Giang
Giang left her home in the northern mountains of Vietnam believing that she was going to change her family’s life.
For as long as Giang could remember, every day had been a struggle just to survive. She searched for ways to support her family as she got older, and thought she’d finally found a breakthrough when she was offered a job in Ho Chi Minh City.
After Giang landed at the airport, she soon realised that there was no job at all.
The people behind the offer put Giang into a car and drove her across the border, through Cambodia and into Thailand. There, they sold her to a criminal gang who enslaved her in a brothel.
Giang’s captors beat her upon arrival and again whenever she refused to work. For two years, they used violence to systematically drain her of self-belief, thinking that she would eventually give up her desire to be free again.
But Giang clung to hope. Inside the brothel, she made friends with four other young Vietnamese women who had been trafficked there by the same people. Together, they made an escape plan.
When one of the group found a phone, they reached out for help. Blue Dragon then mounted a rescue operation to bring Giang and her friends home to Vietnam.
While the safe arrival home of Giang and her friends means that Blue Dragon has now rescued over 2,000 people from slavery, the impact of her newfound freedom goes far beyond statistics.
Giang will never get that lost time back, and she will carry the horror of her experience for the rest of her days. But with our support, she can hold her loved ones in her arms and bring them with her as she heals and learns to thrive.
Giang and her friends arriving in Vietnam.
The first rescues
Giang’s rescue was an extremely complicated process, due both to how human traffickers have developed more sophisticated and brutal forms of slavery, and how Blue Dragon has responded by developing more sophisticated rescue tactics.
The first time Blue Dragon rescued someone from slavery was very different. Blue Dragon founder Michael Brosowski was sitting outside a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City when he noticed a street child selling flowers. He soon realised the child was being controlled by gang members who took the money for every sale he made.
Michael spoke to the boy, learned that his name was Ngoc and that he desperately wanted to go home to his family. Blue Dragon got Ngoc away from the gang and took him back to his village in the coastal province of Hue.
One of the first times Blue Dragon rescued someone from slavery in another country came when a girl named Phung, who we had been supporting, was trafficked to a brothel in China. She had no idea even what city she was in, and the only information she could provide us was a phone number on the wall of a building across the street.
“It took months to find her,” shares Blue Dragon’s rescue team leader. “Now, in terms of technology development and transportation, we can rescue people more quickly. Everyone has a phone now. In the past, sometimes people would send a letter and we’d trace the seal or postage stamp to the location it was sent from. Now we can locate people very quickly.”
Another problem Blue Dragon faced was that we were a new organisation built from the ground up to help street children.
“We didn’t plan to start rescuing people from trafficking. We didn’t have the skills, resources and knowledge to have a big impact because at first it wasn’t part of a strategic plan, we just saw the problem and started tackling it as we went. We saw people selling flowers on the street, and we tackled that. We saw people working in sweatshops and had to help. We heard about a girl in China who was trafficked for a forced marriage and we decided to help.”
A child working in a sweatshop.
The road to mass disruption
After Blue Dragon rescued Ngoc from slavery in Ho Chi Minh City and brought him home to his family in central Vietnam, a bigger picture of human trafficking began to emerge.
No one in Ngoc’s family had ever been to school. They lived in a tiny, makeshift home that blew down whenever a storm passed through the area – which was several times a year. His family, and so many other families in the community, were so desperate to change their lives that when a group of seemingly kind strangers offered their children vocational training and jobs, they gladly accepted.
Many children trafficked from Ngoc’s community ended up like him, enslaved on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. More still ended up in sweatshops where they were forced to work 18-hour days with no breaks. Back then, sweatshops were a common sight in many southern provinces, filled with children trafficked from all areas of Vietnam – even the far north.
In one northern community, a large group of children had been trafficked in much the same way as Ngoc. Some friendly strangers arrived in a village, told the people that they would take their children away to get education, training and steady employment, only to cut all contact and disappear.
When this village reached out for help, together with the authorities Blue Dragon tracked down the children and rescued all of them from a sweatshop thousands of kilometres away.
A young girl selling flowers on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, just as Ngoc used to do.
A plan
The rescues of Ngoc, Phung and the children at the sweatshop all point toward a blueprint for how to end human trafficking on a systemic scale.
As Michael recognised when he arrived in Ngoc’s village, education and employment opportunities are crucial to making people more resilient to those looking to exploit them. As the village of trafficked children show, large scale rescue work disrupts the traffickers’ operations.
The sweatshops that once lined the industrial suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City gradually closed down. Children from Ngoc’s community are no longer trafficked to sell flowers or make garments, and the people of the northern community who lost so many children now know not to trust outsiders with job offers.
As Blue Dragon’s skills, knowledge and personnel expanded, we began rescuing bigger groups of people as part of an increasingly sophisticated overarching plan. This strategy causes mass disruption to specific forms of human trafficking using methods that can be replicated in other places, towards other forms of the same crime.
Alongside rescue missions, Blue Dragon began to focus more and more on developing programs and initiatives to prevent people from being trafficked in the first place. Through educating vulnerable communities, keeping children in school, and enabling people to lift their families out of the poverty that makes them so vulnerable to exploitation, we make sure families and communities are safe to thrive.
“Our rescue operations remain urgent, but they are now part of a much larger strategy,” shares Luong, who works directly with communities in Vietnam. “We work on prevention, strengthening the reintegration of trafficked people back into society, contributing to law reform, and building Anti-Trafficking Boards so local governments take ownership.”
In turn, the rescue operations cause huge disruption to the criminal gangs orchestrating the trafficking of people from Vietnam. Every one of the people we rescue from forced scamming costs their slavers thousands of dollars, both in the money they paid to buy them in the first place and the money they would have continued earning had they remained enslaved.
“Blue Dragon has cost traffickers millions of dollars,” shares Blue Dragon’s rescue team leader. “If we didn’t rescue the person, there’d be no consequences for the traffickers. But when we rescue, it disrupts their work, it costs them money and it leads to investigation, and often prosecution of the person who trafficked them.”
Through this double-edged approach of rescue and prevention, we have created systemic change across the country. Education levels are rising in the communities where we work, people there are more aware of the dangers of human trafficking and what to do when they suspect it, and our programs can be replicated and tailored to the specific needs of more areas throughout the country and beyond.
Michael receiving an award from Vietnam’s border guard in 2026.
New threats
While Blue Dragon has established a very effective strategy to end human trafficking for good, like all plans it requires adaptation and dynamism – which was the case when a new form of this horrendous crime emerged in 2020.
“When Blue Dragon reached 1,000 people rescued, it felt enormous. It took us 15 years to reach that number. We were proud, but also deeply aware that 1,000 people rescued meant 1,000 lives stolen, 1,000 families broken. We asked ourselves when we would reach 1,500? 2,000? Honestly, I didn’t think we’d reach 2,000 in just another five years. What stands out to me most is not only the speed but the scale of change in the trafficking landscape.”
The speed at which Blue Dragon has gone from 1,000 to 2,000 rescues is due to two main factors: traffickers upscaled their methods of exploitation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we effectively adapted our approach to rescue missions in response.
As COVID-19 sent large parts of the world into panic and isolation, criminals saw it as a chance to exploit more people for their own gain through a different method of human trafficking: forced online scamming.
When casinos in Cambodia lost their business due to a combination of COVID-19 and a national ban on online gambling, criminal gangs took hold of the infrastructure and pivoted towards the much more lucrative business of forcing enslaved people to scam others online. Driving huge profits, the crime has continued to grow in scale ever since, spreading to criminal-run areas of Laos and war-torn regions of Myanmar.
“In the last few years, we have seen the rapid rise of trafficking into forced criminality, especially online scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos,” shares Luong. “Unlike earlier patterns of trafficking, like forced marriage and sexual slavery, that primarily affected women and girls, this wave has involved large numbers of young men trafficked in batches, often through deception about job opportunities. Suddenly, entire groups were being moved at once. Now, we were not rescuing one or two individuals, but sometimes dozens at a time.”
Forced scamming is now the leading form of exploitation we encounter, and it is estimated that there are more than 300,000 people enslaved in scamming operations across Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
Barbed wire tops the perimeter walls of this scam compound in Cambodia.
This scam compound houses thousands of enslaved people.
New methods
Though human trafficking in Southeast Asia grows ever larger and more complex, Blue Dragon has adapted our methods to meet the traffickers head on every step of the way – and will continue to do so until we end it for good.
One way we have changed our tactics to adapt to the unique challenges of rescuing people from forced online scamming is to become more agile when a window of opportunity arises.
“With forced marriage, brothels and small sweatshops, the captors were mainly individuals like the husband or brothel owner. In scam compounds, the captors are large-scale criminal gangs. They have money. They have guns. And so the rescues from the compounds are hard to plan. The only way is for the enslaved person to wait for a chance to climb the fence. Or if they’re moving people from place to place. Or when the scam compound is disrupted or invaded for another reason like the earthquakes in Myanmar last year. We don’t know when they will happen, so we have to seize opportunities when they arrive and act very quickly, otherwise people will die.
“Recently, we rescued a man who had internal bleeding and a broken leg from being beaten in the compound, and he was lost in the forest after escaping. In another case, there was a girl who was beaten very badly and without medical support she would have died.”
Being able to respond so quickly requires us to have a larger rescue team on the ground at all times. As this team grows, we now have the means to handle several operations at once, bringing people home from multiple countries simultaneously in increasingly larger numbers.
The more people we rescue, the more trust we build among organisations in Vietnam and beyond, which in turn helps us to expand our operations. This trust is a crucial part of our overarching strategy.
“The first 1,000 rescues were built slowly. We were learning. We were building trust with police, border guards and communities. The second 1,000 happened faster because Blue Dragon is no longer small or unknown. We now work at scale. We have strong partnerships and cooperation with authorities across provinces and borders. Communities trust us. Survivors of trafficking trust us.”
In 2025, we completed our largest ever rescue operation of people from human trafficking – a total of 68 people. Some are pictured here using a boat to make their way home to Vietnam.
The future
“I wish the number would stop at 2,000,” shares a member of Blue Dragon’s rescue team. “I wish we’d never have to rescue anyone else, but over the last 15 years there have been changes, and I’m sure there will be more.”
While human trafficking remains a significant threat operating on a huge scale, there is hope. By working as a unified front against the people who ruin lives on a systemic scale for their own profit, we can see how to disrupt and eventually end the large-scale trafficking of Vietnamese people into forced online scamming.
“I can see that disruption of human trafficking across the region is happening,” shares Blue Dragon’s rescue team leader. “Governments are getting more involved and more interested in tackling it. And at Blue Dragon, now we have such a big community, we have the resources, we’ve adapted before and we will find a way again.”
And there is evidence that the people of Vietnam are becoming increasingly resilient to human trafficking. We have seen villages turn from trafficking hotspots into safe, thriving communities; we have seen how our most effective programs can be replicated in other areas across the country; we have seen concrete examples of communities acting to prevent human trafficking based on our teaching; and we have seen survivors of human trafficking successfully reintegrate into society. As Luong shares:
