In Cambodia, two Taiwanese were sentenced to two years in prison for staging and publishing on social media a fake kidnapping in the seaside town of Sihanoukville, a Cambodian court announced on Friday.
Chen Neng-chuan, 31, and Lu Tsu-hsien, 34, were arrested after live-streaming a video on Facebook earlier this week showing them being arrested and beaten by security guards in an apartment building of Sihanoukville believed to house a cybercrime center, the Preah Sihanouk provincial court said in a statement.
Online scams
According to Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA), one of the men livestreamed a video Monday evening in which he claimed to have entered an
"illegal online scam center
. "
In this video, he appears chased and beaten by invisible attackers.
In a second video posted Tuesday, he shows his injuries as he describes how he was robbed, tied up, beaten and assaulted with a stun gun before he was able to escape, according to CNA.
“The two men had entered Cambodia to produce slanderous videos linked to human trafficking, detention with torture, rape and the sale of human organs
,” the court said.
They were found guilty of
“inciting to cause chaos in public security”
during a trial held on Thursday.
The court sentenced them to two years in prison each and ordered them to pay a combined fine of approximately $2,000, the statement added.
Criminal networks have created numerous structures in Cambodia, but also in Burma and elsewhere to organize online scams.
Thousands of people, mostly Chinese, are lured into cybercrime centers that extract large sums of money from their victims.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia are forced by criminal gangs to engage in online scams, often under threat of torture and sometimes subjected to sexual violence, according to a UN report.