIONAL SOLUTIONSPAES is a mission-driven organization dedicated to advancing workforce development in Ethiopia and East Africa. It leads a full talent enablement ecosystem through: Visionary Solutions – Ethiopia's leading provider of professional certification and validation. HubBits – An agile training and workspace platform focused on real-world skills and remote work enablement. Through its exclusive partnership with MoLS and collaborations with global partners like Prometric, PAES builds bridges from training to certification to international job placement. ABOUT PROMETRICPrometric is a global leader in credentialing and skills development, building the workforce of tomorrow across all industries and professions in 180+ countries with the largest testing center footprint of any assessment provider. With more than 30 years of assessment expertise, innovation, and best-in-class solutions, Prometric changes lives to create a better world. For more information, visit Prometric or follow us on X at @PrometricGlobal and CONTACT: Jennifer Leckstrom (215) 681-0770 jleckstrom@
New Indian Express
4 days ago
- Sport
- New Indian Express
In-form Gulveer runs to 10,000m glory at Asian meet
CHENNAI: GULVEER Singh has continued his golden run this year. The national record holder in both 5000 metres (12:59.77s, Feb 2025) and 10,000 metres (27:00.22s, Mar 2025) added another feather to his cap by winning India's first gold medal in the 10,000m with a timing of 28:38.63 seconds at the Asian Athletics Championship in Gumi, South Korea on Tuesday. This year Gulveer has been in domineering form and he credits it to a lot of hard work and exposure trips to the United States. He has been training at Colorado Springs under India's foreign middle and long distance coach Scott Simmons and that according to him has helped him improve his timing. He has massively improved his record from the 2023 Asian meet in Bangkok where he had clocked 29:53.69s. In fact, tracing his progression is quite interesting. In November 2022 he had a personal best of 28:54.29 and in 2023 it was down to 28:17.21. In the last couple of years he has been spending more time in the US and the progress seemed quite visible. In 2024 his best was 27:14.88, bettered more than a minute and in 2025 he has hit his best strides. "Training under the coach (Scott) and practising with Kenyans and Ethiopians impacted me positively," he told this daily from Gumi. "There has been good feedback and everything has helped me improve."
The Age
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Age
Caught in a $60b scam, these workers tried to flee but the soldiers were waiting
They were told their government wasn't coming for them, and this was true. Months had passed since they had been hauled from the scam compounds of Myanmar's lawless borderlands and put here, a holding camp, of sorts; a place to wait under the watch of militiamen until their names appeared on a list designating those who were soon to be free. Other nations had muscled their citizens onto that list. Embassy officials from dozens of countries had swarmed to the border bearing plane tickets and paperwork. But not for them. On their own, the 270 trafficked Ethiopians decided to escape. Exclusive video obtained by this masthead documents part of their confrontation with armed soldiers that day, just short of the Moei River border with Thailand. The guns won. The scamlands were roiling at the time. Under way since early February was the first significant crackdown on eastern Myanmar's scam mega-factories, sprawling faux cities of colourful, almost romantic sounding names: Shwekokko, Taichang, KK Park. Asian crime games run them. Self-enriching warlords abet them. Impoverished migrants, tricked or tempted into enslavement, staff them under threat and fulfilment of torture. The common scamming method is known as 'pig butchering'. That is, fattening up an online target with small wins, confidence or love, then slaughtering them for the lot. The Asian mafia makes eye-watering cash this way – more than $60 billion a year, by some estimates, in schemes emanating from South-East Asia alone, where the major hotspots are Myanmar and Cambodia. The fraud can be incredibly elaborate, fooling everyone from lonely pensioners to bank chief executives. But one of the syndicates went too far. Waves of bad online PR when little-known Chinese actor Wang Xing was kidnapped in Thailand this year (from what he thought was a shoot), appeared to be the catalyst to shake Beijing and Bangkok from insouciance to action. On February 5, a day before Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, Thailand cut power, fuel and internet access to communities across the border, an attempt to starve the mafia out. The pressure was on, and crime bosses, working with their militia landlords, cleared out a portion of the less profitable workers. In a few chaotic and extraordinary months, close to 10,000 people were loaded onto buses and sent over the Moei River to airports in Thailand. 'They transit through Thailand. They don't stop here; they don't spend the night here; they are just in and out,' says Amy Miller from the US-based NGO Acts of Mercy International. 'This works for a good percentage of Asian countries. Their flights aren't expensive, and they have more resources. They have more diplomatic power. They're in ASEAN. 'But you look at African nations, and it's difficult.' Come April, the 270 Ethiopians remained in the borderlands holding camp, kernels forming about what would become their failed escape, their patience thinning in confined rooms and odious toilets, choking down two bad meals a day and sleeping on carpets set out wherever floor space allowed. The massive earthquake in wartorn Myanmar on March 28 had maimed the nation's already inept bureaucracy. But this did not explain the sloth of the Ethiopian government, which had neither processed the required paperwork, nor approved embassy staff to travel to the border, Miller said from her base in Mae Sot, a town on the Thailand side of the border. 'We were sending family members to the ministry of foreign affairs in Addis Ababa, saying 'Go knock on their door and put pressure on them to approve this',' she said. 'They came back saying, 'Well, they're not willing to pay for the buses'. We're like, 'We will pay, like we told them. We're going to pay'.' Days after the earthquake, opportunistic 'Chinese bosses' stormed into the holding camp with an unconscionable proposition: the Ethiopians were stuck, and it was time to come back to work. Mekidem, from Addis Ababa, saw his countrymen swell in fury. 'If they [the bosses] stayed a little longer, things would have gotten bad, as some people were grabbing stones to throw at them,' he texted this masthead this month, the only means of reliable communication from the camp. Mekidem had been trafficked to Myanmar about 15 months earlier, after responding to a phoney job offer for data processing in Bangkok. After an interview over the messaging app Telegram to test his English proficiency, his recruiters had promised a month of training, and paid for his flight to Thailand. This is how the mafia gets many of its workers. While some of those enlisted are complicit – at least until they realise they are not allowed to leave – more wind up in Myanmar because they've been duped into Bangkok and trafficked over the border at Mae Sot, a seven-hour drive to the north-west. There are no 'data' jobs as advertised. The work is elaborate online swindling, on behalf of highly organised syndicates increasingly with fingers in online gambling, cryptocurrency exchanges, payment processors, illicit online marketplaces and encrypted communications platforms, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Posing as an Asian model named Alicia, Mekidem, 28, was made to chat up men from Eastern Europe and Arabic-speaking nations for their money. 'I refused to work [at first] and they asked me for $US8000 [$12,500] if I wanted to leave the place – which I cannot pay in a million years,' he said. He was beaten 'a few times', but he avoided the worst of the torture – whippings, solitary confinement, poundings with electrified batons. 'Many of my friends have been through it, as I witnessed it right in front of me,' he said. 'Their wound marks are still on their backs.' After that first visit by the bosses to the holding camp, the group of Ethiopians worried that the next visit would mean they would be taken by force back to Taichang, one of the most brutal scam compounds. 'They were freaking out, saying 'We're going to escape, we're going to escape',' Miller said. 'We were talking them through it, like, 'what would happen if you ran', saying, 'hey they might shoot you'.' On the evening of April 13, Australian aid worker Judah Tana, one of three workers in Mae Sot working on thousands of worker cases, sent a group message to the Ethiopian leaders informing them of the bureaucratic problems at play. 'That was a very honest and brief explanation of what was going on,' Mekidem said. 'So we immediately gathered and had a meeting … we thought we were going to be deceived again.' The following morning, Mekidem and the other 'committee' members assembled the population and put forward an idea: They would march en masse from the camp and swim across the Moei river. All but a handful agreed, Mekidem said. Miller, terrified something would go wrong, told Thai officials to be ready to receive almost 300 people who would soon be flapping about in the river under possible gunfire. About 90 minutes after that group meeting, the Ethiopians walked out the gates of the holding compound, which were open during the day. Footage shows them casually strolling to the river dragging suitcases. The area, south of Myawaddy, is controlled by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, whose shadowy deals with the crime syndicates have allowed scam operations there to flourish. Within minutes, nervous young DKBA soldiers blocked the road to the river, shouting and 'clucking their guns and beating people who were in front', Mekidem said. Voices can be heard on the video of the escape attempt, shouting 'go home' and 'no fight'. One DKBA soldier can be seen grabbing a gun from an agitated colleague, perhaps so it would not be used. After about half an hour, the Ethiopians were forced back into the holding camp without shots being fired. The Ethiopian government has been contacted for comment. The UN has described the situation at the Thai-Myanmar border as a humanitarian crisis building for at least five years. The release of roughly 10,000 victims this year has not changed this. In fact, it has barely dented the gangs' workforce. Those who make the most money – 'gold collar dogs' as the bosses call them – remain in the scam compounds of eastern Myanmar. It is impossible to know their numbers, but estimates have put the total number of compound workers in Myanmar, including in the northern regions bordering China, at upwards of 100,000. The journey home again Transfers from Myanmar to Thailand were at their peak when this masthead visited the border in March. In two days alone, close to 600 Indonesians were escorted over the Friendship Bridge 2 from a holding camp on land of the Karen Border Force Guard, another of Myanmar's armed, non-government groups. Once cleared at Mae Sot immigration, their buses moved in convoy, non-stop through the night, to Don Mueang Airport in Bangkok. Stressed Indonesian officials were still organising logistics right up to that moment. Still, the process was as smooth as co-operation between a third country, Thailand, Myanmar's military junta and a non-state army can get. Sometimes, Miller said, the Myanmar side helped to get the victims out, living up to its claim that housing and feeding thousands of traumatised people in the holding camps was a burden they could no longer sustain. Other times, it was 'power play ... like the wild west'. 'We had 14 Sri Lankans that came today as well – and we weren't sure they were going to make it. For whatever reason, Myanmar said they were not ready to move them,' Miller told this masthead in March. 'It's only because the ambassador was here and she went across the bridge. She stood there and said, 'Today. We're not doing this tomorrow. We have plane tickets in the morning'. She just kept pushing and pushing, and it happened.' In another case on the same day, Miller said the planned release of a small group of Taiwanese was delayed because Myanmar allegedly insisted on releasing the individuals to officials from China rather than to those from Taiwan. Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs would not confirm this, but the same happened last month after a scam compound was busted in Cambodia. China, of course, had no such difficulties repatriating its citizens from Myanmar, whisking thousands of them – more than half the 10,000 released – aboard chartered planes waiting at Mae Sot airport. Why, with such sway in these parts, did it take them so long? Part of the reason could be that China, unlike other nations, viewed the mafias' workforce as guilty participants in online fraud, regardless of whether they went willingly in Myanmar or not. State-owned media published a photo in February showing repatriated citizens disembarking a plane in China, each one of them handcuffed and flanked by police officers. Miller offered another insight. Months before the mass release, she said, Chinese officials visited KK Park and put conditions on the gangs: No more murders, no excessive torture, no scamming Chinese, and no more obscene prices for individuals wishing to buy their freedom. 'They put that pressure on them and things did start to shift in KK,' Miller said. 'But it's always been China for China. They don't really care that their citizens are there so long as they're scamming somebody else.' The Chinese government has been contacted for comment. How the scam operators get their victims At Mae Sot airport in March, 19 Bangladeshis were literally tasting freedom. It was Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, but the men were so sapped and hungry the chicken rice served up in the waiting area did not stand a chance. They had been out for minutes, having just cleared Thailand immigration after weeks in Myanmar holding camps. Soon, they would board the first of their flights home. The men had been forced to scam inside Taichang and another crime estate referred to as Hexen Group. One of them, Akash Ali, told this masthead it was only at that moment, in the airport, that he was convinced of his freedom. 'I thought we were going to be sold,' he said. His story was typical. Unhappy in Dubai as a construction worker, Ali wished to return to his 'niche' of training people in Microsoft Excel and data processing, so he answered such a job ad on Facebook. The work was in Thailand, which he knew nothing about, not even its cities. What mattered was the offer: $US1000 a month and regular days off. It sounded good. As in Mekidem's case, the criminals paid for Ali's flight to Bangkok. But things quickly turned strange. For starters, the 'company' driver who picked him up from the airport did not speak a word of English. Then there was the drive; hours and hours, until finally reaching Thai checkpoints around Mae Sot. '[Thai checkpoint guards] asked me what I was there for. I said 'visit'. And then they let me go. It was this way three times, at every checkpoint,' he said. 'I was told that once I entered the company, they would definitely make a legal work visa for me, that's why I said it.' But that was wrong. This and all the recruiter's promises evaporated for Ali when locals took his luggage at the river border and loaded it onto a small boat for Myanmar. 'This is when I knew,' he said. Inside the compound, he was given fake female Facebook profiles and made to draw personal information from lonely Indonesian men up for a chat: age, location, phone number and hobbies. Once in hand, he passed the data to his bosses, who he presumed passed it along the scam production line to more skilled workers. 'I wanted to share [with the online victims] how terrible a place I am right now, ask them, 'Can you help me?',' he said. 'I wanted to, but I could not because [the bosses] were always monitoring on another PC.' Still in the Myanmar holding camp a few weeks after the escape attempt, Mekidem, the Ethiopian, sent a photo of himself, looking stern and thin-lipped. 'We have a high hope of leaving this place very soon,' he texted, before sending through another photo, this time of him smiling. 'You can use this picture!! Nice and clean.' Loading Miller informed this masthead on Monday that Mekidem had been released a few days earlier, along with most but not all of the 270 Ethiopians in that group. He was now home. Tens of thousands more people trapped in Myanmar remained at their computers.
Sydney Morning Herald
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
Caught in a $60b scam, these workers tried to flee but the soldiers were waiting
They were told their government wasn't coming for them, and this was true. Months had passed since they had been hauled from the scam compounds of Myanmar's lawless borderlands and put here, a holding camp, of sorts; a place to wait under the watch of militiamen until their names appeared on a list designating those who were soon to be free. Other nations had muscled their citizens onto that list. Embassy officials from dozens of countries had swarmed to the border bearing plane tickets and paperwork. But not for them. On their own, the 270 trafficked Ethiopians decided to escape. Exclusive video obtained by this masthead documents part of their confrontation with armed soldiers that day, just short of the Moei River border with Thailand. The guns won. The scamlands were roiling at the time. Under way since early February was the first significant crackdown on eastern Myanmar's scam mega-factories, sprawling faux cities of colourful, almost romantic sounding names: Shwekokko, Taichang, KK Park. Asian crime games run them. Self-enriching warlords abet them. Impoverished migrants, tricked or tempted into enslavement, staff them under threat and fulfilment of torture. The common scamming method is known as 'pig butchering'. That is, fattening up an online target with small wins, confidence or love, then slaughtering them for the lot. The Asian mafia makes eye-watering cash this way – more than $60 billion a year, by some estimates, in schemes emanating from South-East Asia alone, where the major hotspots are Myanmar and Cambodia. The fraud can be incredibly elaborate, fooling everyone from lonely pensioners to bank chief executives. But one of the syndicates went too far. Waves of bad online PR when little-known Chinese actor Wang Xing was kidnapped in Thailand this year (from what he thought was a shoot), appeared to be the catalyst to shake Beijing and Bangkok from insouciance to action. On February 5, a day before Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, Thailand cut power, fuel and internet access to communities across the border, an attempt to starve the mafia out. The pressure was on, and crime bosses, working with their militia landlords, cleared out a portion of the less profitable workers. In a few chaotic and extraordinary months, close to 10,000 people were loaded onto buses and sent over the Moei River to airports in Thailand. 'They transit through Thailand. They don't stop here; they don't spend the night here; they are just in and out,' says Amy Miller from the US-based NGO Acts of Mercy International. 'This works for a good percentage of Asian countries. Their flights aren't expensive, and they have more resources. They have more diplomatic power. They're in ASEAN. 'But you look at African nations, and it's difficult.' Come April, the 270 Ethiopians remained in the borderlands holding camp, kernels forming about what would become their failed escape, their patience thinning in confined rooms and odious toilets, choking down two bad meals a day and sleeping on carpets set out wherever floor space allowed. The massive earthquake in wartorn Myanmar on March 28 had maimed the nation's already inept bureaucracy. But this did not explain the sloth of the Ethiopian government, which had neither processed the required paperwork, nor approved embassy staff to travel to the border, Miller said from her base in Mae Sot, a town on the Thailand side of the border. 'We were sending family members to the ministry of foreign affairs in Addis Ababa, saying 'Go knock on their door and put pressure on them to approve this',' she said. 'They came back saying, 'Well, they're not willing to pay for the buses'. We're like, 'We will pay, like we told them. We're going to pay'.' Days after the earthquake, opportunistic 'Chinese bosses' stormed into the holding camp with an unconscionable proposition: the Ethiopians were stuck, and it was time to come back to work. Mekidem, from Addis Ababa, saw his countrymen swell in fury. 'If they [the bosses] stayed a little longer, things would have gotten bad, as some people were grabbing stones to throw at them,' he texted this masthead this month, the only means of reliable communication from the camp. Mekidem had been trafficked to Myanmar about 15 months earlier, after responding to a phoney job offer for data processing in Bangkok. After an interview over the messaging app Telegram to test his English proficiency, his recruiters had promised a month of training, and paid for his flight to Thailand. This is how the mafia gets many of its workers. While some of those enlisted are complicit – at least until they realise they are not allowed to leave – more wind up in Myanmar because they've been duped into Bangkok and trafficked over the border at Mae Sot, a seven-hour drive to the north-west. There are no 'data' jobs as advertised. The work is elaborate online swindling, on behalf of highly organised syndicates increasingly with fingers in online gambling, cryptocurrency exchanges, payment processors, illicit online marketplaces and encrypted communications platforms, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Posing as an Asian model named Alicia, Mekidem, 28, was made to chat up men from Eastern Europe and Arabic-speaking nations for their money. 'I refused to work [at first] and they asked me for $US8000 [$12,500] if I wanted to leave the place – which I cannot pay in a million years,' he said. He was beaten 'a few times', but he avoided the worst of the torture – whippings, solitary confinement, poundings with electrified batons. 'Many of my friends have been through it, as I witnessed it right in front of me,' he said. 'Their wound marks are still on their backs.' After that first visit by the bosses to the holding camp, the group of Ethiopians worried that the next visit would mean they would be taken by force back to Taichang, one of the most brutal scam compounds. 'They were freaking out, saying 'We're going to escape, we're going to escape',' Miller said. 'We were talking them through it, like, 'what would happen if you ran', saying, 'hey they might shoot you'.' On the evening of April 13, Australian aid worker Judah Tana, one of three workers in Mae Sot working on thousands of worker cases, sent a group message to the Ethiopian leaders informing them of the bureaucratic problems at play. 'That was a very honest and brief explanation of what was going on,' Mekidem said. 'So we immediately gathered and had a meeting … we thought we were going to be deceived again.' The following morning, Mekidem and the other 'committee' members assembled the population and put forward an idea: They would march en masse from the camp and swim across the Moei river. All but a handful agreed, Mekidem said. Miller, terrified something would go wrong, told Thai officials to be ready to receive almost 300 people who would soon be flapping about in the river under possible gunfire. About 90 minutes after that group meeting, the Ethiopians walked out the gates of the holding compound, which were open during the day. Footage shows them casually strolling to the river dragging suitcases. The area, south of Myawaddy, is controlled by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, whose shadowy deals with the crime syndicates have allowed scam operations there to flourish. Within minutes, nervous young DKBA soldiers blocked the road to the river, shouting and 'clucking their guns and beating people who were in front', Mekidem said. Voices can be heard on the video of the escape attempt, shouting 'go home' and 'no fight'. One DKBA soldier can be seen grabbing a gun from an agitated colleague, perhaps so it would not be used. After about half an hour, the Ethiopians were forced back into the holding camp without shots being fired. The Ethiopian government has been contacted for comment. The UN has described the situation at the Thai-Myanmar border as a humanitarian crisis building for at least five years. The release of roughly 10,000 victims this year has not changed this. In fact, it has barely dented the gangs' workforce. Those who make the most money – 'gold collar dogs' as the bosses call them – remain in the scam compounds of eastern Myanmar. It is impossible to know their numbers, but estimates have put the total number of compound workers in Myanmar, including in the northern regions bordering China, at upwards of 100,000. The journey home again Transfers from Myanmar to Thailand were at their peak when this masthead visited the border in March. In two days alone, close to 600 Indonesians were escorted over the Friendship Bridge 2 from a holding camp on land of the Karen Border Force Guard, another of Myanmar's armed, non-government groups. Once cleared at Mae Sot immigration, their buses moved in convoy, non-stop through the night, to Don Mueang Airport in Bangkok. Stressed Indonesian officials were still organising logistics right up to that moment. Still, the process was as smooth as co-operation between a third country, Thailand, Myanmar's military junta and a non-state army can get. Sometimes, Miller said, the Myanmar side helped to get the victims out, living up to its claim that housing and feeding thousands of traumatised people in the holding camps was a burden they could no longer sustain. Other times, it was 'power play ... like the wild west'. 'We had 14 Sri Lankans that came today as well – and we weren't sure they were going to make it. For whatever reason, Myanmar said they were not ready to move them,' Miller told this masthead in March. 'It's only because the ambassador was here and she went across the bridge. She stood there and said, 'Today. We're not doing this tomorrow. We have plane tickets in the morning'. She just kept pushing and pushing, and it happened.' In another case on the same day, Miller said the planned release of a small group of Taiwanese was delayed because Myanmar allegedly insisted on releasing the individuals to officials from China rather than to those from Taiwan. Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs would not confirm this, but the same happened last month after a scam compound was busted in Cambodia. China, of course, had no such difficulties repatriating its citizens from Myanmar, whisking thousands of them – more than half the 10,000 released – aboard chartered planes waiting at Mae Sot airport. Why, with such sway in these parts, did it take them so long? Part of the reason could be that China, unlike other nations, viewed the mafias' workforce as guilty participants in online fraud, regardless of whether they went willingly in Myanmar or not. State-owned media published a photo in February showing repatriated citizens disembarking a plane in China, each one of them handcuffed and flanked by police officers. Miller offered another insight. Months before the mass release, she said, Chinese officials visited KK Park and put conditions on the gangs: No more murders, no excessive torture, no scamming Chinese, and no more obscene prices for individuals wishing to buy their freedom. 'They put that pressure on them and things did start to shift in KK,' Miller said. 'But it's always been China for China. They don't really care that their citizens are there so long as they're scamming somebody else.' The Chinese government has been contacted for comment. How the scam operators get their victims At Mae Sot airport in March, 19 Bangladeshis were literally tasting freedom. It was Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, but the men were so sapped and hungry the chicken rice served up in the waiting area did not stand a chance. They had been out for minutes, having just cleared Thailand immigration after weeks in Myanmar holding camps. Soon, they would board the first of their flights home. The men had been forced to scam inside Taichang and another crime estate referred to as Hexen Group. One of them, Akash Ali, told this masthead it was only at that moment, in the airport, that he was convinced of his freedom. 'I thought we were going to be sold,' he said. His story was typical. Unhappy in Dubai as a construction worker, Ali wished to return to his 'niche' of training people in Microsoft Excel and data processing, so he answered such a job ad on Facebook. The work was in Thailand, which he knew nothing about, not even its cities. What mattered was the offer: $US1000 a month and regular days off. It sounded good. As in Mekidem's case, the criminals paid for Ali's flight to Bangkok. But things quickly turned strange. For starters, the 'company' driver who picked him up from the airport did not speak a word of English. Then there was the drive; hours and hours, until finally reaching Thai checkpoints around Mae Sot. '[Thai checkpoint guards] asked me what I was there for. I said 'visit'. And then they let me go. It was this way three times, at every checkpoint,' he said. 'I was told that once I entered the company, they would definitely make a legal work visa for me, that's why I said it.' But that was wrong. This and all the recruiter's promises evaporated for Ali when locals took his luggage at the river border and loaded it onto a small boat for Myanmar. 'This is when I knew,' he said. Inside the compound, he was given fake female Facebook profiles and made to draw personal information from lonely Indonesian men up for a chat: age, location, phone number and hobbies. Once in hand, he passed the data to his bosses, who he presumed passed it along the scam production line to more skilled workers. 'I wanted to share [with the online victims] how terrible a place I am right now, ask them, 'Can you help me?',' he said. 'I wanted to, but I could not because [the bosses] were always monitoring on another PC.' Still in the Myanmar holding camp a few weeks after the escape attempt, Mekidem, the Ethiopian, sent a photo of himself, looking stern and thin-lipped. 'We have a high hope of leaving this place very soon,' he texted, before sending through another photo, this time of him smiling. 'You can use this picture!! Nice and clean.' Loading Miller informed this masthead on Monday that Mekidem had been released a few days earlier, along with most but not all of the 270 Ethiopians in that group. He was now home. Tens of thousands more people trapped in Myanmar remained at their computers.
