An international coordination centre is to be set up in Thailand to help find and secure the release of people, of any nationality, who have been trafficked into Myanmar to work in scam call centres, said Pol Gen Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, the police inspector-general.


Thatchai was in Tak province on Monday, to follow up on the border situation, after Thailand cut internet, electricity and fuel supplies to five locations in the Tachileik, Myawaddy and Payathonzu border townships in Myanmar on February 5th.


As recommended by Liu Zhongyi, China’s vice minister for public security, who visited Thailand last week to address the problem of Chinese citizens being trafficked into Myanmar, many through Thailand, the police inspector general explained that the international coordination centre will work with police in various countries whose citizens are believed to have been duped into working in scamming operations in Myanmar.


He disclosed that Thai police currently have more than 100 reports, from relatives in the Philippines and Bangladesh, that their missing loved ones are believed to have been trafficked into Myanmar.


Yesterday, in the northeastern province of Surin, police arrested two Vietnamese men at a shop house in Muang district, on suspicion that they are linked to a scam call centre operating in O-Samet in Cambodia.

In the shop house, police found a computer, two printers, an industrial sewing machine and several other pieces of equipment used to make fake passports.


Police say that the arrests of the two men, who entered Thailand illegally from Cambodia, follows the rescue of a Chinese man, who jumped out of a moving car when he realised that he was being smuggled into Cambodia to work in a call centre.

Bangkok to set up international centre to help trafficked sc