内容摘要：The rate of femicide is rising on the whole in the country, despite some fluctuations over the years.

The rate of femicide is rising on the whole in the country, despite some fluctuations over the years.

During a recent visit to the zone by Al Jazeera, Rolls Royce limousines ferried gamblers to some of the city’s casinos while workers toiled on the construction of an elaborate and expansive Venice-style waterway just a stone’s throw from the Mekong river.While luxury construction projects – including the recently completed Bokeo International Airport – speak to the vast amounts of money flowing through this mini casino city, it is inside the grey, nondescript tower blocks dotted around the economic zone where the lucrative online scam trade occurs.

Within these tower blocks, thousands offrom all over the world – just like Khobby – are reported to spend up to 17 hours a day working online to dupe unsuspecting “clients” into parting with their money.The online swindles are as varied as investing money in fake business portfolios to paying false tax bills that appear very real and from trading phoney cryptocurrency to being caught in online romance traps.

Anti-trafficking experts say most of the workers are deceived into leaving their home countries – such are nearby China, Thailand and Indonesia or as far away as Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Ethiopia – with the promise of decent salaries.Khobby told how his “data entry” job was, in fact, a scam known in the cybercrime underworld as “pig butchering”.

This is where victims are identified, cold-called or messaged directly by phone in a bid to establish a relationship. Trust is built up over time to the point where an initial investment is made by the intended victim. This can be, at first, a small amount of the victim’s money or emotions in the case of fake online relationships.

There are small rewards on the investments, Khobby explained, telling how those in the industry refer to their victims as pigs who are being “fattened” by trust built up with the scammers.“They are crimes of solitude that stigmatise the woman. It is not easy to speak of them,” the judge said.

Indigenous lawyer Haydee Valey, who represented the women, said the sentence was “historic” because it finally recognised the struggle of civil war survivors who haddemanded justice for decades

Several Maya Achi women in the courtroom applauded at the end of the trial, where some dressed in traditional attire and others listened to the verdict through an interpreter.One of the victims, a 62-year-old woman, told the AFP news agency she was “very happy” with the verdict.