Trafficked Indonesian Man Forced to Pose as a Woman

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - An Indonesian man trafficked to Cambodia said he was tricked into becoming an online scammer, posing as a woman and using social media to lure American men into investment scams. 

Suherman, not his real name, is one of the victims of human trafficking in Cambodia. He was tricked by his father's colleague, who offered him a job as a company administrator in Singapore. Instead of flying to Singapore, the 22-year-old was taken to Samraong City on the Cambodia-Thailand border to be hired as an online fraud operator.

At first, Suherman didn't know what scamming was. In his first few days on the job, the high school graduate was asked by his boss to pretend to be an Asian woman and create fake profiles on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

"After 2-3 days, I realized what fraud was. So I started looking for information on how to get out. "I contacted the Indonesian embassy and waited almost 20 days before the police came and got me," he told Tempo in an interview on August 8.

The Blitar man flew to Cambodia on March 2, 2024, and was able to return to Indonesia on June 14, 2024. While working as a scammer, he was required to collect 100 WhatsApp numbers of potential victims. If the targets are not met, his salary would be cut.

Djumara Supriyadi, coordinator of protocol and consular functions at the Indonesian Embassy in Phnom Penh, said there has been a significant increase in the number of problematic Indonesians in Cambodia. In 2022, there were 1,099 cases, which rose to 1,386 in 2023. However, most assessments by Cambodian authorities of these cases show that most are related to labor issues. "Not trafficking," he said.

Brig. Gen. Djuhandhani Rahardjo Puro, director of the General Crimes Department at Indonesian police's Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim), said no cases of human trafficking have been found in Cambodia's online gambling industry because gambling is legal. "At the beginning, we treated it as a human trafficking crime, but over there they considered it a labor problem," he said.

According to Djuhandhani, many cases of human trafficking are experienced by online scam workers. Victims are usually deceived by job advertisements on social media, leading to exploitation and inhumane treatment, which is mostly experienced by Indonesian citizens in Cambodia and Myanmar.

Judha Nugraha, director of Indonesian Citizen Protection at the Foreign Ministry's Directorate General of Protocol and Consular Affairs, said there are Indonesians who come to Cambodia fully aware that they will be working in the gambling sector. However, when they arrived there, they were actually hired as cheaters. "That's where the problem lies. They are exploited and so on with promises of big salaries. If they don't meet the targets, they can be threatened, even beaten," he said.

AHMAD FAIZ IBNU SANI

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