Police found the compound after a Vietnamese man climbed the wall to escape and raised the alarm. In his 30s, he arrived in the Philippines in January after landing a role as a chef.
But he soon realised the job did not exist: instead, he had become a victim of human trafficking. Mr Casio said he showed signs of torture, including electrocution.
In this week’s raid, police rescued 432 Chinese nationals, 371 Filipinos, and 72 others – including people from as far away as Rwanda. They also arrested eight suspects for illegal detention and human trafficking.
“The victims were controlled by having their passports confiscated so they were unable to leave,” said Gilberto Cruz, executive director of the crime task force that led the pre-dawn raid, told AFP. “The workers who failed to achieve their quota … were physically harmed, deprived of sleep or locked up inside their rooms.”
Such scam centres have proliferated across Southeast Asia since the coronavirus pandemic, with the United Nations estimating last August that hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have been tricked into the compounds.
“These scam compounds are quite different to other forms of trafficking that we have seen before… and there’s a lot more brutality involved, ” Dr Caitlin Wyndham, from the anti-trafficking organisation Blue Dragon, told The Telegraph.
“Tackling them is much more complicated, because there are victims on both sides and because most scam centres are run by large and highly organised crime syndicates.”
The industry is also proving incredibly profitable, raking in unprecedented sums equivalent to billions of dollars, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told the Telegraph that the “frightening reality” is that the Philippines is emerging as a scam centre hub in Southeast Asia.
“This big bust shows that criminal syndicates are taking advantage of the country’s prevailing corruption, and lax law enforcement environment, to create these hellholes of trafficking, exploitation and rights abuses that use the Internet to rake in dollars from unsuspecting cyberscam victims overseas,” he said.
“President Marcos and his government need to get serious in investigating and taking down these scam centres in a systematic way.”
