Abstract:
A new form of human trafficking has emerged across Chinese borders, where individuals are lured to Southeast Asia with fraudulent job offers and then coerced into operating online scams. Despite its massive economic and human toll, this scam-driven trafficking remains underexplored in academic research. Through qualitative analysis of 158 RedNote posts, the speaker and her co-authors examined how Chinese online communities respond to this threat. Their findings reveal that perpetrators exploit cultural ties to recruit victims for cybercriminal roles within self-sustaining compounds, using sophisticated manipulation tactics. Survivors face serious reintegration barriers, including family rejection, as the cultural values that enable trafficking also hinder their recovery. While communities present protective strategies, efforts are complicated by doubts about the reliability of support and cross-border coordination. The speaker will discuss key implications for prevention, platform governance, and international cooperation against scam-driven trafficking. Warning: The talk contains descriptions of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse.
The talk is based on the following research paper:
Jiamin Zheng, Yue Deng, Jessica Chen, Shujun Li, Yixin Zou and Jingjie Li (2026) Characterizing Scam-Driven Human Trafficking Across Chinese Borders and Online Community Responses on RedNote. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), Article Number 1313, 25 pages, ACM, 2026 (Best Paper Award = top 1% of all submissions)
Bio:
Jiamin (Karen) Zheng is a first-year PhD student in the Centre for Doctoral Training in Machine Learning Systems at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Dr Jingjie Li and Dr Luo Mai. Her research interests span HCI, online safety, privacy and compliance, and AI for privacy and safety. Her personal website is https://karennnz.github.io/.
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