Indians are lured by fake jobs promising high salaries, but find themselves trapped in cyber slavery and cryptocurrency scams in Southeast Asia.
According to local media reports, tens of thousands of Indian nationals are trapped in cyber slavery in Southeast Asia, where they are forced to engage in online scams including cryptocurrency scams, phishing scams and pig slaughter scams, often targeting individuals in India. . .
In some cases, victims have to impersonate law enforcement officers to extort funds from unsuspecting Indians through drug-in-package scams.
The report added that around 45% of cybercrimes targeting Indians are estimated to originate from Southeast Asia.
Government Intervention and Rescue Efforts
The victims, mostly young Indians, are lured by fake job advertisements offering attractive salaries for IT and data entry positions. When they arrive in countries like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, their passports are confiscated and they are taken to secure accommodation and made to work in inhumane conditions.
Indians lost at least 500 million rupees (about $60 million) from these operations between October 2023 and March 2024, according to a March report.
Due to the severity of the problem, the Indian government has launched a rescue effort, working with international organizations, NGOs, and local authorities in Southeast Asia to repatriate trapped citizens and dismantle cyber-slavery networks.
As crypto.news reported, on August 14, Indian teenagers were rescued from a fraud center operating in Bokeo province, Laos. At the time, the Indian Embassy in Laos warned that ‘visa-on-arrival’ employment was illegal and urged residents to check the credentials of recruitment agents before accepting job offers in Laos.
Nonetheless, government records show that around 30,000 Indians who traveled to Southeast Asian countries including Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam between January 2022 and May 2024 failed to return.
Among the Indian government’s other initiatives, an inter-ministerial panel including representatives from various government ministries is working to crack down on cyber-slavery networks and ensure the safe return of trapped Indians.
Meanwhile, domestic telecom operators have been ordered to block international spoofed calls, monitor suspicious roaming activity in Southeast Asia and disconnect millions of SIM cards believed to have been compromised and linked to the scam.
Beyond cryptocurrency fraud
Past investigations have shown that these crypto-related cyber fraud networks often go beyond financial fraud and have potential links to global human trafficking and exploitation organizations.
In 2023, Bloomberg journalist Zeke Faux uncovered what initially appeared to be a scam involving the stablecoin Tether, but led to the discovery of a large-scale human trafficking operation in Cambodia linked to a Chinese criminal network. Victims were imprisoned in camps such as Sihanoukville’s ‘Chinatown’ and subjected to brutal conditions, physical abuse and forced drug use to maintain compliance.
The severity of such incidents has caught the attention of international authorities, including the U.S. Treasury Department, which recently sanctioned a Cambodian senator with links to a cyber fraud center.
The sanctions not only targeted the senator, but also his conglomerates and affiliated entities, all of which were implicated in exploiting trafficked workers for cryptocurrency-related scams.