MANILA (AFP) – Foreign criminals running cryptocurrency scams in Southeast Asia are targetting Filipinos to work for them because of their English language and computer skills, a Philippine Foreign Ministry official said yesterday.
Filipinos were “prized” targets for scam networks operating in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, said acting undersecretary for migrant workers affairs at the Department of Foreign Affairs Eduardo de Vega.
De Vega said efforts to repatriate Filipinos sucked into the scam activities were ongoing, with more than 100 brought home since last year.
The latest group arrived in Manila yesterday. Four men, all in their 30s, had been trafficked into Myanmar for “less than two months” where they were held in compounds, de Vega told AFP.
The men were in Dubai when they were recruited online to work as “customer support representatives” in Thailand, the ministry said.
When they arrived in Bangkok, they were taken to the western Thai city of Mae Sot and ferried across the border into Myanmar “rebel territory”, de Vega said.
There they were “forced to trick individuals into investing in cryptocurrency”, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Myanmar’s rugged borderlands are home to a patchwork of ethnic rebel groups and military-aligned militia that have fought each other for decades over territory and the drug trade.
