They went to Asia looking for jobs. Some ended up running online scams. Others were beaten, electrocuted, locked in cages or forced to meet financial targets for criminal networks. In this concluding part of the investigation,STEPHEN ANGBULUfollows the Nigerian victims beyond the recruitment stage, documenting their accounts of life inside the compounds and examining the response of Nigerian authorities and anti-trafficking organisations to a rapidly evolving form of human traffickingThe promises were different, but the trap was the same: lucrative jobs, easy money and a chance to escape Nigeria’s economic hardship.For Offor, Michael and Doyin, the online offers ended not in offices or technology firms, but behind guarded compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia, where Nigerian and other African youths were allegedly forced to run romance scams, fake online stores and cryptocurrency fraud under threats of beatings, electrocution and imprisonment.Offor’s department ran fakeTikTokstorefronts that lured victims into depositing money for fabricated orders. Other offices ran romance scams and cryptocurrency fraud. Some generated $500,000 to $1.2m in a single day. Monthly targets were around $300,000 per person.“We were given a target. Every month, you have to bring $300,000. If you did not meet it, they will punish you,” Offor told our correspondent.Standard infractions such as sleeping at your desk drew fines that were deducted from the $800 monthly salary (already slashed from the promised $1,500).Those who refused to work were taken to the “Dark Room,” a cage shorter than an adult’s standing height, where detainees were chained with arms above their heads, denied food, and brought out at intervals to be electrocuted.“I am taller than the cage,” Offor said, touching his head.“You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. The promises were different, but the trap was the same: lucrative jobs, easy money and a chance to escape Nigeria’s economic hardship.For Offor, Michael and Doyin, the online offers ended not in offices or technology firms, but behind guarded compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia, where Nigerian and other African youths were allegedly forced to run romance scams, fake online stores and cryptocurrency fraud under threats of beatings, electrocution and imprisonment.Offor’s department ran fakeTikTokstorefronts that lured victims into depositing money for fabricated orders. Other offices ran romance scams and cryptocurrency fraud. Some generated $500,000 to $1.2m in a single day. Monthly targets were around $300,000 per person.“We were given a target. Every month, you have to bring $300,000. If you did not meet it, they will punish you,” Offor told our correspondent.Standard infractions such as sleeping at your desk drew fines that were deducted from the $800 monthly salary (already slashed from the promised $1,500).Those who refused to work were taken to the “Dark Room,” a cage shorter than an adult’s standing height, where detainees were chained with arms above their heads, denied food, and brought out at intervals to be electrocuted.“I am taller than the cage,” Offor said, touching his head.“You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. For Offor, Michael and Doyin, the online offers ended not in offices or technology firms, but behind guarded compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia, where Nigerian and other African youths were allegedly forced to run romance scams, fake online stores and cryptocurrency fraud under threats of beatings, electrocution and imprisonment.Offor’s department ran fakeTikTokstorefronts that lured victims into depositing money for fabricated orders. Other offices ran romance scams and cryptocurrency fraud. Some generated $500,000 to $1.2m in a single day. Monthly targets were around $300,000 per person.“We were given a target. Every month, you have to bring $300,000. If you did not meet it, they will punish you,” Offor told our correspondent.Standard infractions such as sleeping at your desk drew fines that were deducted from the $800 monthly salary (already slashed from the promised $1,500).Those who refused to work were taken to the “Dark Room,” a cage shorter than an adult’s standing height, where detainees were chained with arms above their heads, denied food, and brought out at intervals to be electrocuted.“I am taller than the cage,” Offor said, touching his head.“You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Offor’s department ran fakeTikTokstorefronts that lured victims into depositing money for fabricated orders. Other offices ran romance scams and cryptocurrency fraud. Some generated $500,000 to $1.2m in a single day. Monthly targets were around $300,000 per person.“We were given a target. Every month, you have to bring $300,000. If you did not meet it, they will punish you,” Offor told our correspondent.Standard infractions such as sleeping at your desk drew fines that were deducted from the $800 monthly salary (already slashed from the promised $1,500).Those who refused to work were taken to the “Dark Room,” a cage shorter than an adult’s standing height, where detainees were chained with arms above their heads, denied food, and brought out at intervals to be electrocuted.“I am taller than the cage,” Offor said, touching his head.“You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “We were given a target. Every month, you have to bring $300,000. If you did not meet it, they will punish you,” Offor told our correspondent.Standard infractions such as sleeping at your desk drew fines that were deducted from the $800 monthly salary (already slashed from the promised $1,500).Those who refused to work were taken to the “Dark Room,” a cage shorter than an adult’s standing height, where detainees were chained with arms above their heads, denied food, and brought out at intervals to be electrocuted.“I am taller than the cage,” Offor said, touching his head.“You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Standard infractions such as sleeping at your desk drew fines that were deducted from the $800 monthly salary (already slashed from the promised $1,500).Those who refused to work were taken to the “Dark Room,” a cage shorter than an adult’s standing height, where detainees were chained with arms above their heads, denied food, and brought out at intervals to be electrocuted.“I am taller than the cage,” Offor said, touching his head.“You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Those who refused to work were taken to the “Dark Room,” a cage shorter than an adult’s standing height, where detainees were chained with arms above their heads, denied food, and brought out at intervals to be electrocuted.“I am taller than the cage,” Offor said, touching his head.“You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “I am taller than the cage,” Offor said, touching his head.“You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “You cannot stand straight. Your hands are chained above your head. They come in the morning, bring you out, taser you, put you back. Afternoon, same thing. Night, same thing.“Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “Even when you are sick, they don’t care. And when they notice you are feeling somehow, they will put drip in your hand and keep you working there. If anything happens to you, they also go for organ harvesting,” he narrated.He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. He was among 10 Nigerians who, at some point, collectively refused to work. They were locked in the Dark Room and electrocuted one after the other until they broke.“After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “After shocking the first person, they asked us: do you all want to work? We said no. Second person, third. By the fourth, everyone was filled with fear. We finally said yes,” he recalled.During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. During his two months there, a Nigerian from Imo State, identified as Obinna, died after being forced to run around the compound for two hours non-stop.“I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “I slept on the same bunk as him (Obinna). He slept below. I slept on top. They did not let us see the body,” Offor said, his voice breaking.A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. A Liberian also died inside the dark room from what survivors believed was internal bleeding from sustained beatings. Both bodies were not seen. Fellow detainees suspected organ harvesting.Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Offor revealed, “They don’t just dispose of bodies. They take the parts they need. There is a river behind the fence, where villagers search for floating bodies, some without heads, some with other parts removed.”‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. ‘Your life depends on them’Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Michael, 32, from Imo State, a trained gas cooker technician recruited through Instagram, arrived at the same compound in August 2025 and was immediately put to work creating fake female profiles for romance scams.“I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “I told them I have not done this before. A guy tapped me and stepped on my foot. He told me to stop saying I would not work. He said, ‘look around you, they will kill you,’” Michael told our correspondent.He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. He worked every day from August 4 to December 1, 2025, four months with no off days, and received daily punishments, including military-style squatting for two hours with legs elevated on a chair.“If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “If you shake, they cancel it. You start again,” he said.At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. At one point, the African detainees comprising Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans, began holding prayer sessions twice daily, at 6pm and midnight. After five days, the Chinese bosses sent security to shut it down. They refused. It was during one of those prayer sessions, Michael said, that they felt the tide began to turn.Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Using a phone hidden inside a stitched pillow, the Nigerians in the camp sent emails to every organisation they could find. “Anytime you want to use it, we opened the pillow, removed the phone, send messages, then put it back and sew it shut,” Michael explained.When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. When NAPTIP replied, the agency connected them with Eden Myanmar, an NGO, and the Nigerian Embassy in Bangkok. On December 1, 2025, after months of coordinated pressure, the DKBA militia ordered all non-Chinese detainees out. Eighty-three people were loaded onto military trucks and marched through the forest into Thailand.Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Only four of the 83 were formally classified as trafficking victims by Thai authorities. The rest, including Offor and Michael, were convicted of illegal entry and given the choice of a 4,000-baht fine or four days in prison. Most had no money and chose prison. They were then transferred to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility they both described as worse than the compound.“We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “We were over 120 people in a room, sleeping on the bare floor. We had phone access twice a month. Once a week, they let you out for 30 minutes. That is your fresh air,” Michael said.‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. ‘I paid $5,000 to be free’Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Meanwhile, Doyin, a 29-year-old university graduate who had worked at a first-generation bank before relocating to Dubai, was trafficked to Cambodia in August 2024 through a Telegram contact promising $1,200 monthly for “computer work.”Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Inside a gated compound with armed security and dormitories housing 300 others, he was forced to recruit victims into fraudulent investment platforms. Monthly targets were $50,000 per person. The compound, he estimated, generated up to $6m per cycle.“If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “If you say you do not want to work, they will lock you in a room for a weekend and show you things you do not want to see,” Doyin said, adding “People committed suicide severally. I saw a lady jump from a high building just because she was tired. You just wake up and do not know where the person beside you is anymore.”Related NewsW’Bank backs tariff, subsidy reforms in Nigeria’s power sectorNLNG/SEPNU leads as domestic cooking gas supply risesNBA resisted attempts to interfere with its independence – OsigweAfter 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. After 11 months, Doyin negotiated his release by borrowing $5,000 from a friend in Nigeria, the “buyout” price his captors demanded.He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. He then paid a Nigerian fixer in Cambodia another $500 to smuggle him across the border into Thailand by boat, nearly drowning in the crossing. Thai soldiers intercepted him, after which a court gave him the choice between a $120 fine or eight months in prison. He paid but was detained at Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, a facility he described as “worse than prison” where 120 people were crammed into one room with six functioning fans, sleeping on bare floor, allowed outside for one hour every four days, and permitted to make phone calls twice a month.He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. He said, “I was literally crying. I was 29 years old, but I was crying like a child.“On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “On the day they brought my flight ticket, everyone in the cell started clapping and dancing. Imagine, people congratulating you just because you received a flight ticket.”Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Upon return to Nigeria, Doyin alleged that Immigration officials at the Lagos airport demanded N5,000 before releasing his passport.“They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “They did not care. They said, ‘Next time be careful.’ That was it,” he said.However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. However, the spokesperson of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Akinsola Akinlabi, denied the claim.“How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “How would you collect money from someone coming back to their own country?” he said, adding that returnees are typically processed in the presence of senior officials and that the person may have encountered “another agent at the airport.”NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. NAPTIP catching up to new tricksIn an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. In an interview at his Abuja office, NAPTIP’s Chief Press Officer, Vincent Adekoye, said the agency had activated a dedicated Cyber Crime Unit.“We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “We are having a new dimension of human trafficking entirely and because NAPTIP is heating up on the traffickers, they are bringing in new tricks,” he said.Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Adekoye outlined the rescue process saying, “When information like this is received, we look at the region, the mission there, the volatility of that area. We reach out to partners on ground, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant security agencies. We liaise with civil society organisations that have shelters.“We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “We work with the Nigeria Immigration Service to produce emergency travel certificates for victims who have lost their documents. Then we talk to development partners like IOM, who have voluntary repatriation programmes. Within the last six months, we have stopped close to 600 victims from being trafficked from airports and land borders alone,” he added.Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Asked whether NAPTIP was financially equipped for a war expanding across multiple continents, Adekoye maintained that the agency was “very well equipped,” citing support from the Presidency and state governors.“Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “Partners do not give cash. They give technical support. Government created NAPTIP, and government has been up and doing,” he said.Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Another NAPTIP operative who sought anonymity told our correspondent that the agency had also handled fake scholarship schemes used to traffic young Nigerians to Libya, the same methodology now replicated at industrial scale in Southeast Asia.‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. ‘Trafficking is about deception’Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Executive Director of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation, Imaobong Ladipo-Sanusi, told our correspondent that the new frontier represented a fundamental shift in how human trafficking operates.She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. She said, “Previously, people were just trafficked and promised false things. But now trafficking has gone beyond taking you to ababalawoand taking an oath,” she said.“This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “This is online. You are going to be trafficked with what you know, your skill. If you are a dancer, they bring that opportunity to you because you will easily jump at it.”She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. She warned that desperation remained the primary enabler.“When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. “When there is desperation, you will swallow anything hook, line and sinker. The country is hard, yes, but things are not easy all over the world. The people that came recently back are some of the luckiest. Their stories will help other youths,” said Ladipo-Sanusi.Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Sabiu, who returned to Nigeria through the coordinated efforts of the Nigerian Embassy in Vietnam, IOM, NAPTIP, and the NIA, said he received no financial support, medical care, and counselling since his return.He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. He said the IOM, which had promised him reintegration support, told him upon arrival in Abuja that there was “no active case” in his file.Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Offor and Michael, repatriated in February 2026, received their passports from NAPTIP on February 23 but have had no medical attention, no financial assistance, and no reintegration plan.The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. The Nigerian couple they travelled with from CK Hills Hotel in Myanmar, vanished after a medical test at the compound showed the woman to be HIV-positive, a result the couple contested.Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Neither has been seen or heard from ever since.Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. Doyin, back in Ibadan, is jobless, in debt, and was arrested by the police in January over the money he borrowed to buy his freedom from Cambodia.The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report. The founder of Eden Myanmar, Lisa Samuelsen, the Nigerian Embassy in Thailand and the family of Obinna, who died in Myanmar, could not be reached as of the time of filing this report.