Online Reporter
Freeman Razemba
Senior Reporter
THE International Criminal Police Organisation (INTERPOL) has identified human trafficking scam centres where victims have been trafficked into criminality from more than 60 countries worldwide.
According to a new crime trend update released by INTERPOL, human trafficking-fuelled scam centres have expanded their global footprint.
As of March 2025, victims from 66 countries were trafficked into online scam centres, with no continent left untouched.
Seventy-four percent of human trafficking victims were brought to centres in the original ‘hub’ region of Southeast Asia, according to analysis of the crime trend using data from relevant INTERPOL Notices issued in the past five years.
However, online scam centres have increasingly been observed in other regions, including the Middle East, West Africa, which could be developing into a new regional hub, and Central America.
While approximately 90 percent of human trafficking facilitators were from Asia, 11 percent were from South America or Africa.
At least 80 per cent of facilitators were men, and 61 per cent were aged between 20 and 39 years old.
Initially concentrated in a handful of Southeast Asian countries, the centres are estimated to have drawn in hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims, typically through false job ads, detaining them in compounds and forcing them to carry out online social engineering scams.
While not every person committing fraud in a scam centre is a victim of human trafficking, those held against their will are often subject to extortion through debt bondage, as well as beatings, sexual exploitation, torture and rape.
Online scams engineered by the centres target a second set of globally-dispersed victims, who often suffer debilitating financial and emotional damage.
Since 2023, INTERPOL has documented how this double-edged crime trend has evolved from a regional threat in Southeast Asia to a global crisis, issuing an Orange Notice to signal its serious and imminent threat to public safety.
In 2024, a global operation coordinated by INTERPOL uncovered dozens of cases in which trafficking victims were deceived and coerced into committing fraud, with national police officers raiding an industrial-scale scam centre in the Philippines.
In the same year, an INTERPOL operation saw police dismantle a scam centre in Namibia, where 88 youths were forced to conduct scams.
