(The people-smuggling industry is thriving in Southeast Asia where tides of migrants secretly cross borders as they search for economic prosperity or flee persecution and conflict.)
SYDNEY, Jun 13, MINDS/AAP/EFE.- Illegal migration is rife in Southeast Asia and it is big business for people smugglers who ruthlessly exploit the region's porous borders.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that more than 80 percent of people who've slipped across borders in the region have done so with the aid of smugglers.
The trade can be as lucrative for the smugglers as it is dangerous for the smuggled, who roll the dice in a high-stakes game of roulette.
For the desperate who prevail in these shadowy journeys, the outcome is a better life in a more affluent country, or escape from war or persecution.
But for those who lose, the outcome can be death, torture, detention, or a life of forced labor or sexual slavery.
Central to this dark and deadly trade is the cancer of corruption.
"It's literally the grease that allows the wheel to turn," says Fiona David, an Australian criminologist and expert in migrant smuggling in Southeast Asia.
If the world needs proof of the evil nature of the smuggling trade and the role corruption plays in it, it need not look very far.
David points to what she calls death camps on the Thai-Malaysian border, where a human cargo of persecuted and stateless Rohingya people have been dumped by the smugglers they paid to get them out of Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Their smugglers often turn captors, detaining people in hell-hole camps and starving them while trying to extort money from their families.
Some have been sold to human traffickers. Others have been tortured and killed.
In 2015, dozens of bodies were unearthed in border camps, including that of a young pregnant woman found tethered to a tree in a tidal area and left to drown.
More than 80 suspects - including local politicians and senior Thai army general Manas Kongpan - filed into a Bangkok court on human-trafficking charges in early 2016. But journalists were banned from reporting on the case.
The UNODC estimates Asia's criminal migrant smuggling trade is worth $US2 billion (1.8 billion euro), with Southeast Asia accounting for a large but unspecified proportion.
Smuggling operations range from highly organized syndicates that are tapped into networks across the world, to very loosely related individuals relying on social media and word of mouth to drum up business.
David talks of a hierarchy of smuggling products, where those with the most money stand the best chance of a new life.
"The cheapest is by foot, smuggled through the jungle literally on foot. Those journeys tend to be very dangerous and very cheap," says David, who's also executive director of global research for the Walk Free Foundation, which works towards ending modern-day slavery.
"The next level up is people being smuggle
