A Kenyan man escaped from a Myanmar forced labour camp run by an international Chinese cartel on Saturday and managed to cross into Thailand.
The 30-year-old, identified only as James, told Thai police that the gang was holding about 1,000 people of various nationalities, including 23 Kenyans, at a fraudulent call centre in Myanmar's eastern Kayin state.
He said he had escaped from a "scam town" in Myawaddy and walked across a mountainous region to the Thai border. Covered in wounds, James told the Bangkok Post that he limped into a shop in Phop Phra district on Sunday morning and asked a shopkeeper to take him to the police.
James left Kenya last year after applying for a job as a cook in Thailand through an employment agency in Kenya.
After arriving at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport on October 5, he and two compatriots were picked up by a driver and taken to Mae Sot district in Tak.
He said he realised he had been duped when the three were smuggled across the Moei River, a natural demarcation line between Thailand and the Myanmar border, to a camp where they were forced to work as cryptocurrency investment scammers.
James said that when he refused to become a scammer, he was beaten with a stun gun and a baseball bat, and hot wax was applied to his wounds.
He claims that many foreigners, including Filipinos, Cambodians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans, work at the Chinese-controlled plant.
Thai police in Phop Phra district contacted the Kenyan embassy in Bangkok to arrange for the man to meet Ambassador Kiptiness Lindsay Kimwole. He was later taken to the screening centre in Mae Sot district for questioning by Thai authorities.
A government statement said dozens of Kenyans and other East Africans had been lured to Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, ostensibly to work as English language teachers, but ended up as overworked, underpaid labourers.
The embassy said the problem had grown, especially after recruiters hired other Kenyans to persuade compatriots to join them on false promises. The embassy said it had recently worked with local authorities to rescue as many as 140 Kenyans and other East Africans, reflecting how the trend has continued unabated despite warnings since 2022.
"Despite extensive warnings and awareness campaigns, the persistence of these scams remains a concern," the embassy said.
The embassy says Kenyans in Myanmar have now become human trafficking agents on behalf of criminal cartels.
The agents, some of whom are Kenyans, receive large sums of money from unsuspecting Kenyans, as much as Ksh300,000 to obtain visas at the Thai embassy in Nairobi and pay for air tickets.
Kenyans are duped by fake job advertisements in Thailand, especially in customer care, front office, cryptocurrency and teaching, "only to arrive in Thailand and find that there are no such jobs. Some of the Kenyans have ended up destitute in Bangkok, sleeping on the streets and begging for food from strangers," the embassy said.
In December, Emma Gicheha, director of the Welfare and Rights Division at the State Department of Diaspora Affairs, acknowledged the problem, describing it as a "headache".
“Thailand is one of the headaches as a government now,” she said. “The other destination that I noted in my report includes human trafficking in India. We are helping a number who are being trafficked to India.”
“Many of our people are stuck there,” Ms Gicheha said, adding that she has seen an increase in the trend of trafficking in these countries.
