Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone

An enclave in Laos on the Mekong, reached by longboat from Thailand, with Myanmar visible across the water. Twenty- and thirty-storey towers standing in jungle, half-built, mostly empty, and — Harry’s description — a malfunctioning theme park crossed with a ghost town.

Obs: Harry does not get inside a scam compound and says so repeatedly. What is on this page is the town around them, plus what he was told by one resident who asked not to be filmed and is described here without identifying detail. The most specific claim he was given is recorded as second-hand and unverified, as he presents it.

What it looks like

• Skyscrapers in jungle, and the incongruity is the whole first impression.
• Everything is Chinese — restaurants, barbers, shops, signage — with Lao translations underneath. He compares it to being in China.
• Prices are in yuan. His card doesn’t work, there are two ATMs (one for baht, one for yuan), and buying a milk tea takes three attempts.
• Luxury cars with no number plates, in numbers.
• The KFC is fake.
• Dead by day, alive at night. A nightlife strip with a nightclub, KTV rooms, a brothel and sex work openly on the street.
• The workers are from Myanmar, working for Chinese employers, with small numbers of Laotians and Thais. He is told the ownership is Chinese all the way up.

The casino

• The legitimate reason the zone exists: gambling is banned in both Thailand and China, so gamblers cross the border to play here.
• A free shuttle train runs to it.
• The staff are from Myanmar and speak no English.
• There is no mobile signal inside the casino, which he flags as odd, since he has signal in the street outside.
• He puts $100 on red, loses it, and leaves.

What is reported to happen here

• Law enforcement bodies have said publicly that what goes on is not legal. The zone operates in the shadow of a Chinese national sanctioned by the US government for drug trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering, bribery and wildlife trafficking (the name is unrenderable in the subtitles and is not recorded here).
• Reports describe hundreds of prison-like call centres.
• How the recruitment works, as Harry sets it out: a job advert for a call centre in the zone, expenses paid to get you there — and on arrival your passport is taken and you are made to run romance and investment scams, typically on people from your own country. He has heard accounts of torture and of workers unable to leave.
• Fenced compounds with the fencing wired shut and visible attempts to break out through it, a guard pacing, and residential blocks inside. He films from a few hundred metres and moves on.
• Everybody who lives here knows, according to the man who talks to him.
• The Laotian government has raided the zone, and there has reportedly been violence recently.
• A group of West African men at a café are, he is told, probably scam workers. He deliberately names no country.

Harry’s tips

This is the rare page where the advice is about not going.

• He calls it, plainly, a bad place, and leaves early.
• He refuses to say what he learned until he is back over the border, in case his camera is searched on the way out.
• He was offered a way into a compound — walk in and say you’re looking for a job — and was told that being caught filming would cost him his passport, and that talking about it could cost far more. He didn’t go, and the video is explicit that this was the right call.
• A large sign at the crossing warns about human trafficking. He films it, and says it is the first time the phrase has stopped being an abstraction for him.

Source

• Exposing the Human Trafficking Capital of the World 🇨🇳 🇱🇦 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPeiDMsuj6M