Two Taiwanese men who ran a Brisbane "slave house" where occupants were forced to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, will be deported after serving jail terms.
"Police and post office scam" perpetrators Yu-Hao Huang, 28, and Bo-Syun Chen, 29, were sentenced to jail after pleading guilty on Wednesday.
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Slaves told leaving was 'impossible'
Taiwanese nationals were allegedly held at slave houses at Morningside and South Brisbane where they made scam calls to China. 612ABC
But District Court Judge Tony Moynihan elected to release both men on Wednesday after about 18 months already served in prison, to be immediately deported.
The court heard they were the first to be charged under the newly created offence of causing a person to enter into servitude.
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Both men admitted to keeping a third Taiwanese man in servitude for two weeks in charges stemming from two so-called "slave houses" uncovered in August 2015, defrauding wealthy Chinese as part of a Taiwanese crime syndicate.
In Morningside, two dozen workers were crammed into one of two luxury Brisbane homes and forced to work the phones for 10 hours a day.
By night, they received training in carrying out the phone fraud until 9.30pm, before being forced to go to bed by 11.30pm.
They were forced to shower together, could only contact their family once a week under supervision and couldn't move around, stretch or talk while working.
The victim, a Taiwanese national who eventually fled the house in the early hours of August 9, 2015, and tipped off authorities, complained about the conditions from the start.
"He told the cadres that he wanted to leave and they yelled at him and verbally abused him," Crown prosecutor Daniel Whitmore said.
"They told him that he'd agreed to travel to Australia to work there and that it was impossible to leave."
The victim had arrived in Australia just two weeks earlier for work he knew was illegal in Taiwan but had been told was a "grey area" in Australia.
When the victim made further pleas, he was forced to stand in a room for five hours.
"You can't move, if you try to make noise or something, you want me to beat you?" Chen said, according to the prosecutor, before warning about a previous worker who was apparently beaten.
"If you want to be like him, you know you'll get to be treated like him."
Further punishment was to include eating last, shortened showers and being banned from drinking milk in the mornings.
"The victim has suffered harm and has been adversely affected as a result of your offending," Judge Moynihan said.
"He has suffered psychological trauma as a result of being abused in this way.
"He is concerned for his future and that of his family."
The judge said Huang was the leader and Chen his second in charge of the house but both men had little involvement in the hierarchy of the criminal organisation.
Defence barrister Michael Byrne accepted the agreed statement of facts but argued his clients had in fact suffered the same victimisation as the man they forced into servitude and were only placed into authority because they were older.
"They were basically briefed by a driver, taken to the first house, taught the process to go through to carry out the scam," he said.
"They themselves were in the position of the victim and his complaints are indeed their complaints as well."