Thai woman saved from gang of organ harvesters after being lured by job in Cambodia, police say

March 11, 2022

A Thai woman lured with a job for a Chinese-operated call center in Cambodia was saved from a gang of organ harvesters just moments before they could illegally operate on her, police said.

The 25-year-old woman, whose name has been withheld for her safety, recalled her ordeal at the Thai-Cambodian border town of Sa Kaeo in eastern Thailand while speaking to Police Lieutenant General Surachate Hakparn on Wednesday evening.

According to the woman, she was allegedly lured by the gang into working for an illegal scam operation in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. The woman said the group profited from scamming Thai people from their call center.

The gang allegedly detained her without food after refusing to cooperate. They also reportedly tortured her with electric shocks and demanded she calls someone to pay a ransom for her freedom.

The woman eventually managed to escape her captors and tried to get to Poi Pet on the border with Thailand by hiring a driver. Her driver, however, eventually said they had to stop to pick up another man before telling the woman he could no longer drive and stopped at a hotel to stay overnight.

She told Surachate the last thing she could remember was falling unconscious at the hotel. When she woke up, she found herself back in the city surrounded by several bags of her blood and back in the city she had just escaped.

While traveling with her abductors, the victim said she met a woman to whom she was able to pass a note asking for help before passing out while being tortured once again.

She claims she then woke up inside a room near the Vietnam border, surrounded by what she described as surgical equipment. The woman recalled hearing screaming voices from a nearby room.

Authorities managed to locate the victim by tracking her phone and with the help of the woman she met earlier, just before the gang members could harvest any of her organs.

The victim was later taken to a hospital in Poi Pet for treatment and spent some time there until she could regain her strength. She was reportedly among eight Thai people rescued after having been tricked into working in Cambodia illegally.

Speaking to the media, Surachate said Thai authorities checked the LINE group of the gang and found that they often target specific people for their kidneys, eyes and liver to be later sold on the black market.

“There are possibly close to 3,000 Thais working illegally in Cambodia, about 90% of whom are illegal migrants,” Surachate said in a statement.

Featured Image via Thai PBS

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