No, you asked if foreign gangs do kidnap, a simple google search says they do.
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You trying to insinuate only Chinese gangs do kidnapping is more reflective of your biased world view and limited Googling skills. Try to diversify your news sources, you read very biased media with a narrow view.
Playing devil's advocate, if he is talking about telephone fraud alone, this is kind of a uncommon rationale for kidnapping.
If you look at India and Africa, most telecom scammers are simply workers.
Most of the kidnappings in most other countries are for higher margin crimes like ransom, extortion and prostitution.
The prime source of these scammers were Taiwanese. DPP was accused of sheltering these scammers because majority of their victims were mainlanders. Some of them expanded into Fujian (where most Taiwanese have ancestral ties), but were shut down since they are in reach of mainland authorities. Rumor (probably from Chinese media which I cannot read well) is that the Chinese authorities then went for extrajudicial apprehension of gang leaders in Taiwan. They moved to other countries like the famous case in Spain (and other cases in Africa), but these countries were open to cooperation with PRC Law Enforcement (since they had an economic relationship) and were extradited to PRC despite holding ROC passports (which put the fear of the death penalty in them).
We have to realize, this is 10 years worth of heavy enforcement. It could be that there are simply less and less volunteers for this work and forcing a situation of kidnapping. They are even moving into more lawless areas like the ethnic controlled areas of Myanmar. Unlike India and Nigeria, where you are working on English-language scams, you require Mandarin for this scam and thus need Chinese people (or at least Mandarin speaking people). Some of these lawless areas actually have many Mandarin speakers, but often times in SEA, Mandarin is an asset for doing business and probably there are legitimate opportunities that are more attractive.