It depends on how you define “educated”. Don’t forget that many people here are insulated from many of lives hardships by their families and often don’t understand how things work in the real world.
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Another story, this time in The Guardian…
This has been going on for a long time. I think it’s blowing up because before it was mostly only gangsters working with other gangsters from both China and Taiwan… But lately they have tried to recruit many ordinary people. A lot of women are involved, too. A few young Chinese and Vietnamese ladies have leapt from tall buildings in the past few years, too.
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Up to 2 or 3,000 Taiwanese may be trapped… They have trouble getting support. Chinese embassy says it can help citizens of “Taiwan province”… Up to now, Taipei has no luck setting up representative support anywhere in Southeast Asia… Taiwanese can ask the Vietnamese office for help, too…
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More bad news from Cambodia 
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The Chinese traffickers are getting bolder - according to the news, they kidnapped a Malaysian female backpacker from a restaurant in broad daylight, and nobody did anything…
To hell with trafficking—they appear to have just grabbed that woman off the street!
Guy
Taipei prosecutors are after some of the Taiwanese traffickers in Cambodia now.
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How do the authorities in Taiwan communicate with the government of Cambodia, one of the most Beijing-friendly governments out there?
Apparently one answer is “through facebook.” Tasked with getting scammed Taiwanese out of forced labour, members of Taiwan’s special Criminal Investigation Bureau team communicated with the Cambodian Minister of the Interior via f-book. Incredibly, this seems to have gotten results:
[T]he Taiwan government has assigned CIB mission-specific communications liaison officer Chan Li-tse (詹利澤) to Vietnam to work with another CIB officer stationed there to help bring home the Taiwanese human trafficking victims in Cambodia.
Chan said the effort to bring home the 11 Taiwanese got off the ground when he contacted [Cambodian Minister of the Interior Sar] Kheng via the minister’s Facebook page and provided him with the names, passport numbers and locations of the 11 victims, who were being held in Cambodia against their will.
The information about the 11 people had been obtained during an investigation into the possible involvement of the Bamboo Union – a crime syndicate in Taiwan – in the trafficking of Taiwanese nationals to Cambodia, Chan said.
During the investigation, law enforcement officers were able to confiscate a ledger, which contained a record of the personal data and location of the 11 Taiwanese, who were in various locations in Cambodia, including Sihanoukville and Kandal, he said.
According to Chan, some of those who have returned said that while they were aware of the prevalence of job scams, they thought the Cambodia job offers were above board, as they had been interviewed via video links.
Once they got to Cambodia, however, their passports were seized by the members of the fraud rings, and according to one victim, anyone who broke the rules would be beaten senseless, Chan said.
In August, Kheng, who is also chairman of Cambodia’s National Committee for Counter Trafficking, made a public pledge to crack down human trafficking crimes in the country.
Guy
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More accounts about Cambodia scams
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Nicola Smith, writing at the Telegraph, reports on the harrowing story of one 30-something Taiwanese man who got caught in a scam—and managed to escape.
Middle-class migrant trap as traffickers lure white collar workers into bogus overseas jobs
The Telegraph
Gangs are enticing young, educated Asians with the promise of well-paid tech jobs, only to force them to work under duress for online scams
ByNicola Smith, ASIA CORRESPONDENT, IN TAIPEI and I-Hwa Cheng 26 September 2022 • 8:00am
Yang Weipin thought he was leaving Taiwan for a dream job, but instead was imprisoned and forced to launder money in Cambodia CREDIT: I-HWA CHENG
Summary
It had seemed like a golden job opportunity, and Yang Weipin was excited as his plane touched down in Cambodia.
The 34-year-old had secured a position as a marketing specialist with a respectable salary and generous benefits after passing a rigorous, two-stage interview process back home in Taiwan. Now, contract in hand, he had arrived in Phnom Penh on a flight paid for by his new company to begin his new chapter.
But within hours of being greeted by a driver at the airport, his dream began to crumble.
Mr Yang was taken to a compound surrounded by a steel fence and asked to surrender his passport for “official” paperwork. Doubts about the job, which had offered perks including swimming and boxing lessons, crept in.
“Before I took the flight, I did a lot of research and contacted the HR department to ask for pictures of the work environment,” he told the Telegraph. “They sent pictures of a glamorous hotel, but the reality was nothing like that. I started to become suspicious, but when you are in a new environment, you tell yourself that it’s going to be ok.”
Mr Yang thought he had secured a position with a respectable salary after passing a rigorous, two-stage interview process back home CREDIT: I-HWA CHENG
Unfortunately, his gut instinct was correct. Mr Yang was imprisoned for 58 days in an isolated, heavily guarded building block while he was forced to launder money for suspected drugs and illegal weapons gangs. He broke free only after staging an audacious, risky escape.
Though his story sounds more like a thriller than a reality, the case is far from isolated. It’s now so common that Taiwan has started to dispatch police officers to the airport with laminated signs warning travellers of potential scams.
Cambodia has faced calls to tackle the growing scourge of suspected Chinese and Taiwanese criminal syndicates operating on its territory. The gangs are luring young, educated, middle class Asians with the promise of well-paid tech jobs, only to force them to work under duress for online scam rings.
Mental threats and physical violence
In March, the Cambodian government was told to urgently address “a crisis of forced labour, slavery and torture” after multiple Asian embassies, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, warned their citizens were being consistently kidnapped, extorted and tricked into fake jobs.
Licadho, the Cambodian League for the Promotion of Defence and Human Rights, said that thousands of people, mainly foreign citizens, were believed to have been detained in large, fortified compounds by criminal enterprises.
“Workers who escape report having faced physical and mental threats and violence at the hands of their captors,” the organisation said in a statement, urging an investigation into the alleged complicity of some government authorities.
Cambodia has now pledged to aid foreigners who have been victimised by human traffickers.
Sar Kheng, the interior minister, said his ministry would launch a nationwide check of all foreigners living in the country to identify possible victims and last week the police raided multiple compounds allegedly holding people against their will, seizing more than 8,000 phones, about 800 computers, handcuffs, electric shock tools and detaining 12 suspects.
But rights advocates fear the authorities have only revealed the tip of the iceberg.
Gen. Chhay Sinarith, the deputy national police chief, said in recent years the authorities had uncovered many illegal online schemes that lured illegal workers, and had arrested hundreds of suspects from China and Taiwan. Scammers, mainly from China, had used Cambodia as a base for extorting money, he said.
Many of those who flew to Cambodia thought they would be living and working in the capital Phnom Penh CREDIT: TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP via Getty Images
Like Mr Yang, many of the victims are smart, tech-savvy, Mandarin speakers, who are attracted by false promises of positions in computer engineering or similar fields.
When Mr Yang applied for the Cambodian marketing job, he had been down on his luck but not gullible.
His massage business had taken a severe financial hit during the pandemic, and when he saw a job posted on a reputable website he jumped at the chance – especially as he had previously had a positive experience working in Cambodia.
The thorough interview process and the legitimate-looking contract offering a $1,500 starting salary plus performance bonus, rising to $1,800 after a probation period, left little room for suspicion.
But instead of a new career in marketing, Mr Yang was held against his will, living and working for 12 hours a day in the same building alongside about 20 other Taiwanese, Chinese and Malaysian victims.
Crammed into a makeshift call centre, also referred to as a “boiler room”, they were tasked with persuading Chinese customers to invest money into a credit card linked with a widely used messenger service, which Mr Yang believes was then used by gangs to launder money from illegal arms and drugs deals.
“I vowed on the first day that I would escape, so I acted like I was following their orders,” he said. “They made it very clear that we were not allowed to leave the building.”
Mr Yang holds his boarding pass back to Taiwan after his safe return to Taipei CREDIT: I-HWA CHENG
Two guards, armed with wooden sticks, remained by the door around the clock. “If we tried to run, they would definitely have stopped us. I heard of someone in the past who tried to escape but failed and they disappeared,” he said.
The majority of the scamming operations have been run out of the southern port town of Sihanoukville – a beach spot popular with backpackers, but which has long had a reputation for being in the grip of the criminal underworld.
Other victims have suffered a more violent fate than Mr Yang. After being kidnapped on arrival, some have reportedly been ransomed. Others have testified about beatings, torture by electrocution or sexual assault.
In the main, the gangs have forced them to deceive mainly Chinese citizens with fake investment offers, or romance and online gambling scams.
Sold four times in seven days
Pipi, who uses a pseudonym, told the Focus Taiwan news agency she had applied for a high-paying job, but was then held in a fully-fenced industrial park and sold four times in seven days before she could escape. Other Taiwanese escaped by jumping from a building, injuring themselves.
Taiwanese and Vietnamese citizens appear to have been targeted in particular. A video that emerged in August showed dozens of Vietnamese workers making a dramatic escape from a Chinese-managed casino by jumping into a river. A teenager was later found dead.
Over the weekend, Vietnamese border guards reported they had received a further 226 citizens who had been rescued last week after being tricked into taking “high-paying easy jobs” that did not exist.
After observing his guards for weeks, Mr Yang was eventually able to make a run for it while they were sleeping at 6am. He vaulted over a wall outside the compound and made his way to a police station but they refused to help.
As Taiwan has no embassy in Cambodia, it took him several more weeks to earn enough money through offering massages at a casino to be able to pay for temporary travel documents to return home in June. He is now conducting an awareness campaign to prevent others from making the same mistake of applying for a fake Cambodian job.
Mr Yang has been doing as many media interviews as he can, while also campaigning, to alert others to the dangers CREDIT: I-HWA CHENG
Taiwan is trying to establish how many of its citizens have been entrapped. In August, politicians and police said at least 2,000 may be stranded in Cambodia, based on an analysis of flight records to and from the country, but it is feared the number may be much higher. Almost 4,700 Taiwanese have gone to Cambodia over the past year and not returned.
Last month, the Criminal Investigation Bureau said it had identified more than 300 people who could be victims of fraud and human trafficking rings and Taiwanese prosecutors indicted nine suspects on human trafficking charges for allegedly luring 88 people to Cambodia. Further arrests were made in September.
But Li Zonghan, a Taiwanese politician who has helped several victims, said Taiwan’s response had been complicated by the lack of an embassy in Cambodia. Consular support could only be offered from Vietnam, and he hoped more diplomats could be deployed to assist.
Taiwan’s foreign ministry said its office in Ho Chi Minh City had bolstered its cooperation with the Cambodian police and immigration officials to help rescue victims.
“The ministry of foreign affairs would continue to cooperate with Cambodia to “jointly combat telecom fraud and transnational human trafficking,” said a spokesperson.
Since his return in June, Mr Yang has been doing as many local media interviews as he can, while also campaigning on the streets to alert others to the dangers.
“I’m trying to warn other people not to do this,” he said. “And now we have a very serious problem because it’s getting harder and harder for the scam groups to develop their business in the Mandarin speaking world. As far as I know, these scam groups have already taken steps into western countries."
Guy
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3 raids in Sihanoukville led to release of 1,045 foreigners from 11 countries. More released in recent raids of 10 sites in Phnom Penh.
Finally the Cambodian government is stepping up. Those places could only operate under protection of corrupt officials and police.
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To much bad PR. Window dressing.
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Based on the Telegraph report I posted above, these Chinese scamsters seem to be targeting folks in the PRC. I suspect it might be possible that is finally putting some pressure on its client state (aka the Cambodian government) to crack down on this activity.
Guy
Since March, the National Police Agency has cracked 100 relevant cases and made 284 arrests. Among the arrests, 70 were gang members and 63 of them were placed in custody.
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After being freed the ordeal is not over yet for some human trafficking victims
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Of course they are. 
A lot of Taiwan gangsters in Cambodia now… Large scale badness happening…
(Usually, this type of activity involves export from Cambodia to Taiwan or China… They got caught before export, probably after manufacturing the stuff here, or after taking delivery from Laos or Myanmar…)