Hundreds rescued from love scam center in the Philippines
A scam center in the Philippines, where individuals were coerced into posing as online lovers, saw the rescue of hundreds by police during a raid on Thursday.
Authorities reported the successful extraction of 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese, and 73 other foreign nationals from the center, situated approximately 100km north of Manila.
Operating under the guise of an online gambling establishment, the center highlighted the prevalent issue of such fraudulent activities in Southeast Asia. These centers often ensnare even the scammers themselves, who are manipulated into engaging in criminal behavior.
Victims, particularly young and technologically adept individuals, are drawn into running these illicit operations, which encompass various illegal activities such as money laundering, cryptocurrency fraud, and deceptive love scams, also known as “pig butchering” scams. This term derives from the farming practice of fattening pigs before slaughtering them.
Love scams typically commence with the perpetrator assuming a false identity to cultivate affection and trust with their target, subsequently exploiting the illusion of a romantic or intimate relationship to deceive or extort from them.
This frequently involves convincing victims to invest in fictitious ventures or fraudulent schemes.
According to law enforcement officials, the raid near Manila was initiated following a tip-off from a Vietnamese man who managed to escape the clutches of the scam center the previous month.
The man, who was in his 30s, arrived in the Philippines in January this year, after being offered what he was told would be a chef’s job, said Winston Casio, spokesman for the Presidential Commission against Organized Crime.
But the man soon realized that he, like hundreds of others, had fallen prey to human traffickers running love and cryptocurrency scams.
Those trapped in the Bamban center were forced to send “sweet nothings” to their victims, many of whom were Chinese, Mr Casio said – they would check in on their recipients with questions about their day and if and what they had eaten for their last meal. They would also send photos of themselves to cultivate the relationship.
Mr. Casio said those running the scam centers trapped “good looking men and women to lure [victims]”.
On 28 February, the Vietnamese man escaped the facility by climbing up a wall, crossing a river, and seeking refuge at a farm. The farm owner then reported it to the police.
There were signs of torture on the man, including scars and marks from electrocution, said Mr Casio, whose team visited the man early this month.
Mr Casio added that several others have tried to escape but were always caught.
Police also seized three shotguns, a 9mm pistol, two .38 caliber revolvers, and 42 rounds of live ammunition from the center.
Authorities are still in the initial stages of the investigation as most of those rescued from Thursday’s raid are still “shaken”, he said.
In May last year, Philippine authorities rescued more than 1,000 people who were held captive and forced to run online scams inside a freeport zone in Clark, a city also north of Manila – in what remains its biggest bust to date.
A UN report last August estimated that hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have been trafficked to Southeast Asia to run online scams.
