Latest news with #KateGeraghty
Sydney Morning Herald
24-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
On the edge of humanity: A journey through the Thai borderlands
Zach Hope and Kate Geraghty travel to the borderlands near Myanmar, where efforts are under way to rescue thousands of trafficking victims from scam factories. See all 2 stories. Something quite remarkable has been happening this year at Mae Sot, a Thai border town about 500 kilometres north-west of Bangkok. This remote and otherwise nondescript place is one of the most important links between Thailand and Myanmar, which inevitably makes it a hub for transnational shipments of all manner of contraband and dubiously sourced resources. Much of it pours eastward over the border to Thailand, and then to the world beyond. Drugs, for example. Illegal stuff goes the other way, too. For the past five years, at least, jaw-droppingly vast flows of a particularly valuable resource have been smuggled into Myanmar, making for what the United Nations has labelled a humanitarian crisis. It is people, many of them with little or no education, and from impoverished nations. They are the workforce of the Myanmar scam compounds, the human production line of sophisticated online swindles that reap billions of dollars a year from ordinary people around the world. Estimates put the number of scam workers in Myanmar at more than 100,000. Some of them in the eastern regions of Myanmar choose the work, to be sure, but it appears many more are lured into Thailand with fake job offers, then trafficked over the border where the Asian crime syndicates behind frauds operate with near impunity. This extraordinary and complex ecosystem, however, is not the remarkable happening I'm referring to. What is remarkable is that thousands of trafficked workers are being freed as part of a clampdown by Thailand. Photographer Kate Geraghty and I recently visited the borderlands to see for ourselves, flying into Mae Sot at the peak of the chaotic and high-stakes human transfers to the safety of Thailand.
The Age
24-05-2025
- The Age
On the edge of humanity: A journey through the Thai borderlands
Zach Hope and Kate Geraghty travel to the borderlands near Myanmar, where efforts are under way to rescue thousands of trafficking victims from scam factories. See all 2 stories. Something quite remarkable has been happening this year at Mae Sot, a Thai border town about 500 kilometres north-west of Bangkok. This remote and otherwise nondescript place is one of the most important links between Thailand and Myanmar, which inevitably makes it a hub for transnational shipments of all manner of contraband and dubiously sourced resources. Much of it pours eastward over the border to Thailand, and then to the world beyond. Drugs, for example. Illegal stuff goes the other way, too. For the past five years, at least, jaw-droppingly vast flows of a particularly valuable resource have been smuggled into Myanmar, making for what the United Nations has labelled a humanitarian crisis. It is people, many of them with little or no education, and from impoverished nations. They are the workforce of the Myanmar scam compounds, the human production line of sophisticated online swindles that reap billions of dollars a year from ordinary people around the world. Estimates put the number of scam workers in Myanmar at more than 100,000. Some of them in the eastern regions of Myanmar choose the work, to be sure, but it appears many more are lured into Thailand with fake job offers, then trafficked over the border where the Asian crime syndicates behind frauds operate with near impunity. This extraordinary and complex ecosystem, however, is not the remarkable happening I'm referring to. What is remarkable is that thousands of trafficked workers are being freed as part of a clampdown by Thailand. Photographer Kate Geraghty and I recently visited the borderlands to see for ourselves, flying into Mae Sot at the peak of the chaotic and high-stakes human transfers to the safety of Thailand.
