On January 28th this year, a Bangkok local government official is checking the Facebook page of a volunteer group he's set up to help folks struggling financially during the pandemic.

Among the messages, there's a disturbing video from an 18 year old Thai girl

her eyes swollen from crying. I'm in a building opposite the karaoke bar says the

girl. She traveled from Bangkok to the Thai-Cambodia border she adds where she's been promised a job in the CEDI Cambodian

Casino town of Poi Peep, but everything has gone tragically wrong.

Once across the border, she's been told her new role will actually be to scam strangers online.

And if she wants to leave, her father will have to pay 40,000 but over a thousand US dollars.

I know everything and I'm afraid that he'll kill me she says referencing the boss who has

tricked her into this criminal world.

I don't know what it will do to the others after this, and I don't know if I can contact you

again.

I've heard that at least 20 or 30 people have died. The official Eapoplouang Praetet is bemused at first.

Perhaps this video is a scam, he wonders.

But the Thai team sends location details and photos from her Cambodian compound.

And in the coming months, dozens more trafficking victims share their own stories,

sent into slavery, casino towns all over Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Lough, Myanmar.

Each one has a tale of misery, orchestrated by Chinese gangsters. Hot spots like Poi Pet and Sienukville and Cambodia,

and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Lau,

the home of notorious Casino, the King's Romans,

are the worst hit. As the pandemic's halting of tourism

forced local crooks to branch into even more violent crimes. These special

economic zones or SEZs are tax havens, legal no man's lands,

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