In November, at a fruit and vegetable shop near Uttar Pradesh’s Dasauli village, Ram Janam Rao, 35, stared into his phone. He was reading out an email from the Indian embassy in Myanmar.
On August 6, Rao had written to the embassy about his 22-year-old brother-in-law, Ajay Kumar, who had been “stuck in Myanmar’s Myawaddy area for five months”.
“Please have patience,” said the embassy in an email sent a day later. “The area is inaccessible, beyond the control of Myanmar authorities so rescue/release is challenging for the embassy.”
In March 2024, Kumar and two friends from a nearby village – Sagar Chauhan and Arush Gautam – were offered jobs at a call centre firm in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
“There are no jobs here,” said Rao. “I was happy Ajay got something and felt assured because the three of them were going to work together.”
But the jobs turned out to be fake.
A month later, the three men were sitting in front of computers inside a compound in Myawaddy, a town on Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand, trafficked with hundreds of others from across the world, and forced to scam their victims by pretending to be Chinese women looking to meet wealthy men.
In previous stories in this special series, Scroll has reported on those who lost their life’s savings to such frauds and the global origins of this crime syndicate.
This is the story of the scamsters, who are victims themselves – men who were lured to Southeast Asia and confined in scam compounds, where they were forced to take on new cyber identities and dupe people into giving away their hard-earned money.
In 2023, the UN Human Rights Office estimated that nearly 2.2 lakh people “may be held” against their force in Cambodia and Myanmar, and “forced to carry out online scams”. This includes thousands of Indians.
The journey
Before leaving for Malaysia, the three men from Uttar Pradesh had no reason to believe they were being deceived. Definitely not Arush Gautam.
He was familiar with the region. In 2023, he had spent four months working at a customer support service firm in Kuala Lumpur. But in December that year, appendicitis forced him to return home for a surgery and quit his job.
In February 2024, Gautam contacted a former colleague in Kuala Lumpur, someone called Jitendra Singh, or Ronny, to help him with another job in Malaysia.
His friends, Kumar and Chauhan, both unemployed graduates, wanted to join him. Gautam said Singh informed them that a firm called the Yong Qian group was hiring, offering Rs 65,000 a month. The three men sat through video interviews that tested their English language skills and made the cut.
Only three months later, an advisory by the Indian Embassy in Myanmar would go on to label the Yong Qian group as a “Chinese scam company” and list Jitendra Singh as an agent involved in a “job scam”. Since Singh is untraceable, Scroll could not contact him for a response.
Gautam said he took the Yong Qian job because it is hard to find one in India that pays well. His friends had similar reasons. “Sagar was especially keen on the job because he was frustrated at home and upset with his parents, who mocked him for not making enough money,” said Gautam. Kumar and Gautam are Dalits, while Chauhan is a Thakur.
According to the schedule fixed by the firm, Gautam had to first fly to Yangon, Myanmar, before going to Kuala Lumpur. Kumar and Chauhan would take another route.
In Yangon, Gautam, 26, was picked up by two Burmese men dressed in white uniforms.
When he entered their SUV, he realised something was amiss. “There were four people in the car. Two of them had rifles and looked like they were part of an armed group,” Gautam said. “Two others were civilians like me, but seemed Chinese.”
The drive lasted 24 hours. The final destination was a compound in Myawaddy on the Myanmar-Thailand border with high boundary walls, patrolled by armed guards.
His friends arrived a couple of days later, via Bangkok.
“We were taken to a Chinese man with a translator who briefed us about our work,” Gautam said. “We had to pretend to be women and lure men all over the world on WhatsApp to invest in cryptocurrency.”
When Gautam refused to do this, the Chinese man, called ‘boss’ by his subordinates, slapped him. “He said if you want to leave, pay $8,000, or work here for one and a half years.”
Lured to Cambodia
Miles away in Kerala’s Kozhikode district, a group of five men, too, had been promised jobs in Thailand. Instead, they were flown to Cambodia and forced to work as cyberslaves.
As with the men from Uttar Pradesh, the men had been recruited by people known to them.
In August 2024, Semil Dev, 25, a relationship manager with Maruti Suzuki, heard from his neighbour, Adhirath, that a Thailand firm called Infinity Finance International was offering sales and advertising jobs for Rs 89,000 a month.
Dev, who made Rs 20,000 a month at the time, was tempted. “There are not many opportunities here. I also wanted to help my father, who has been paralysed because of an ailment,” he told Scroll.
Adhirath and two other recruiters – Anurag and Naseeruddin Shah – also approached Semil’s friend, Arun, whom they had known since school and who, like Dev, was from Thoddanur village. The offer was thrown open to other friends from the village who needed jobs. Three of them – Ashwanth, Abhinav and Abhinand – joined.
In September and October, the five men, all in their early twenties and with college degrees, flew to Bangkok. Enroute, they met two other Malayalis who were to join the same firm.
A surprise waited for them in Bangkok. At the airport, the second recruiter, Anurag, called Semil and Abhinand and told them that they would have to take another flight to a city called Phnom Penh, and then travel to Poipet, where the firm was based.
“I did not know that Poipet and Phnom Penh were not in Thailand,” Dev told Scroll. “If I had known that the job was in Cambodia, I wouldn’t have gone in the first place.”
A cab picked up Dev and Abhinand from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. After an eight-hour drive through the sparse Khmer countryside, they reached Poipet, a crammed and dusty Cambodian outpost that looked nothing like Bangkok. The unexpected itinerary in a foreign land made Dev anxious, but he felt at ease after seeing Adhirath at the hotel.
After a round of interviews, the seven newcomers were taken to the “company accommodation” in the middle of the town – a sprawling, heavily guarded scam compound of high-rises run by Chinese men in their twenties and thirties. Their passports were seized and they were not allowed to leave the compound. They were allowed to use their mobile phones only at fixed hours.
The ‘digital arrest’ training
On their first working day in Poipet, the men from Kerala were handed scripts that taught them how to carry out a “digital arrest” scam on State Bank of India customers.
“There was a three-day training which involved studying the script and ‘script-fighting’ with our seniors,” said Dev. “They would pretend to be customers and we were SBI bank officials. We had to put on a convincing act. If we cleared this, we would move to the job.”
The job was manning the “first line” of a “digital arrest” scam, which Dev explained, had three “lines”. First, an imposter pretending to be a bank official calls and tells a customer that Rs 1 lakh is due on her SBI credit card. The customer is perplexed and says that she did not spend that much money. The caller tells her that another person might have misused her IDs to issue a credit card. He then advises her to file a police complaint and offers to connect her to a police official on WhatsApp or Skype.
The fake police official, dressed in a khaki uniform, is on the ‘second line’. While registering the complaint, he pretends to discover that the customer’s bank account was used in a multi-million-rupee scam that involves Jet Airways and its owner, Naresh Goyal.
The policeman’s demeanour then turns intimidating. The victim denies any wrongdoing, but gives away her bank account statement and Aadhaar card details. The call then moves to a senior police official – the “third line” – who tells the victim that she is a suspect in the scam and under “digital arrest”. This comes with conditions: do not speak to another person about the case, stay alone in a room, and switch on audio and camera for constant police surveillance.
After hours, even days, the fake police official on the “third line” offers to release the victim in return for a bail bond. The scammers decide the amount they demand of the victim after studying the bank statement.
Different scam compounds have different levels of skills to deceive their victims. Some cannot even dress their fake cops in convincing uniforms. Others are much better. Dev told Scroll that his compound in Poipet had rooms designed to look like the office of a senior police official, with files, folders and portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and BR Ambedkar.
The scamsters who defrauded SP Oswal, the octagenarian chairman and managing director of Vardhman Group, of Rs 7 crore in August 2024 even had someone pose as the then Chief Justice of India, DY Chandrachud.
The Chinese groups incentivise good performance among the trafficked scamsters, Dev said. In the Poipet compound, the “first line” scammers made a 1% cut for every successful “digital arrest” scam. If they pulled off four to five scams in a day, the commission increased to 2%. If the steal in a single scam was more than Rs 1 crore, the cut increased to 4%.
There were perks for those who performed well – they could use their phones, step out of the compound on some days, even go out drinking with the bosses. Biryani was a common incentive for South Asians. Poor performers faced punishments, like sit-ups and long runs and could even be sold off to other cyberscam compounds.
A scammer adept at playing a fake police official told Dev and his friends that they could move to the “second line” if they worked hard. One of them, Arun, made it to the “second line” where he posed as an auditor from the Reserve Bank of India providing advice to the police.
“Our victim was a doctor from Thrissur in Kerala. He looked tense and on the verge of a breakdown,” Arun recalled. “He could not follow the conversation in English and so I was roped in. I was made to tell him some technical banking legalities in Malayalam and said that he should transfer all his money.”
However, the doctor realised something was amiss and called his lawyer. He then cut the call.
But most people fell for the scam – some at a huge cost. “We heard stories from our seniors about victims attempting suicide during ‘digital arrest’,” said Dev. “Like a Bengaluru woman with a three-month-old child who slashed her veins during the call.”
Not all Indians in the Poipet compound were victims of human trafficking. “Two scammers from Hyderabad told us that they were earlier involved in an Amazon scam in their city, and working in Cambodia was a promotion,” Dev said.
Dev and Arun told Scroll that Anurag, Adhirath and Shah made $2,800 per person for bringing them to Poipet. The bounty for recruiting an Indian woman can go up to $5,000 or more.
Scamming in Myanmar
Seven hundred kilometres away on the Thailand-Myanmar border, Arush Gautam and his friends, Ajay Kumar and Sagar Chauhan, remained imprisoned in a cybercrime hub called KK Park.
Spread over dozens of acres, KK Park is a collection of four scam compounds in Myawaddy, a region run not by the Myanmar military, but semi-autonomous armed groups, like the Karen Border Guard Force and the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army.
According to an Indian embassy advisory, most of the Indian victims being trafficked into Myanmar end up in this region, which the embassy described as “lawless” in an email to Rao, Kumar’s brother-in-law.
The Chinese bosses tasked Gautam and his friends with a classic “pig-butchering scam”, where cyberscamsters use fake identities to coerce and lure their victims into investing in apparently lucrative schemes to ultimately steal their money, akin to farmers fattening pigs for slaughter.
Working from a desk on a floor with 300 other scammers, Gautam had to pretend to be a Chinese woman named Ella and earn the trust of his male victims over WhatsApp conversations. His targets were men in countries such as the Netherlands, Russia, Romania, Switzerland and Dubai, whose numbers had been obtained from TikTok.
A typical conversation would last for four days. The first day was reserved for chit chat. On day two, Ella showed off her wealth – often sharing pictures of her lavish meals or her shopping sprees. On day three, she struck an emotional chord with the victim, talking about a difficult childhood.
On day four, Ella would reveal the secret of her wealth – product reviews on Ebay that earned her up to $25 each. The victim was then encouraged to try the scheme himself. He uploaded a review and Ella transferred $25 to him in cryptocurrency.
The scheme then moved to the “killing stage”. This is when Gautam had to hand over the conversation to a more experienced Chinese scammer. Under him, Ella would invite the other person to invest in firms that ran the Ebay product review business and make good profits. Once the victim poured in thousands of dollars, he would never hear from Ella again.
One out of every five targets would fall for the scam, Gautam told Scroll.
Not only did they work up to 18 hours a day, poor performance meant gruelling physical exercises or physical assault early in the morning. Gautam was thrashed on his back and legs by the “boss” on two occasions when he failed to lure victims.
Making an escape
The worst was reserved for those who wished to get out.
Three days into their jobs in Cambodia, the men from Kerala approached their recruiters and told them they wanted to quit. The recruiters agreed to let them go.
But the next day, the seven men were taken to an empty hall in the scam compound. “We were made to stand back-to-back from morning to evening,” recalled Dev. “When Abhinav tried to bend to ease the pain in his knee, he was electrocuted by a Cambodian guard with a stun baton. We were treated like street dogs and beaten mercilessly.”
The men were locked in the hall and brutalised for a week. The bosses told them that their freedom cost $2,800 each. When they suspected that Arun was sending SOS messages, he was taken to a building in rural Poipet, 13 km from the compound. “There, I was asked to call my parents and tell them that I was safe and happy,” Arun said.
On October 25, Dev and his friends were sold off to another scam compound in the border town of Bavet, on the Cambodia-Vietnam border, another notorious haven of cybercrime. Dev was convinced all of them would be murdered. “When we were leaving, the Chinese boss said, ‘You’ll never see us again.’”
On the way, the Malayalis appealed to the conscience of their Cambodian driver. They showed him their injuries and offered $250 if he dropped them at the Indian embassy in Phnom Penh. The driver agreed. In the capital, embassy officials interviewed the men over several hours and then put them up in official accommodation.
The embassy asked a Malayali businessman in Phnom Penh to help sponsor their journey back to India. On October 27, the seven men were back in Kozhikode.
In December, their alleged recruiters – Adhirath, Anurag and Naseeruddin Shah – flew back to Kerala from Cambodia, unaware that they were on the police radar. All three were arrested by the Kerala police. Scroll was unable to contact them for a response.
Between 2022 and 2024, the Indian government rescued 2,358 Indians from scam compounds in Southeast Asia, according to data presented by the Ministry of External Affairs in the Rajya Sabha in November 2024 – 1,091 of them were rescued from Cambodia, and 497 from Myanmar.
Nathan Paul Southern, the Phnom-Penh based director of operations at the Eye Witness Project, a research consultancy that investigates crime and corruption, told Scroll that it is harder to pull off rescue operations in Myanmar than in Cambodia or Laos. “You don’t know which armed group controls the areas that you need to go through,” said Southern.
Gautam and his friends from Uttar Pradesh made it out with much difficulty.
In April 2024, Sagar Chauhan’s family paid a ransom of Rs 8 lakh to the Chinese scammers for his release. The embassy facilitated his return to India.
Gautam and Kumar, however, were left behind – their families did not have money to bail them out. In July, they were sold off to another scam compound 30 km away, called the Kyaukhat compound, along with five other Indians. Gautam believes it happened “because trafficked Indians were being rescued from Myanmar and we were seen as liabilities now.”
Before they were let go, the Chinese bosses stuffed the seven men in a 10x10 feet room. “They made us run for an hour inside that room,” said Gautam. “One of the men was 55 years old. He struggled to run so he was beaten up.”
In late August, Gautam and a few others were led out from their dormitory and put inside cars which took them to the Indian embassy in Yangon. “We had been set free,” Gautam said. “I don’t know why that happened.”
Ajay Kumar is still stuck in Myanmar, dialling his parents once a week through a secret phone. In November, an official at the Indian Embassy told Ram Janam Rao over email that Myanmar authorities are working to rescue his brother-in-law, who is in touch with the Embassy.
“Whenever he calls, all he says is that we should somehow get him out of that place,” Rao said.
With additional reporting by Jisha Surya.
