PHNOM PENH: More than 40 people made a desperate plunge into a river and swam across the border from Cambodia into Vietnam to escape ill-treatment by their employer.
Vietnamese border guards in the An Giang Province reported on Thursday that they have rescued the 35 men and five women and all were being held in custody pending verification of their identities.
According to a report in the Vietnamese daily Vn Express, an officer stationed at the Long Binh border gate said initial investigations showed that they were among 42 people who escaped from a casino in Cambodia's Kandal Province.
He said those rescued claimed that they swam across the Binh Di River to escape from their employers but one had been swept away by currents while another had been caught by the casino owners.
According to the report, they went to Cambodia and worked at several online games casinos, but claimed they had been overworked and not given pay or rest.
In a desperate bid to escape from their deplorable working conditions, they saw an opportunity and decided to escape en masse and made the desperate swim to freedom.
It has been reported that many Vietnamese and other nationalities from Southeast Asian countries are tricked into working in Cambodia with promises of lucrative salaries. They are then made to work for casinos and other similar places where they are often exploited.
Authorities said if they wanted to return to Vietnam, they were told to pay the casinos up to US$30,000 in compensation.
In the first half of this year, Vietnamese and Cambodian authorities have collaborated to rescue over 250 such people.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese authorities said at least 373 Taiwanese have recently been duped into working for Cambodia-based fraud rings through fake job advertisements.
Focus Taiwan reports that 333 of them are trapped with human trafficking criminal operations in Cambodia.
Taiwan Cabinet spokesperson Lo Ping-cheng said there have been a surge in online fraudsters luring young adults to Cambodia through false job promises.
He said police and government officials recently visited 4,679 households in Taiwan with members aged between 20 and 45 years, who recently traveled to the country and have not yet returned. This is to determine who might have fallen for the job scams.
The checks concluded that 144 people could be held against their will in Cambodia and that over 200 people reported that their family members or friends had been recruited for such scams from March to July.
The total number of Taiwanese lured to Cambodia by job scams added up to 373, of which 40 have returned home, according to Lo.
Lo said 99 per cent of them were recruited to work in phone scams there while a few were trafficked for sexual exploitation.
Taiwan Prime Minister Su Tseng-chang has also reportedly instructed Cabinet members to "give top priority" to all possible means to free the victims and bring them home, and crack down on local criminal rings which sent them to Cambodia.
The recent spate of Cambodia-based job scams has put mounting pressure on the government, prompting the Taiwan Cabinet to set up an inter-ministerial task force in early August to tackle the longstanding cross-border fraud problem.
Opposition party KMT Deputy Secretary-General Lee Yen-hsiu said that among other things, the government should try to curb the problems "at the source" by providing the public with more information about overseas job scams.
Meanwhile, Tainan city mayor Huang Wei-che solicited help from the city's tour operators to prevent people from falling prey to such scams.
The Focus Taiwan report said tour operators who provided tips to the police about suspicious cases where human trafficking may be involved, will be rewarded NT$20,000 (US$666) for each person.
Police in Yunlin County have also arrested seven people in Tainan and Kaohsiung, as they are believed to be part of a ring that had posted lucrative foreign job offers on dating apps and had arranged for four individuals to go to Thailand.
New Taipei City police said that they had arrested 16 suspects belonging to three human trafficking rings who had used fake job listings to target mostly young adults who did not have much knowledge about the fraudulent schemes.
Acting on a tip-off from a person who realised it might be a scam while on his way to the airport in August, the police successfully stopped five individuals at the airport before their departure.
However, another person still went ahead with his travel plans.