The GTSEZ is situated in the heart of the Golden Triangle, where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet at the Mekong River. The area was once a major producer of opium and heroin (a fallout from the Vietnam war, when the trade exploded to meet demand from American troops) and, according to Vice magazine, it is now one of the world’s biggest methamphetamine factories. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recording more than one billion meth pills seized in East and Southeast Asia last year.

The GTSEZ, known locally as “Kings Romans” after Zhao’s Hong Kong-registered company that owns the zone, is an infamous hub of gaudy casinos and kitsch resorts. It has long been implicated in human trafficking and drug smuggling, and caters to a predominantly Chinese high roller clientele seeking out bear-paw soup and tiger-bone wine to go with their rounds of baccarat and call girls.

In theory, Kings Romans’ status as an SEZ should mean authorities can’t enter without a formal com­plaint, but in reality they don’t dare go in at all without Zhao’s permission. Local authorities in this tiny prov­ince of Bokeo, whose economy is dominated by the multibillion-dollar SEZ investment, frequently justify inaction over criminality inside Kings Romans by saying it is too difficult to get inside.

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Gambling is illegal for Laotian citizens, and Laos followed in China’s footsteps by closing international borders for more than two years during the pandemic, cutting off the SEZ’s vital supply of Chinese tourists and Thai day trippers, while implementing strict lockdowns. As late as May this year, security on the Laos gate refused us entry, claiming Covid-19 restrictions were still in place, and the second entry point, for visitors crossing from the Thai side of the Mekong, remained closed, too.

But TikTok videos shared by bar hostesses working inside told a different story: raucous party nights in the zone’s seedy clubs at the height of the lockdown, along with (now removed) job ads calling for new recruits for bars and massage parlours. In February 2021, local police in surrounding Bokeo province found that at least 430 women were employed as sex workers inside Kings Romans.

Before the pandemic, demand for these nightlife venues and sex workers was driven by tourists, mostly Chinese, visiting the Kings Romans casino and its handful of smaller counterparts dotted around the SEZ, but since 2020, the casino tourism market has evaporated. Even now that the Thailand-Laos border has reopened, the main casino, a futuristic golden lotus megastructure that towers over the skyline and that in normal times sees more than 10,000 guests a month, was practically empty when we returned in July, with just a handful of Thais and Chinese at the baccarat tables.

These days, the busiest business inside the GTSEZ isn’t gambling or even sex – it is the trafficking of thousands of people into the zone, lured by the promise of jobs that don’t exist, and the selling of them to online scam “call centres” – sprawling compounds of high-rise dormitories, where workers are forced under threat of violence and torture to dupe strangers out of their money over the internet.

A former timber trader from Heilongjiang province, Zhao, now 70, started his casino-investor career in Macau in the 1990s, before moving to Chinese-dominated Mong La, in Myanmar, in 2001. This gambling enclave in the rebel-held Wa territory of Shan State, 150km north of the Thai border, was the prototype for other self-contained casino towns across Southeast Asia, powered by Chinese investors, overrun with Chinese organised crime, catering to Chinese visitors and operating on Chinese time, using the Chinese language and Chinese currency.

But in 2005, as part of an attempt to clean up corruption and vice in its ranks, the Chinese government sent in soldiers to shut down Mong La’s casinos. As a result, Zhao shifted his sights to Laos, negotiating a 99-year lease with the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party to build the GTSEZ in 2007.

At the time, SEZs such as these, which are supposed to function as self-contained, trade-boosting industrial estates (with tax exemptions, special labour rules and one-stop shops for customs processing), seemed like a lifeline for Laos’ economy. But allegations swiftly mounted that Zhao was using Kings Romans to traffic heroin and methamphetamines, launder money and “permit and promote” child sexual exploitation, prompting a decision by the US Treasury to place him and his wife, Su Guiqin, under Magnitsky sanctions in 2018.

The Magnitsky Act allows the US government and its allies to freeze the assets of human rights abusers, and bar them and their companies from using the US banking system. In a press conference in 2018, Zhao dismissed the accusations against him as groundless.

Despite these financial sanctions, the SEZ is still going strong. Kings Romans covers a land area three times the size of Macau, but most of this is still being developed and trucks roll constantly in and out, bringing rock blasted from nearby mountainsides to feed the demands of its construction sites.

A shiny new Chinatown, complete with statues of Confucius and Disneyfied traditional shophouses selling knock-off Gucci gear had just been completed when we visited in July. A modernist, one-level mall hosts luxury goods shops – albeit of questionable authenticity – and a fake Starbucks (the lower-case font and menu heavy on chicken gizzards and stinky tofu giving the game away).

That’s where they keep the slaves. I feel guilty. I feel so sorry for them. Some of them escape, but most have to pay to get outTaxi driver talks about indentured workers in the economic zone

In July, the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime found that bear and tiger parts were still being sold openly in the GTSEZ, and in March, the NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) released covert drone footage showing that illegal tiger and bear farms inside the zone, used to supply visitors with exotic meat and traditional Chinese medicines, were expanding.

The same month, Thibault Serlet, research director of corporate intelligence agency the Adrianople Group, wrote an article describing Kings Romans as the “world’s worst” SEZ – citing its record of human trafficking, drug smuggling, wildlife trafficking, and refusal to submit to inspections by Lao authorities.

The autonomy enjoyed by the zone was highlighted in June, by a local official telling Radio Free Asia that the SEZ gifted Bokeo police a 30-room prison: “It will be used within the zone,” he said. “If there are any criminals [in the SEZ] they will be sent to this prison.”

After the pandemic hit, wiping out jobs and incomes around the country and the region, Kings Romans seemed to be one of the last employers around.

Companies based in the SEZ flooded social media with ads for well-paid jobs not only at the casino and nightlife venues but also in online trading, admin and other roles that offered room and board as perks. Hopefuls flocked in – from Laos, and also, despite the lack of legal entry points, from countries including Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines and China.

But as jobseekers like Seng would discover, the reality was very different from what had been promised.

“That’s where they keep the slaves,” says a Laotian taxi driver inside the SEZ in July, two months after our first visit, as we pass a looming, prison-like cluster of yellow six-storey buildings, surrounded by barbed-wire fences. It is common knowledge within the zone that this fenced-off enclave is where most of the call centres are, the driver says, and the people there can’t leave.

“I feel guilty,” he says. “I feel so sorry for them. Some of them escape, but most have to pay to get out.”

Back when we visited in May, the volume of people arriving for jobs at the SEZ suggested that recruitment inside the complex was in full swing: Chinese handlers carrying stacks of yuan corralled arrivals – all young, mostly women – into a processing queue where they were told to pay an admin fee and agree to have their blood taken.

We saw heavily tattooed, black T-shirt-clad men rolled through the main gate in their luxury Mercedes G-Wagons, flashing visitor passes without slowing down. Only vehicles coming out of the complex were searched, with security doing a quick check of the boot. Now it seems clearer what they were looking for: desperate workers trying to escape.

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Over dinner at a friend’s restaurant in Luang Prabang in May, Seng quietly explains how he got caught up in the scam. He describes how another friend working in the SEZ sent him a Facebook ad for a job based out of Kings Romans Casino, scouting for new customers for an investment and trading site, how he was told he would be paid US$900 a month, a huge salary in Laos but not excessive enough to be unimaginable, and that it was all “just lies”. From the moment he arrived at the GTSEZ, he says, “the Chinese controlled all”.

Seng says he was placed in a dormitory close to the Kings Romans Casino with 14 other people and given the phone he would use for his job. Work schedules were 14 to 16 hours per day, seven days a week. Small infractions such as taking a photo or trying to talk to workers from other dorms, he says, meant being tasered and thrown into solitary confinement without food.

Machine-gun-slinging guards from China or Myanmar patrolled outside, he adds, and the occasional gunshot rang out. “Sometimes people would just get taken off to the toilet and never come back,” he says.

Amid the atmosphere of terror and paranoia, rumours spread that the captors had a human blender. Seng says that from his dorm window, he saw a second worker from another building jump to their death.

No matter what job they had been promised, once inside the GTSEZ grounds, new arrivals had no control over the type of work they were made to do or who they would be sold to next if they underperformed.

As Seng explains, every floor in his dorm was controlled by a different company running their own brand of scam, so there were plenty of buyers close at hand. But captives could also be sold farther afield, through digital slave markets such as the since-disbanded White Shark HR Channel on Telegram, which advertised people for sale to online scam companies, with prices ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, based on languages spoken and whether they had their documents.

If workers want to leave, the only option is to pay off their “debts” (travel, accommodation, food, admin, mandatory quarantine and on-arrival blood and antigen test expenses) – costs they are told run into thousands of dollars and which they likely have no way of paying. As reported on Radio Free Asia and in local media in Thailand and Laos, women who thought they were signing up for telemarketing, admin or sales roles are often instead sold to the brothels that serve the casinos.

Outside Laos, other casino towns and SEZs in Cambodia and Myanmar have also been overrun by this new slaves-for-scams model. Since 2020, a human trafficking crisis has developed in the Cambodian gambling hubs of Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh and Bavet, where embassies and NGOs have called for the government to clamp down on “slave compounds” and some companies now list “no selling” as a job perk in ads.

But despite ongoing pleas for help and extensive reporting in the region, the Cambodian government has continually downplayed the scale of the crisis. Some journalists have been threatened with arrest for trying to cover the story, and in August, a Chinese businessman named Chen Baorong, who had set up a volunteer group to assist victims trying to leave scam centres in Cambodia, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in a secretive trial.

The Bangkok Post has also reported on Thais forced into sex work in a casino in Myawaddy, Myanmar, on Thailand’s northwest border, while Frontier Myanmar exposed a massive modern slavery-driven online scam operation in nearby Shwe Kokko, a purpose-built casino town.

It is outrageous and unacceptable how they are failing at the even most basic level to protect the safety of their own citizens and foreignersPhil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch Asia Division

Shwe Kokko is linked to Broken Tooth (Wan Kuok-koi) a former 14K triad boss who built a gambling empire in Sihanoukville after serving prison time in Macau for running illegal gambling operations, loan sharking and other criminal activities. Broken Tooth, who was famously arrested during a pre-screening of Casino, the 1998 feature film he commissioned about his own life, is also the founder of so-called mutual aid society the World Hongmen group, the Cambodian branch of which was placed under international sanctions following allegations that it was a front for organised crime.

“The authorities in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos have their hands out, and their eyes and ears closed,” says Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. “It is outrageous and unacceptable how they are failing at the even most basic level to protect the safety of their own citizens and foreigners.”

Each day, Seng and his roommates were moved from their cramped dorm to a makeshift office in the same building, handed a list of wealthy English-speaking men from the US, India and other anglophone countries, and told to reach out and flirt through Facebook and Instagram.

His social media persona was a beautiful Singaporean woman, a finance professional, who, once his marks believed they were in a real relationship – sometimes to the point of talking about marriage – would recommend investing in a commodity such as gold, oil or cryptocurrency. A fake link to a real trading platform would be sent out, the mark would hand over a modest sum, and the company would see to it that the “investment” turned a profit. The fictional girlfriend would then persuade the mark to invest a much larger amount, and then cut all contact and disappear along with the money.

Not that Seng was involved in the hard sell. His job was just to get the marks on the hook – and his quota was five to seven a day. These leads were handed up the chain, with a new person taking over the role of hot Singaporean financier, and with an actor on hand to play the role in video calls and chats.

But five to seven is a lot of love interests to cultivate in a single shift, and as Seng fell behind, the bosses warned him his pay was being slashed to cover room and board. Rather than the US$900 salary he was promised, he was told he had earned 5,000 yuan (US$700) the first month.

The second month, the pay dropped to 2,500 yuan – and it continued to decrease, until he reached negative figures and was made to pay back money from his earlier pay packets. Unless he found more victims, the bosses said, they would sell him to another company. Then, his six-month contract would reset, and he would be forced to earn his way out. In other words, he would be put into indentured servitude.

Seng’s release involved persuading his captors that he knew police in the Laos capital, Vientiane, who could create headaches for them if they tried to sell him to another scam company in the zone instead of letting him go when his contract was done.

Perhaps the timing worked in his favour: eight women who had been promised jobs as “chat girls”, enticing gamblers into placing online bets, but were forced into prostitution when they missed targets, escaped Kings Romans through a fence in late January, and a few weeks later, authorities were allowed inside, retrieving six more Laotian women trapped in similar circumstances.

Later that month, five Thai nationals who had been tricked into working for online scam companies prompted a flurry of news reports in Thailand after they fled the SEZ by bribing a Laotian employee at the quarantine centre to help them escape to a boat waiting on the banks of the Mekong.

In Laos, the drug dealers pay the government to clear the routes … all the staff know the processDrug trafficker-turned-police informant

Thai government officials then pressured the Laos authorities into negotiating the release of a handful more Thai nationals in March. The increased, if short-lived, scrutiny appears to have made Seng’s bosses jittery. After six months of hell, he was dumped outside the gates of the GTSEZ compound with just enough money for the bus back to his hometown.

As Seng tells this story in Luang Prabang, hunched on a low plastic stool and eating little of the lovingly prepared barbecued pork and mushrooms heaped in front of him, the owner of the restaurant – a childhood friend – listens in bewilderment, his joy at their reunion fading away, along with his excitement at showing off his new rock ’n’ roll themed place. Have a beer, he says repeatedly, you need it. But Seng can’t let himself drink. It is clear he doesn’t trust himself to hold it together.

On the Thai side of the Golden Triangle, law enforcement say that river patrols regularly intercept businessmen crossing by boat with millions of dollars stuffed in suitcases, while a drug trafficker working the region claimed that massive shipments of drugs and endangered-wildlife parts continued unabated throughout the pandemic, facilitated by corrupt officials on either side.

“It happens all the time, 24 hours a day,” says the drug trafficker-turned-police informant. “In Laos, the drug dealers pay the government to clear the routes … all the staff know the process.” Meanwhile, he claims, the “Chinese investor” who runs Kings Romans – Zhao – imports drugs from Myanmar to store inside the casino, ready for dealers to collect and distribute to other provinces in Laos. “Kings Romans have their own staff on both the Myanmar and Laos borders. The investors, or the big boss, only collect the money,” he says.

In its rationale for applying Magnitsky sanctions, the US Treasury also accused Zhao of stashing methamphetamine on behalf of the United Wa State Army, a rebel force that carved out its own fiefdom upriver in Myanmar’s Shan State.

“The fact that the likes of Kings Romans Casino is owned and operated by a wanted international criminal like Zhao Wei shows how under-the-table deals with leaders of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party allow these abuses to continue,” says Robertson. “If the Lao PDR [People’s Democratic Republic] wants to allow blatantly criminal establishments like this to operate on their soil, they should face serious adverse consequences from other governments.”

So far there have been none. There are no records of any companies or traffickers being prosecuted or shut down, and victims trapped inside are still sharing videos of workers being tasered. Meanwhile, all over Laos, it seems everyone knows someone who has slipped into Kings Romans’ murky orbit.

“The police cannot do anything about what is hap­pening. There are all kinds of different rules and laws inside,” says Jaomom Uttama, a monk from Bokeo travelling from Luang Prabang to Vientiane on the brand-new, Chinese-built US$6 billion high-speed railway – a development that has connected the country with southern China, but also pushed it deeper into debt.

Uttama says he has friends inside Kings Romans, who tell him they are working as interpreters. They have encouraged him to follow suit, but he is certain what they are doing is illegal. Asked what he thinks is really going on, he simply states: “It’s online scams.”

Just across from Kings Romans, on the Thai side of the Mekong River, the Golden Triangle is a tranquil tourist spot, where visitors stop at the foot of a giant Buddha to snap a selfie with views of three countries, and elephants roam the grounds of a luxury resort.

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But the tiny dock for the boat to Kings Romans is papered with signs alerting people to the dangers of human trafficking and fake job offers. Given the zone’s proximity, the Thais are easily lured in, but once they have made the five-minute journey across the river, it becomes nearly impossible for Thai authorities to get them out.

“Thai police can’t help. It’s not Thailand. You must have the officials from [Laos] to help you,” Tanrak Jujaroen (not her real name) posted to her followers on Facebook in August 2021. “And let me tell you, these [online scam] sites are very well-connected.”

Tanrak, a Thai travel agent who found herself at a loose end during the pandemic, today volunteers in counter-trafficking efforts. She prefers to use a pseudonym for safety as she lives within easy reach of Kings Romans. She began assisting Thais abroad when a friend working in Cambodia asked for help to leave after the country went into lockdown in April 2021.

Tanrak used social media to share guidance for other Thais stuck in Cambodia. Others reached out saying they had been trafficked into casino hubs in Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. Many were children.

“Trafficking victims contact me themselves, or it’s the victim’s relatives or friends,” she says via a translator. “I helped because people asked for help, and I’m Thai – but regardless of my nationality, I’ll always try to help.”

If the family of the victim cannot pay, the agent will resell [the victim] to another agent, again and again, until the girls are put into prostitution and the guys as labourersTanrak Jujaroen (pseudonym), counter-trafficking volunteer

She acts as a point of contact for victims and families, passing on names to Thai authorities and the Lao embassy in Thailand, which calls on governors in Bokeo to negotiate with Kings Romans.

In June, she even accompanied police to retrieve 14 young Thais who had reached out to her from inside Kings Romans. Most of the “kids” who contact her, she says, are between 14 and 18 years old, and are recruited through job ads on Facebook, TikTok and other social media platforms offering high monthly salaries.

“The agent will claim that the jobs they promised have been cancelled and victims have to work illegally by tricking people online,” she says. “If the victim does not agree, the agent will resell [them] to another place. They cannot escape. The area has its own law, so the Lao government cannot intervene.”

Knowing they hold the upper hand, recruitment agents acting on behalf of the scam operators have been known to demand ransoms to secure releases. These can start at around 50,000 baht (HK$10,500), Tanrak says, but she has seen them rise to 300,000 baht.

“If the family of the victim cannot pay, the agent will resell [the victim] to another agent, again and again, until the girls are put into prostitution and the guys as labourers,” Tanrak explains. Parents who can’t pay are sent videos of their children being tortured, she says, and “some torture until the victims die”.

Tanrak says ransom payments led to 88 Thai victims being returned to authorities between August 2021 and June 2022. In June, a Bokeo official said that nearly 500 victims had been rescued since May 2021. But a member of the province’s anti-human trafficking unit conceded that these rescues were limited to those who had paid ransoms or had not yet signed contracts.

This year, Laotian authorities have made sporadic but ineffectual attempts to intervene, barely making a dent in the number of victims at Kings Romans, with its dystopian complexes of sprawling high-rise dormitories capable of housing tens of thousands of workers.

The situation is only getting worse, according to Jason Tower, Myanmar country director at the United States Institute of Peace. “Since Laos began reopening its borders in May of 2022,” he says, “it has seen a significant surge in the trafficking of persons into slave-like labour conditions in scam zones, including inside the Golden Triangle SEZ.

“Zhao Wei and his transnational criminal organisation based at the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone remain under US Treasury financial sanctions for engaging in an array of illicit activities,” an official at the US State Department wrote in an email. “The United States continues to target key figures in the Zhao Wei transnational criminal organisation, which stretches from the GTSEZ throughout Southeast Asia.”

Despite the international condemnation, for those trapped inside Kings Romans, help is unlikely to come.

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Seng says he and other victims in the dorm believed that contacting Bokeo police was pointless as they suspected they had been paid off. Corruption is rampant in Laos, and in Bokeo, corruption has become so big an issue that the central government has started removing offenders from the country’s sole political party.

There seems to be genuine uncertainty among victims, rescuers and people living in the vicinity about what powers the police have to intervene. But Jeremy Douglas, regional representative of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, insists there is no legal grey area. “[Lao] authorities certainly have jurisdiction. Obligations to address organised crime don’t cease at the boundary of an SEZ or a port,” he says. “Sovereignty and responsibilities of states don’t start and stop like that.”

The Chinese embassy in Vientiane and the Laos Ministry of Planning and Investment, which promotes investments into SEZs, did not respond to a request for comment. Repeated phone calls and emails to the Kings Romans Casino went unanswered. But while news reports, occasional raids and word-of-mouth accounts are slowly gaining traction, for the 100 or so people waiting to be processed outside Kings Romans when we visited in May, it was too late to turn back.

One young woman, who spoke in Lao using a translation app, said she was there to trade currency online. We asked if she knew of the dangers.

She backed away, shaking her head, clearly afraid of retribution by the Chinese handlers who circled closer, eyeing our conversation with suspicion. Whether in denial or simply out of options, as she stood chewing her lip, staring past hazmat-suited medics drawing blood from her compatriots to a door leading into the compound, one thing seemed certain: once she crossed that threshold and signed her rights away, she would not see her home again this year. Perhaps, never again. As Seng put it simply, “here, the Chinese control all”.

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