In Cambodia, two Taiwanese men were sentenced to two years in prison for staging and posting on social media a fake kidnapping in the coastal town of Sihanoukville, a Cambodian court said on Friday.
Chen Neng-chuan, 31, and Lu Tsu-hsien, 34, were arrested after they live-streamed a video on Facebook earlier this week showing them being detained and beaten by security forces at an apartment building in Sihanoukville is probably a cybercrime center. Preah Sihanouk Provincial Court said in a statement.
According to Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA), one of the men livestreamed a video on Monday evening in which he claimed to have entered an “illegal online fraud center.”
In this video, he appears to be chased and beaten by unseen assailants.
In a second video released Tuesday, he shows his injuries and describes being robbed, tied up, beaten and tasered before he was able to escape, according to CNA.
“The two men had entered Cambodia to produce defamatory videos relating to human trafficking, detention with torture, rape and the sale of human organs,” the court said.
In a trial on Thursday, they were found guilty of “inciting chaos in public safety.”
The court sentenced them each to two years in prison and ordered them to pay a total 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 fraud.
Thousands of people, mostly Chinese, are lured into cybercrime centers that extort large amounts of money from their victims.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia are being forced into online scams by criminal gangs, often under threat of torture and sometimes sexual violence, according to a UN report.