PHNOM PENH: Abdul’s plan was to teach English in a Bangkok school. His family in Uganda sold what land they had on the promise of greater opportunities far across the Indian Ocean in Southeast Asia.A few months later, as he was being dragged through a dark jungle with men armed with machetes and arrows, the future he had imagined was disappearing from view.Desperate after teaching job promises had fallen through and on the premise of starting a simple data entry job in Cambodia offered by online recruiters, Abdul was taken on a harrowing journey.He was bundled into multiple vans across Thailand, wrenched into Laos under the cover of darkness, in and out of mysterious remote complexes, across a river into Cambodia and then eventually smuggled down to a small outpost town close to the Gulf of Thailand.
Abdul, who asked that his full name not be used for this article, was not alone. Many strangers, mostly Chinese men, were being taken on similar routes. They were all heading for the same fate - being moved into criminal scamming compounds.A great human wave has been rolling through these back channels for months and years on end. Coordinated dragnets pulling in people from around the world to fill the ranks of a shadow workforce in secure compounds across Cambodia.
