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From the onset of French colonization (c. 1870) in Vietnam until 1945, the colonial police received countless kidnapping complaints. These kidnappings were part of a larger problem involving the buying and selling of people in colonial Indochina, which comprised what some scholars have identified as human trafficking networks. This article will show how rescued victims as well as communities that were threatened by trafficking portrayed their experiences. An analysis of articles printed in the Vietnamese press reveals an undeniable sense of panic that the kidnappings provoked within the local community. Vietnamese journalists presented the threat of human trafficking via gendered and racialised caricatures, persistently labelling ethnic Chinese and unmarried older Vietnamese women as the villains — whether accurately or not. By printing stories of victims’ personal experiences, these newspaper articles humanized victims in a way that French authorities never did.