Thousands, including Indians, rescued from cyber-scam centres in Myanmar in recent weeks
Such ‘scam compounds’ are staffed with foreigners lured outside their home countries with fake job offers, as ‘Scroll’ found in its reportage.
Thousands who were forced to work in cyber-scam call centres in Myanmar were rescued in recent weeks as authorities in Thailand launched a crackdown on such establishments, The Guardian reported.
They included several Indian citizens.
As part of the ongoing action against the scam compounds, 140 Indian citizens were rescued from centres in Myawaddy, Myanmar, The Times of India reported on Wednesday. The Indian government has been facilitating their repatriation back home.
Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said on February 19 that about 7,000 persons have been rescued from illegal call centres in Myanmar and are waiting to be brought across the border to Thailand.
The Thai Police said that they were preparing to receive about 10,000 foreigners rescued from the centres.
In the Cambodian city of Poipet too, Thai authorities halted cross-border telecommunication services to suspected scam call centres, Camboja News reported. This sparked a dispute with Cambodian law enforcement officials, who said that Thailand’s crackdown was a one-sided action rather than a collaboration with local authorities.
Thailand began acting against the centres after a 22-year-old Chinese actor was abducted after being scammed through a call. The actor was abducted after he arrived in Thailand for what he thought was a casting meeting with film producers.
Earlier this week, Scroll published a series of extensive reports about Chinese crime syndicates that run cyber crime centres from Southeast Asia, mainly Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. These highly sophisticated “scam compounds” are staffed with thousands of people, many of them from India, who are lured with fake job offers and then forced to work on scamming people back home.
The area around Myawaddy has among the largest clusters of scam compounds in the region and, possibly, the world, The Guardian quoted Jeremy Douglas, an official from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as saying.
Read Scroll’s reportage of the illegal scam call centres:
- India’s cyber-scam epidemic is part of a multibillion global industry. This series traces a full arc
- The scammers who got scammed: How jobless Indians were lured into cyber slavery
- I travelled to ground zero of the cyber scams targeting India. Here is what I found
Workers describe torture, coercion
Several of those working at the scam call centres said that they were subjected to torture and were forced to work for 20 hours every day. They said they were beaten when they could not achieve the targets.
“I got a lot of punishments,” Reuters quoted a 19-year-old Ethiopian man named Yotor as saying. “I received electric shocks every day.”
A 21-year-old man from Bangladesh named Faysal told the news agency: “When a client says ‘I love you’, then we start washing his brain how to get money.”
He added: “We are not scammers. We are victims.”
Many Chinese citizens were also found to have been working at the centres.
“I really want to go home,” AFP quoted a Chinese man as saying. “I wanted to go home as soon as I arrived. I really miss my parents and family.”
How scam call centres proliferated
A network of scam compounds such as the ones in Myanmar is among the reasons why cyberfrauds have increased exponentially in India in recent years.
Indians lost Rs 11,333 crore, or $1.3 billion, to cyber scams in just nine months last year, according to the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, an agency attached to the home ministry.
From 71 cybercrime complaints registered every day in 2019, the number shot up 87 times in 2024 to 6,175 complaints a day.
However, those who make scam calls from such centres are victims themselves, having been lured into going abroad through fake job offers, Scroll found. When they tried to leave, they were “beaten mercilessly”.
In May, India’s foreign ministry warned citizens against fake job offers in Cambodia and Laos, and urged them to seek employment only through authorised agents approved by the government.
