Every response to trafficking turns on one early judgement: is the person in front of the authorities a victim or an offender? Protection, prosecution, return, and compensation all follow from how that question is answered. We identify victims because they are owed justice, because a legal system that punishes the coerced does not uphold the law so much as hollow it out, and because identifying the victim is often the only practical route to the people who exploited them. When identification fails, the case against the traffickers usually fails with it.
That is the principle. The difficulty is that trafficking for forced criminality is designed to defeat it.
What the authorities actually encounter is straightforward. A person is found running fake investment accounts or sending fraudulent messages. The crime is visible. The coercion is not. Investigators have to reconstruct how the person was recruited, whether they could leave, whether their documents were taken, and whether they were in debt or under threat. Traffickers know this. They build their operations to erase exactly that evidence. Phones are wiped, contracts disappear, movement is tightly controlled, and the person is often made to implicate themselves. By the time they are questioned, the record that would prove coercion has been destroyed. What remains points at them.
The burden then falls on the survivor to prove their own victimhood through repeated interviews, at the moment they are most exhausted, frightened, and ashamed. Many simply do not want to go through it. That reluctance is not evidence against them. It is a predictable response to a process that too often ends badly. The OHCHR (Feb 2026)’s report found that nearly seventy per cent of the survivors interviewed were subject to official penalties after their release. Similar to the returned cases I encountered in the past years.
The status of these people is genuinely difficult, not just administratively.
Most scam compounds now run a dual-victim model: trafficked people are forced to defraud a second set of victims in other (or from their own) countries. If law enforcement cannot conclude that trafficking occurred, the person is denied victim status and the rights that come with it. They may instead be treated as a suspect. And because the operation depends on victims recruiting the next intake, offering commission or simply relief from abuse, some do cross into genuine complicity over time. The line between the coerced and the culpable is not always clean. That is why it cannot be drawn from the visible act alone.
This duality is why the non-punishment principle is there: a person should not be punished for unlawful acts they were compelled to commit as a direct result of being trafficked. In June 2026, states at the UN Crime Commission adopted a resolution on trafficking for forced criminality that affirms this principle. But it will always arrive too late for anyone the system has already misread, and misreading remains the norm.
Better interviews and better screening are necessary. They will still not be enough. The crime is built to blur the distinction those tools rely on. We should stop treating this mainly as a victim-identification problem and start treating it as what the evidence shows it to be: an organised-crime, financial-crime, and corruption problem in which coerced labour is one input among several.
Now let us look at the scale of the crime, which makes the point. UN agencies estimated scam losses of between 88.3 and 114.1 billion US dollars across East and South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand in 2025 alone. The networks now resemble corporate franchises, with separate arms for laundering money, moving people, and harvesting data plugged into shared infrastructure. The forced labourers generate the revenue. Underground banking and cryptocurrency move it across borders almost instantly. Local corruption protects the physical compounds. Even a small operation needs the same basic things: somewhere to house people, a way to recruit and control them, and a way to handle the money.
Those needs are the weakness. They leave regulatory traces.
The decisive work is operational. Housing, labour law, and relevant regulations should function together. Companies that arrange accommodation for workers, especially foreign workers, must face real inspection rather than a signature on a form. Financial reporting and taxation should be treated as counter-trafficking tools, because an enterprise that cannot account for its labour or its revenue is telling you something. The same applies to the digital infrastructure that enables these operations: the companies providing platforms, servers, and payment channels also leave traces that can be scrutinised. And corruption has to be addressed seriously by the authorities themselves, not gestured at. A small bribe to certify foreign workers who have no permission to be there is not a minor lapse. It is the first brick in the compound wall.
None of this replaces recognising the victim. It makes recognition possible, by attacking the conditions that produce the coercion in the first place, rather than waiting for an exhausted survivor to prove, against a record their traffickers designed, that they were never really the criminal they appear to be.
For further opinion and discussion, please contact me at hong.thitranvn@gmail.com.
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