For three days, Wang Xing lived in fear. His head had been shaved. He couldn’t sleep and was in a strange place where his captors forced him to type – the first phase of training for an unwanted role. The 31-year-old Chinese actor had flown to Bangkok for what he expected to be a movie casting call. Instead, he was picked up at the airport and driven to a scam center in Myanmar’s Myawaddy, a notorious cyber-fraud hub across the border from Thailand. Wang is among hundreds of thousands of people who have been trafficked into scam compounds – many run by Chinese crime syndicates – that have proliferated in civil war-torn Myanmar and other parts of Southeast Asia in recent years. Often lured by the promise of well-paying jobs or other enticing opportunities, victims are held against their will and forced to carry out online fraud schemes in heavily…
