The handcuffed generation

When 64 young South Koreans arrived at Incheon Airport in handcuffs on Saturday, the scene looked less like a crime roundup than a mirror held up to the nation's quiet tragedy.

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They were not hardened criminals, but victims of a cruel equation: despair multiplied by debt, driven by the promise of "10 million won ($7,030) a month." Their return from Cambodia, where they were detained for online scams, exposed not only the brutality of foreign criminal networks, but structural neglect that has left an entire generation cornered.

The immediate cause of their ordeal is clear enough. Criminal rings in Cambodia, Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia have built sprawling cyber scam operations, preying on young people lured by fantastical job ads, who are then trapped, beaten and forced to defraud others.

The death of a South Korean university student in August, tortured after being lured by such a job offer, galvanized public outrage and forced the government's hand. But the moral reckoning should not end with the victims' repatriation. What drove so many young people to seek fortune in places they barely knew?