In 2019, Indonesian authorities impounded the Lu Huang Yuan Yu 117 and 118 in the Riau Islands on human trafficking charges linked to the forced labor of Indonesian crew, according to a 2020 Mongabay News article.[^1]

In 2019, a 50-year-old Indonesian man called Syamsul was recruited by the manning agency PT Makmur Jaya Mandiri. Syamsul, a father of four daughters, had worked a variety of odd jobs the previous decade and had spent two years on a foreign fishing vessel when younger. In January 2020, he departed from Tegal to Jakarta, where he flew to Singapore. Though he was promised employment on a different ship, he was put to work on the Lu Huang Yuan Yu 117, a Chinese handliner.

Syamsul was promised $450 per month, with $50 being provided onboard and the rest wired to his wife. In reality, only one of the six payments was ever transferred. Onboard, Syamsul worked more than 12 hours per day without proper rest breaks and witnessed physical abuse. Though he was able to avoid it because of his prior experience on boats, the younger crew were not so lucky.

Of the 35 people who worked onboard, 23 of them were Indonesian or Filipino. While the foreman and Chinese crew got individual cabins, the Indonesian and Filipino workers were forced to share tiny rooms and sleep not on beds but on thin carpet. Discrimination also occurred with food. While the Chinese crew got meat with every meal, others only got one or two pieces of chili with their rice. Syamsul was once so hungry that he stole an onion from the kitchen.

In June 2020, while a transshipment occurred to Lu Huang Yuan Yu 118, a fellow Indonesian alerted Syamsul to the presence of a dead Indonesian fisher on the other boat. He and his fellow countrymen felt guilty that they couldn’t do anything about the fisher, whose body was now kept among boxes of squid in the Lu Huang Yuan Yu 118’s freezer. The crew decided to contact the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs using a cell phone. They then contacted the Maritime Security Agency, which circulated the recorded call to the Indonesian Ministry of Transportation. On July 8, 2020, as the two boats crossed into Indonesian territory, they were intercepted by law enforcement off Nipah Island. The dead fisher was later identified as Hasan Apriadi, and his body was repatriated to Lampung.

In the subsequent murder investigation, two people from the manning agency that recruited Syamsul were named as suspects. During the trial, it was revealed that the manning agency operated without a licence and that Taufiq Alwi and Totok Subagyo were running the agency illegally. They were sentenced to 16 months in prison and were asked to pay around $10,000 to Syamsul in restitution. Yet, even after their release, Syamsul had still not been paid and his passport and seaman’s book had still not been returned to him. His testimony was published in a 2023 Greenpeace article.[^1]