In January, a 17-year-old high school student from Miyagi Prefecture traveled to Thailand after a Japanese man he had met through an online video game promised him a high-paying job abroad.

Using a flight ticket provided by the man, he arrived in Thailand and was eventually taken to a hotel in Myanmar, where he was forced to take part in a global scam operation involving tens of thousands of people along the Thai-Myanmar border.

While his family filed a missing person report back home, the high schooler — under the watchful eyes of security guards with assault rifles — made phone calls from the Southeast Asian nation to Japan some 4,000 kilometers away, according to accounts he gave to Japanese police, as reported by the Asahi Shimbun. Fortunately, he was released and returned to Japan 10 days later after Japanese authorities reached out to their Thai counterparts.