CASE STUDY

Digital data helps take down

Thai General in largest human
trafficking case

On Jan 11, 2015, at a check point on highway 408 in the Southern

Case Summary
province of Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thai police stopped five medium
sized trucks heading eastward in a routine road check. They discovered Date
98 people crammed inside the trucks.
January - July 2017
The truck drivers immediately fled the scene but two were later caught
and arrested. The trafficked persons were identified as originating from Challenge
the Rohingya ethnic Muslim migrant group commonly targeted by human
traffickers for labor services. Multiple mobile devices were found on both Stop one of the most
the victims and drivers, and were seized for examination. corrupt human
traffickers in Thailand
Thai police contacted the headquarters of the international NGO, Freeland, using Cellebrite’s
which specializes in both environmental conservation and human rights. solutions.
Freeland is well known in the region for its dedication to stopping wildlife
and human trafficking. Tools

Freeland representatives Suthivong Phuphong and Sombat Teungwiwat UFED Touch

were dispatched with Cellebrite tools to access and extract data from the
mobile devices. Result

Suthivong Phuphong and Sombat Teungwiwat spent several weeks Lt. General Manas
demonstrating to the Thai police how Cellebrite tools worked. Using Kongpan was arrested
UFED, information began to surface showing who the truck drivers and sentenced to 27
had been talking to during their operation, which informed the years in prison.
interrogations. Deeper dives into the data found more conversations
about Rohingya trafficking, that was occurring nationwide across
Thailand. The rising amount of digital evidence spurned searches that
lead to labor camps being located in the south of Thailand.
In The Spotlight “The 5 mobile phones
found on the drivers,
Several media organizations published that the data obtained from the enabled Thai Police, with
mobile devices had assisted Thai investigators to piece together the puzzle technical support from
of a sophisticated human trafficking supply chain. This lead to the locations Freeland, to access the
of labor camps, where victims were held as prisoners. telephone history dating as
far back as 3 months from
The ongoing media pressure and continued attention of senior police
each device.”
officials, spurred investigators to show results. Working closely with
Freeland on Cellebrite’s UFED, the investigators got a breakthrough from It was stated in
one of the truck drivers’ phones. The data isolated a cluster of repeated https://
phone calls to a single recipient who was found to be the logistics asiancorrespondent.com.*
coordinator of the operation. That person was then arrested.

Rallying the troops

Freeland publicly congratulated the Thai police for the arrest of the
logistics coordinator, and based on the strength of further digital evidence
recommended that a wider investigation be conducted.

“It was us [Freeland], local police, investigators and journalists working together
that brought this about. The shared ‘war room’ at the central HQ helped us
collectively plot the data to expose the supply chain. The common links in the
chain documented the movement of people from south-west Thailand down to
the Malaysian border.” - Steven Galster, Chairman of Freeland.

The investigation continued to unravel insights, including telephone

and e-banking records, linking one of the drivers to a senior provincial
government officer.

“An investigation of the officer’s bank accounts showed a record of Lt. General
Manas receiving more than THB20 million (US$600,000) from him without a
legitimate explanation for the transaction.” - Steven Galster, Chairman of Freeland.

Some victims were encouraged to carry mobile phones during captivity in

order to contact relatives or friends and communicate the terms of their
ransom. Their freedom would be granted for a price between $2500 to
$3000. Those that didn’t have relatives or friends to pay, were allocated for
immediate sale to farm owners at $1000 each. Investigators discovered
that during the waiting periods for ransoms to be met, or farm jobs to be
assigned, many victims became sick or had died.

Uncovering corruption
After all the phones from the truck drivers, victims and others involved
were analyzed, the investigation soon lead beyond the implicated logistics
coordinator, to several people in positions of local and domestic authority,
including a group of law enforcement staff. 67 police officers, 3 politicians,
and an army General were eventually identified as having taken bribes from
the human trafficking cartel.

Case Study | Digital data helps take down Thai General in largest human trafficking case
www.cellebrite.com
“There was big money to be made so everyone wanted a piece of it, from top “The results from the
officials right down to the truck drivers.” - Steven Galster Chairman of Freeland. extractions showed that
they [Thai police] had
caught a kingpin”
Steven Galster from Freeland explained that under normal conditions
this type of human trafficking case would have concluded with only the - Steven Galster –
two truck drivers being arrested for smuggling migrant workers, and Freeland
not actually for trafficking. The victims would have been repatriated to
Myanmar, where most likely would have been re-trafficked. But instead of
a premature resolution of the investigation, Freeland and the Thai police
were empowered by Cellebrite’s UFED to identify many more involved. This
led them all the way up to the army major, Lt. General Manas Kongpan. The
digital evidence that was there proved that this was indeed a case of human
trafficking, and a major one at that.

After two years of this case in the media spotlight, the undeniable evidence
lead to 62 guilty verdicts handed out in a Thai court, and also resulted in Lt.
General Manas Kongpaen receiving a 27-year prison sentence.

To learn more about Cellebrite’s Digital Intelligence solutions, visit Cellebrite.com

Sources:

*https://asiancorrespondent.com/2017/07/ngo-used-state-art-tech-take-thai-general/

Case Study | Digital data helps take down Thai General in largest human trafficking case
www.cellebrite.com
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For more than 20 years, Cellebrite has been the global leader and premiere provider of integrated digital intelligence solutions to
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