… His experiences are similar to those of six other people interviewed by The Washington Post who were trafficked or misled into traveling to Myanmar, including from Thailand and Taiwan. All responded to similarly fraudulent job postings, some asking for candidates with experience in web management or online advertising, before being kidnapped. The U.N. Human Rights Office estimated in a report last August that more than 200,000 people are still being forced to work as scammers in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, the epicenter of this global, multibillion-dollar criminal industry, run predominantly by Chinese criminal gangs…

Accounts from those who escape, the United Nations and human rights groups say, offer a window into this new iteration of global human trafficking and the digital platforms fueling it. The problem has not been met with a global or even regional response, the groups add, even as victims continue to be recruited from more than three dozen countries, predominantly through social media apps like WeChat, Telegram and Facebook. The U.S. State Department said in June that forced labor in scam compounds has continued to grow….

… Xu was living job to job, scouring casual work groups on WeChat when he came across an offer of 10,000 yuan ($1,380) for an acting gig in the tourist town of Xishuangbanna…