Read the relationships on this subject in Vietnamese here.
Several weeks after being saved from scam centers inside Myanmar, more than 200 Vietnamese workers are still blocked in a sordid camp near the Thai border because they cannot afford their visit, two of the workers at Radio Asia said.
“Life here is very difficult. Accommodation is like a chicken coop. You have to sleep on the floor on carpets,” said a 31-year-old woman in the north-vietnamese province of her son, adding that the conditions were “miserable” and that the infections spread between people.
Hundreds of Vietnamese were one of the more than 8,000 people of various nationalities that were released in February by a pro-Junta Myanmar militia which hosted vast online fraud operations on its territory on the Thai-Myanmar border.
The National Army of Karen, or KNA, let them browse unprecedented pressures on the part of governments, including China, criminal activities in the militia area, including forced work and workers torture, and fraud against cyber-species targets.
Freed workers were taken to a makeshift camp near Myawaddy, the main crossing point on international borders in Thailand, to wait for repatriation. While the majority of liberated people were Chinese, the Karen force said that they understood 685 Vietnamese.
On May 15, Vietnam confirmed that it had repatriated a total of 450 citizens of Myanmar and that 200 was still waiting to return. The blocked workers told RFA that there were 215 Vietnamese, and the KNA said 214.
Those who are still left are more and more painful on this subject.
“I am very disappointed,” said the Woman son. “Even Ethiopians, the poorest here, were allowed to go home, leaving only more than 200 Vietnamese here.”
People have to pay
RFA spoke directly to two of the Vietnamese workers. Others were within reach of the call to the camp. They all said they had to pay money to their embassy to be repatriated – money they don't have. All anonymity asked for security reasons.
“At the beginning, he had to pay only 10 million (Dong) ($ 385), but the longer you stay, the higher it is. Now it's 12 million ($ 470), and some people have to pay $ 13 million),” a Vietnamese man in the camp in RFA.
He said that he had been informed by a representative of the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok on how to pay to be on the repatriation list.
He showed RFA the content of an SMS exchange with this civil servant via the Zalo messaging application. In this document, the manager explained that the amount of “more than 12 million (Dong)” was to buy a plane ticket, and if he remained money, he would have returned to the family.
“To be honest, I cannot afford to pay because my family is very poor. My family also asked me why I had to pay for rescue? ” The man told RFA.
The woman told RFA that she was also invited to pay money if she wanted to go home. “The people of the Vietnamese embassy in Thailand have said it would cost money, and if you don't pay, you can't come back,” she said.
RFA contacted the Vietnamese embassies in Myanmar and Thailand to check the above information but received no response.
The revelation that workers in the center of Vietnamese scam must pay for their stay at home can raise delicate questions about the management by the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the situation.
Problems spent with repatriations
The ministry and other Vietnamese government agencies have courted the controversy in the past on officials who burst from repatriation funds. In 2023, a Hanoi court sentenced 54 accused, including superior diplomats, for having received more than $ 7.4 billion in bribes to organize government flights for Vietnamese citizens blocked abroad during the pandemic locking in 2020 and 2021.
Although this repatriation operation is much smaller, the scam centers were the newspapers, highlighting the fate of those taken in enormous fraud operations in regions without law of Southeast Asia. These centers are often equipped with people attracted to false advertisements and forced to work, sometimes threatened with violence, according to workers and rights for the defense of rights.
The scam, known as “pork butcher” in China, implies contacting people without distrust online, to establish a relationship with them, to defraud them. Researchers say that billions of dollars have been stolen from this way to victims around the world.
The Vietnamese said that he had arrived in Thailand in 2023 to take another job, but had been forced to cross the border in Myanmar to work in a Chinese scam center to target the Vietnamese. He said that if he had not achieved monthly goals, he would be tortured.
Her son's wife told her a similar story. She obtained a job as a translator in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand in September 2024, but was then forced by the threat of a weapon by her employers to cross the myanmar border to work in a fraud center.
She said that after that, she had tried to contact the Vietnamese embassy in Myanmar to get help but received no response, and began to plan an escape with other women from India and Indonesia. Their plan was exposed, and she was then locked in a room separated by her Chinese employers for two months as punishment. In April 2025, she was taken to the border camp by the Karen militia.
American sanctions
Despite the exposed efforts of the KNA to show that it disadvantaged from the scam industry, on May 5, the US Treasury Department put the ethnic army on the black army, its chief saw Chit Thu and his two sons to facilitate the cyber-escroqueries of the territory they control on the Thai-Myanmar border. The KNA has been designated as an “important transnational criminal organization” which is prohibited to have goods in the United States and to carry out transactions with American people.
On May 6, Lieutenant-Colonel Naing Maung Zaw, KNA spokesperson, told the Associated Press that 7,454 of the 8,575 crooks of foreign scam have so far been repatriated by Thailand. He said that more than 10,000 people stayed to be identified in KNA controlled areas, and the group would continue to work on the elimination of scam activities.
Addressing RFA last week, Naing Maung Zaw said that they did not have a direct communication channel with the Vietnamese government and have noticed that recently Vietnam has reduced the repatriation of its citizens. He said that he was not aware that those who are stuck at the camp had to pay money to the Vietnamese government to be repatriated.
“Now that RFA has mentioned it, I will pay attention to this problem. I will meet the Vietnamese people tomorrow and ask them directly if it is true. If it is true, we will report it to our superiors and will do something,” he said.
The spokesman for the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry, Pham Thu Hang, told journalists in Hanoi on May 15 that the ministry will direct the Vietnamese representative agencies to Myanmar and Thailand to bring back the remaining Vietnamese citizens as soon as possible.
Edited by Mat Pennington.