Selam’s dream was to make it to Australia. The former flight attendant from Ethiopia had found a way to get there too. An agent had promised her and her husband visas Down Under. All they had to do was make it to Thailand and everything would be processed.
In January this year, after a month of waiting in Bangkok for their documents to be readied, eventually the couple were told to move to one last hotel. But instead of this being the final stage in their big journey, it was a trap. They were smuggled across the border to Cambodia to a frontier town and straight into a scamming compound.
With the pair separated, Selam – who asked that her full name not be used – was put to work on love scamming – targeting victims from around the world using the social media networks LinkedIn and Facebook. Her task was to win trust and extract money.
But deep anxiety set in for her fast. She said she could not do the job. But the bosses of the compound would not release her. And from that point, her life became much more difficult.
“They dragged me. They injected me. I still don’t know what they injected me with. I couldn’t open my eyes, and I couldn’t move after that time.
“They took me into one room, and I have a lot of bad memories about that place. They raped me in there every day. When I had no energy left, they would take me to another place and give me glucose. I did not eat anything else. I would wake up and they would take me again. They did the same thing for three months,” she said.
After this prolonged period of torment, a rare moment presented itself to Selam. After a man was found dead after falling from the scam complex building, and with her captors distracted, she made an attempted escape. Running through the gates, the one other person who tried the same thing was her husband, who she had not seen for months.
“We just ran from that place, and we got into a taxi and got out, even though we didn’t have money to pay the driver,” she said.
They made it across Cambodia to a shelter being run by an international non-governmental organisation connected to the Catholic Church. Eventually, with the support of some fundraisers, they managed to raise the money to get a flight back to Ethiopia.
Returning home did not ease her pain.
“I just remember a lot of things about what happened back in Cambodia.” Selam said.
“I have hepatitis B virus in my blood now. It cannot be cured, and I worked in airlines before, and my airlines don’t want to hire me again because of this disease.”
She understands why people across Africa are seeking opportunities abroad. She says the allure is real and that some people are openly willing to scam to make money. But she said agents exploit that desperation.
“Agents, they sell people like cheap things. They don’t even see you as a human being,” she said.
But she wants her story to be a warning for those acting on impulse, or heading to situations that may not be safe or legitimate. Especially, she warns of the dangerous people running the scamming syndicates, increasingly all over the world.
“If they cannot get what they want from you, they will kill you. They don’t have humanity. You are useless unless you give them money. This is a bad reality.
“Now I have lost everything. I lost my money. I lost myself.”
