but in this case what would they lie about? i don't think anyone would deny existence of defectors or how hard it is for them to move around.

It's more like a poor quality article though, they start off by claiming massive new difficulties for these people in the last couple of years but don't tell you anything about why that happened. Mass surveillance and greedy traffickers who ended up stealing the money and ratting everyone out existed years ago as well, so they didn't really add any new information here, or at least didn't explain it very well.