JAKARTA: It was a tense four-hour journey from the city of Bavet to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh for Indonesian worker Slamet.
The man – who had just escaped from an online gambling ring where he had been forced to work for a period of three months – was making his way to the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia to seek help in order to return home.
But memory of his experience, which happened in 2023, still haunts Slamet to this day.
In an interview with CNA, Slamet requested for his real name not to be revealed because he was “afraid”.
“I’m afraid as (the boss in Cambodia) is still looking for me,” the 27-year-old told CNA.
Recalling the fateful day when he escaped from the online gambling ring in Bavet – a city which is an international border crossing between Cambodia and Vietnam – Slamet said that he only had his wallet, mobile phone and a charger with him.
After requesting to be let out for a smoke break, Slamet took his chance to escape and hailed a taxi. He then asked the driver to bring him to the capital some 160km away.
“I had no choice but to steal from the company to pay for my trip home,” Slamet – who hails from East Java – said in a phone call.
Slamet added that he had been deceived by a recruiter he met in the city of Malang who had lured him with a monthly salary of 15 million rupiah (USD$925) to work at a factory in Vietnam. This was not inclusive of a US$200 “food allowance” he was promised.
That is far higher than what he could have earned working in Indonesia. According to data gathering website Statista, the average Indonesian employee could expect a net monthly salary of around 3 million rupiah as of February 2024.
Moreover, Slamet was unemployed when the offer came.
But instead of being sent to Vietnam, he was taken to an apartment in Bavet to become an administrative staff member of an online gambling site in January 2023.
“I was only paid 4 million rupiah per month and had to work more than 12 hours a day, the office is guarded by armed men and sniffer dogs,” Slamet claimed.
As part of his “job”, he was tasked to manage transactions from those who participated in online gambling activities in Indonesia.
“I know the company’s bank password and pin number. I transferred around 30 million rupiah of their money to my bank account. If I had not done this, I wouldn’t be able to go home,” Slamet told CNA, adding that he is still being harassed by his former boss in Cambodia.
Last month, Director of Indonesian Citizen Protection Judha Nugraha said that Indonesia’s embassy in Phnom Penh handles about 15 to 30 reports daily of its citizens seeking help.
The Indonesian Citizen Protection is an agency within Indonesia’s foreign ministry.
Judha said that from January to November 2024, the embassy there had successfully managed more than 2,946 cases related to the protection of Indonesian citizens with more than 76 per cent of them linked to online fraud.
According to experts, Indonesians becoming victims of human trafficking through online means became a trend since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many were desperate to find jobs and became vulnerable to scams.
Observers also noticed a shift in how human trafficking cases have evolved. The perpetrators now target young people with higher education. They are also no longer sent to Middle East countries, but to other Southeast Asian nations.
PHYSICAL AND MENTAL TORTURE
When Slamet expressed his dissatisfaction and asked to be sent back to Indonesia, his employer demanded a 50 million rupiah fine for his return, leaving him with no choice but to continue working there.
“There were no contractual agreements at all,” Slamet said, adding that he worked in apartment spaces rented by several gambling and online scam firms.
According to Slamet, as many as 80 per cent of those working alongside him are Indonesian citizens, including his former boss who is from North Sumatra.
Slamet worked and slept in the office and could only leave to eat or go for a smoke break. Even that was controlled by the guards, he claimed.
“If I wasn’t mentally strong at the time, I could have committed suicide.”
Responding to CNA’s queries, the Indonesian embassy in Phnom Penh said that in general, most of the Indonesians who faced issues in Cambodia and had returned home were in good physical and mental health.
However, the embassy also noted that several of them were in “poor physical and psychological condition”.
A staff member from the Migrant Care advocacy organisation in Jakarta said that it has received several reports of abuse against Indonesians working in Cambodia.
“Some were handcuffed, electrocuted and beaten and the reasons for this abuse varied, such as failing to meet targets or being punished for filing complaints, among others,” Arina Widda Faradis – who works in the legal aid division at the organisation – told CNA.
This was also confirmed by Slamet who said that the online gambling companies in Cambodia would use electric guns or tasers on employees who were deemed to be incompetent at work.
“My friend told me that he was once electrocuted because he could not master the job after one week of training and if he couldn’t do it in another week, he was threatened with electrocution again,” shared Slamet.
“And if within a month he remains incompetent, he was threatened (with being moved) to Myanmar. Who knows what his fate will be if he is in Myanmar?”
Meanwhile, various cases of human trafficking have also surfaced on social media from alleged victims.
At the end of last month, a video of 25-year-old Agung Haryadi seeking help went viral.
In the video, the man from Tanjung Pinang in the Riau Islands showed a small room where he was held captive in Cambodia with only three thin mattresses on the floor.
“I was pressured, not given food and forced to work,” he said, adding that he was only given bottled water in the room.
In an interview with Indonesian news agency Detik on Dec 27, Agung’s mother Dessi said that her son was initially offered a job at a palm oil company in Malaysia with a promised monthly salary of 20 million rupiah.
However, he was instead taken to Cambodia, in the city of Poipet located near the Thai border.
Judha – the official from the foreign affairs ministry – said that the authorities in Indonesia are investigating the case and have managed to contact Agung.
“Once we manage to get the necessary information, the Indonesian embassy in Phnom Penh will coordinate with the Cambodian authorities to handle the case,” he said on Jan 2.
However, it is noted that not all Indonesian citizens that face problems in Cambodia are victims of human trafficking.
A report from the embassy showed that there were 2,321 cases of Indonesian citizens facing issues in Cambodia from January to September last year, a 122 per cent increase from the same period the previous year which recorded 1,386 cases.
However, from the 2,321 cases recorded, only three have been proven to be victims of human trafficking.
In 2023, there were 39 reported cases of human trafficking while in 2022, there were 425 cases of Indonesian trafficked in Cambodia.
Under the Indonesian law on the Eradication of Human Trafficking crimes, a human trafficking offense is defined as the recruitment of an individual – whether through the use of violence, threats, kidnapping, confinement, forgery, fraud or debt bondage – either domestically or abroad, for the purpose of exploitation.
On Dec 13 last year, Indonesia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry had said that there are many Indonesian citizens who willingly chose to work for these online gambling and scam companies. This means they cannot be regarded as victims of employment fraud, said Judha.
Data from the Indonesian embassy in Phnom Penh showed there are a total of 139,693 Indonesians in Cambodia as of October last year, a 34 per cent increase from the same period in 2023.
Another set of data from June 2024 showed that 58 per cent of these Indonesian citizens in Cambodia had declared that they are working in the online business or industry.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS TRAFFICKED INTO ONLINE CRIMES
In August 2023, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) revealed that there were hundreds of thousands trafficked into online crimes across Southeast Asia, “generating revenue amounting to billions of US dollars each year”.
The report said that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and another 100,000 in Cambodia may be held in situations where they were forced to execute lucrative online scams – from romance-investment scams, crypto fraud to illegal gambling.
Neighbouring countries in the region such as Laos, the Philippines and Thailand have also been identified as main countries of destination or transit where at least tens of thousands of people have been involved, according to the report.
The Cambodian government, however, has called the report “baseless”.
Gambling in the country is legal for tourists and foreigners as seen in the growing number of casinos owned by Chinese investors especially in Sihanoukville.
However, only tourists and foreigners are allowed to gamble in these casinos while local citizens who violated the gambling laws may be jailed or fined.
Following outrage on the rise of online fraud in Cambodia, the government issued a ban on online gambling companies in 2019.
And in September 2022, the authorities launched large-scale raids against online gambling and scam companies, resulting in the arrests and deportations of thousands of people.
Despite the crackdown, local media reports said that plenty of online gambling sites continue to operate in the country despite the ban.
A victim of human trafficking in Cambodia told Voices of America (VoA) in an interview that the raids in 2022 only prompted the online gambling companies to shift their location.
Director of Migrant Care Indonesia Wahyu Susilo, quoting the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report by the US State Department in 2024, told CNA that Cambodia and Myanmar were in the worst “Tier 3” category.
“The largest human trafficking syndicates operate in the Mekong region – Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos – because the governments and law enforcement agencies are not doing what they should be doing,” Wahyu told CNA.
HUMAN TRAFFICKING SYNDICATES NOW TARGETING THOSE WITH HIGHER QUALIFICATIONS
Meanwhile, Wahyu also noted how the profile of human trafficking victims in the region have evolved.
In the past, most of the victims were women from low economic and educational backgrounds, trafficked to work as domestic helpers especially in the Middle East.
But now, most human trafficking victims in Indonesia are young people with high educational qualifications.
Wahyu said the shift in trend is driven by the COVID-19 pandemic when many were left jobless.
He told CNA that one of the tactics used by recruiters to lure victims is by claiming that they will be working as programmers in the digital technology industry, when in reality, they are working in an illegal business.
A report from the Indonesian embassy in Phnom Penh stated that these young people were promised job opportunities abroad that had minimal requirements, or even none at all.
They are usually recruited via social media platforms or offered to work by recruiters whom they already knew, including neighbours, friends and even family members.
For Slamet, a management graduate who once worked for a bank in East Java, he was approached by a recruiter at a coffee shop.
“When the recruiter approached me, I was already unemployed for four months after my contract at a banking company was terminated,” Slamet told CNA.
With the trend in offers made on social media platforms, Commissioner for the National Commission on Human Rights Anis Hidayah regarded the level of human trafficking crimes in Indonesia to be an emergency situation.
Anis said that Indonesian citizens are becoming more vulnerable to human trafficking, a situation exacerbated by the country’s low level of digital literacy.
“In the past, the victims were primary and secondary school graduates, now there are many victims who had obtained a bachelor’s or master’s degree and some of those sent back home by the Foreign Affairs Ministry were influencers,” Anis told CNA.
EFFORTS BY THE INDONESIAN GOVERNMENT TO ADDRESS HUMAN TRAFFICKING
The Indonesian government through its foreign ministry, the police and immigration authorities are working closely with the Cambodian authorities to prevent human trafficking of Indonesians.
“However, the Cambodian government is aware of their limited capacity and the increasingly complex international networks (of human trafficking syndicates) which would require a large amount of resources to handle,” said the Indonesian embassy in Cambodia.
Meanwhile, the Indonesian government had also conducted outreach initiatives in provinces with higher rates of human trafficking victims whilealso eradicating recruiting networks.
In December last year, the police arrested seven members of a syndicate that allegedly sent Indonesian citizens to work in Cambodia by promising victims to work as administrative staff members.
Over the years, immigration authorities have also tightened checks on Indonesians leaving for Cambodia but some have said that it is not fully effective and are calling for the authorities to improve on their investigation mechanisms.
“Why does it happen over and over again? The media has covered human trafficking cases extensively but the public is still easily deceived,” said Anis from the National Commission on Human Rights.
“Maybe there are other factors that we need to check, perhaps this (human trafficking) network is well-supported and coordinated, making it difficult for law enforcers to identify them …,” she added.
Separately, the Indonesian embassy in Phnom Penh has also urged Indonesian citizens to always confirm the job offers they receive with the relevant agencies or official employment agents.
“Avoid job offers that are too good to be true and report illegal recruitment activities to the Indonesian authorities,” the embassy told CNA.
It has also launched a hotline for Indonesian citizens experiencing issues in Cambodia.