Foday Musa looked broken as he listened to the last voice message he received from his son.

It is 76 seconds long and the young man sounds desperate. He is crying, begging for his father’s help.

“It’s so hard to hear. Hearing his voice hurts me,” Musa told BBC Africa Eye, which was given exclusive access to a police unit that helped him as he searched for two of his children who had fallen victim to scammers.

It was in February 2024 that Musa’s 22-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter, along with five others, were recruited from their remote village in the Faranah region of central Guinea by agents promising them work abroad.

The jobs never materialised and the so-called recruiters turned out to be human traffickers. The group was taken across the border into Sierra Leone and held captive.

“My heart is broken. I can’t stop crying. If you look at my eyes, you can see the pain,” Musa said.

His case was picked up by the global policing agency Interpol in Guinea, which asked their unit in Sierra Leone to help. So last August Musa, travelled to Makeni, in central Sierra Leone, in a bid to find them.

Thousands of people across West Africa are being lured by a human trafficking scam, commonly known as QNET.

Founded in Hong Kong, QNET itself is a legitimate wellness and lifestyle company – it allows people to sign up to buy their products and sell them online.

Its business model has faced some criticism – however in West Africa, criminal gangs are using its name as a front for their illegal activities.

The traffickers target people with the promise of work opportunities in places like the US, Canada, Dubai and Europe, asking them to pay large sums of money for administration costs before they start the job.

Once they have paid, they are often trafficked to a neighbouring country and told they can only travel abroad once they recruit others into the scheme.

Yet even when they bring in family and friends, the jobs never materialise.

QNET itself has a campaign running across the region, involving billboards and media adverts. These are all splashed with the slogan “QNET Against Scams” and the company has rejected allegations that it is linked to human trafficking.

Musa and his extended family had already given $25,000 (£19,000) to the traffickers – this encompassed the joining fees and extra money paid to try to get his children home. Travelling to Sierra Leone himself was his last hope.

Mahmoud Conteh, the head of investigations at the anti-trafficking unit of Interpol within the Sierra Leone police, said the case was a priority for his unit.

“It’s very easy for these traffickers to manoeuvre across each of our borders at these illegal crossing points,” he told the BBC.

When Conteh received a tip-off that a large number of young people were being held in a location in Makeni, Musa joined the police as they raided the property, hoping to find his children.

Bags and clothes were strewn across the floors. It is thought 10 to 15 people slept in each room.

The Interpol team gathered everyone inside the property and found some as young as 14 had been living there.

“The majority are Guineans. There is only one Sierra Leonean among them. All the rest are Guineans,” said Conteh.

Musa’s children were not among them, though one young man said they had been there the previous week – the first potential sighting of his children in a year.

The group were transferred to the police station for screening before 19 of them were taken home to Guinea.

The police say they have conducted more than 20 raids like this over the past year, rescuing hundreds of victims of human trafficking.

Often victims have been moved by the traffickers across borders, but others, like 23-year-old Aminata, a Sierra Leonean whose name has been changed to protect her identity, are trafficked within their own countries.

Sitting on a plastic chair with the slopes of Makeni’s Wusum Hills behind her in the distance, Aminata told the BBC how a friend had introduced her to people claiming to represent QNET in mid-2024.

She was successful in an interview and was told she would go on a course before flying to the US for further study and work.

The only catch was she had to pay $1,000 to join the scheme.

Convinced it was legitimate, her family gave her the money they had saved for her college fees.

“When they first recruit you, they feed you, they take care of you. But as time goes by, they stop,” she told the BBC, going on to say this is when she had to go the “extra mile” to survive.

“You have to sell your body and go sleep with men so that you can get money – so you can take care of yourself.”

Aminata said she was told that if she wanted to travel, she had to recruit other people into the scheme.

To do this, the traffickers gave her an international number to make it look like she was already abroad when she contacted them.

“They take you to the airport and you dress well like you’re about to travel. They give you a passport, give you fake travel papers,” she explained.

“Then they take your photo so you can send them to your friends and family.”

Aminata managed to persuade six friends and relatives to join the scheme, still hoping the job in the US would materialise. It never did.

“I felt awful because they wasted their money and they suffered because of me.”

She was held somewhere on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, for about a year before it dawned on her that the job would never be forthcoming.

When Aminata failed to recruit anyone else, it seems she was deemed of no more use to the traffickers – and when she decided to escape, she was not stopped.

Returning home after everything that had happened, especially when everyone had thought she had been living abroad, was hard.

“I was scared to go back home,” she said.

“I’d told my friends that I’d travelled abroad. I’d told my family the same. I was thinking about all the money they’d given me to get there.”

There are no statistics on the number of victims of these types of labour scams but there are constant reports in the media across West Africa of gangs scamming people desperate to believe these foreign jobs schemes are real.

The BBC joined the police on about a dozen raids over three days in Makeni and met hundreds of young people who had been trafficked across the region from countries such as Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Mali.

The police said they had arrested 12 suspected traffickers in total.

But the reality is that there are only a few successful prosecutions and the under-resourced authorities in the region often face an uphill battle in tackling such scams.

According to US state department statistics, between July 2022 – when Sierra Leone’s anti-trafficking act was passed – and April 2025, there were only four trafficking convictions.

Musa never found his children and had no choice but to return to Guinea without them at the end of September.

Conteh, from Interpol, has since told the BBC the traffickers released Foday’s children not long afterwards.

The BBC has since confirmed that Musa’s daughter made it back to Guinea, but she has not returned to her village – and did not want to be interviewed.

She has not contacted her father, which points to the shame felt by many of the victims caught up in the scam.

The whereabouts of Musa’s son are unknown.

It remains a desperate situation for their father.

“After all that has happened, I really just want it all to be over and to see my kids,” said Musa.

“We’d love them to come back to the village now – I’d love them to be here with me.”

Additional reporting by Paul Myles, Chris Walter, Olivia Acland and Tamasin Ford