A Kenyan survivor of Myanmar’s cyber-scam trafficking networks won a landmark judgment in the Employment and Labour Relations Court.
Justice Byram Ongaya on Thursday ruled that Kenyan recruiters trafficked him into a heavily guarded scam compound in Myanmar after escorting him from Nairobi’s JKIA.
They monitored him via WhatsApp during the flight, and handing him over to transnational criminal groups at the Thai-Myanmar border.
The court has awarded the young man Sh5 million.
He was among the 78 Kenyans rescued and repatriated after months of torture in Myanmar’s scam compounds.
A university student who had deferred his studies for what was a well-paying job in Thailand, traffickers in Kenya passed him and others to a coordinated syndicate operating in Bangkok and, eventually, Myanmar.
Gratify Solutions International Ltd, a company registered in October 2024, just two months before it facilitated his travel to Thailand, lists Ann Njeri Kihara and Virginia Wacheke Muriithi as its directors and shareholders.
“My agent was Virginia Muriithi. I paid her a commission of 200,000 and the process was very fast. In two weeks the visa was out. When we arrived it was not good. We were not being paid. Sometimes we were taken to the military and beaten,” said the Myanmar victim.
In Thailand, they were smuggled into scam compounds in Myanmar where they were confined and trained to execute online fraud.
“You go to Instagram and search rich kids in Dubai, those with flashy cars and perfect photos. Those are the people you use as your character,” said the scam victim.
“Inside the compounds they are given targets. For instance, they would be told to meet a target of 5 million US dollars per week and if you don’t, the punishments are very psychological. They lock you up in dark rooms,” said Lillian Nyangasi, advocate.
“Sometimes they make you stand on very sharp stones while carrying 20-litre jerrycans of water on your head for up to 24 hours. They feed you on frogs and snakes. Sometimes they put you in very dehumanising circumstances. They are forced into sodomy. They are forced into drugs.”
Evidence tabled before court, including M-Pesa transactions and WhatsApp chats, showed Virginia Wacheke, Ann Kihara, and Boniface Owino were all linked to Gratify Solutions International Ltd and liable for human trafficking.
Justice Ongaya found that the petitioner was subjected to slavery, human trafficking, servitude, forced labour, degrading treatment, and that his freedom of movement was infringed upon by the respondents.
The court declared that the petitioner’s rights and freedoms were contravened and grossly violated. It ordered the payment of Ksh.5 million for violation of rights and fundamental freedoms, to be paid by February 1, 2026.
The respondents are also to pay costs of the petition.
“They were not compliant with the National Employment Agency requirements for lawfully recruiting and exporting Kenyans for labour,” said Lillian Nyangasi, advocate.
“My plan after compensation is to pay the debts because they are stressing my parent. Once they are cleared, I want to go back to school,” said the scam victim.
Those who were rescued say there are hundreds of Kenyans and Africans who remain trapped in the scam city.
Meanwhile, Myanmar’s military said Sunday it arrested nearly 1,600 foreign nationals in five days in a highly publicised crackdown on a notorious internet scam hub on the Thai border.
Sprawling fraud factories have mushroomed in war-torn Myanmar’s border regions, housing scammers who target internet users with romance and business cons worth tens of billions of dollars annually.
Myanmar’s junta has long been accused of looking the other way as the illicit industry grows, but has trumpeted a crackdown since February after being lobbied by key military backer China, experts say.
Additional raids beginning last month were part of a smokescreen, according to some monitors, choreographed to vent pressure from Beijing without too badly denting profits that enrich the junta’s militia allies.
In its latest publicised tally, the junta said “1,590 foreign nationals who entered Myanmar illegally were arrested” from November 18 to 22 in raids on gambling and fraud hub Shwe Kokko, according to state media The Global New Light of Myanmar.
“Moreover, authorities seized 2,893 computers, 21,750 mobile phones, 101 Starlink satellite receivers, 21 Routers and a large number of industrial materials used in the online fraud and gambling activities,” the newspaper said.
The Global New Light of Myanmar said 223 people accused of perpetrating online fraud and gambling at Shwe Kokko were detained on Saturday alone, including 100 Chinese nationals.
Video published by local media showed a steamroller crushing hundreds of computer monitors lined up in rows next to piles of already smashed mobile phones at the Shwe Kokko compound on Saturday.
Scam hubs, staffed by thousands of willing workers as well as people trafficked from abroad, have proliferated in Myanmar’s loosely governed borderlands since a 2021 coup sparked a civil war in the country.
While China is a key military backer of the junta, analysts say Beijing is increasingly irate at the rampant scams targeting and enlisting its citizens.
Scam victims in Southeast and East Asia alone were conned out of up to $37 billion in 2023, according to a UN report, which said global losses were likely “much larger”.
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