A Brazilian woman trafficked to a scam compound in Poipet, a Cambodian city on the Thai border, was handed to criminals as a "prize" and raped. Her testimony was gathered by Amnesty International and published in June in a report on the country's fraud industry, and was reported this week by Folha de S.Paulo in its Carga Humana (Human Cargo) series. The case exposes the double violence faced by women trafficked to Southeast Asia: on top of captivity and forced labor, sexual abuse.
The victim, identified as Cecília, a pseudonym, was held in one of the compounds where people lured by fake job offers are forced to run financial scams in exhausting shifts. When the site manager decided to reward a group of scammers for their "good performance", he handed the Brazilian woman to them like an object.
"It was like a prize for good work. He said I was like 'a gift'. They raped me", Cecília told Amnesty International.
Cecília's case adds to those of other Brazilians. Of the 84 human trafficking cases involving Brazilian citizens recorded in 2025, 54.8% were women, including one transgender woman, according to data from the federal care protocol for trafficking victims released by Brazil's Ministry of Justice. In 2024, men were the majority, at 58.7% of 63 cases. Cambodia was the top destination for Brazilian victims last year, with 44 of the 84 records, according to the Folha series.
The official numbers themselves reflect how invisible sexual abuse remains. In cases logged through the protocol, slave labor was the main purpose of the crime in 2025; in investigations opened by the Federal Police, Brazil's national police force, sexual exploitation led. Marina Bernardes, the ministry's coordinator-general for combating human trafficking and migrant smuggling, says it is still too early to tell whether the female majority marks a new trend, but the police data "breaks" the invisibility of sexual exploitation as a purpose of trafficking.
What Amnesty International found
The Brazilian woman's account is part of Falling Through the Cracks, a report in which Amnesty assesses the crackdown Cambodia's government announced in July 2025 against the scam compounds, prison-like facilities run by organized crime groups. The organization mapped 86 compounds nationwide and found evidence of state intervention at only 24. Among the 73 survivors from 16 countries interviewed for the study, six women described rape and other ill-treatment, and five said they were raped by managers. None of the 73 was recognized by the authorities as a victim of human trafficking.
Behind the numbers, the interests at play diverge. Cambodia's government says it has shut more than 200 scam centers and freed more than 3,000 victims, and wants to project control over a problem that stains the country's image. Amnesty sees stage management: survivors said police visited compounds to remove bodies and drink coffee with managers, without arresting anyone. "Behind every headline about a compound raid or arrest are survivors of slavery, torture and rape left with almost no support", said Montse Ferrer, the organization's co-regional director. The victims' home countries, Brazil among them, face the opposite pressure: bringing their citizens home. In January, Amnesty was already warning of a humanitarian crisis among survivors left without passports, money or assistance, Brazilians included, and urging home governments to act.
The same network that enslaves foreigners in Cambodia targets victims inside Brazil. Another report in the Folha series showed trafficked Brazilians forced to scam fellow citizens while posing as Federal Police agents. For Brasília, the challenge is twofold: providing a consular response to those who escape the compounds and stopping the recruitment that begins with the promise of a job on the other side of the world.