Their agony is over. Thailand welcomed 260 victims of human trafficking rescued from online scam centers in a neighboring country and is starting the process of repatriating them to their homelands. Pressure from Thailand contributed to the victims’ release.

“After screening the group and verifying their nationalities, it was found that there were 20 nationalities,” the Thai army said in a statement, noting some victims in that group came from as far away as Ethiopia.

According to the Associated Press, countries that “share borders with Thailand, have become known as havens for criminal syndicates who are estimated to have forced hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia and elsewhere into helping run online scams including false romantic ploys, bogus investment pitches and illegal gambling schemes.

“Such scams have extracted tens of billions of dollars from victims around the world, according to U.N. experts, while the people recruited to carry them out have often been tricked into taking the jobs under false pretenses and trapped in virtual slavery,” the news agency wrote.

Thailand is committed to fighting and eliminating human trafficking and has made steady progress in recent years. The Kingdom has climbed from the bottom tier to the second tier in the human trafficking rankings published annually by the United States Department of State. Most countries are in the second tier.

While Thailand is constrained in what actions it can take against scam centers not located within its borders, it has used a range of other tools to try and help shut them down. It has denied the use of its infrastructure by cutting off electricity and other services to towns on the other side of its borders where the centers operate.

It has also encouraged local leaders and security forces on the other side of the border, some of whom are not formally allied with their country’s government, to take action against the transnational gangs.

The 260 trafficking victims released and handed over to the Thai Army were from an area not directly controlled by a national government.