Five hundred and forty-nine Indian citizens who were forced to work at cyber-scam call centres on the Myanmar-Thailand border were repatriated on Monday and Tuesday on board Indian Air Force aircraft.

The first flight with 283 citizens arrived from Mae Sot in Thailand on Monday, the Ministry of External Affairs said. The second group with 266 citizens arrived in Delhi on Tuesday.

“The Government of India has been making sustained efforts to secure the release and repatriation of Indian nationals lured to various Southeast Asian countries, including Myanmar, with fake job offers,” the ministry said on Monday.

A third flight is expected to repatriate more Indians on Wednesday, The Hindu reported.

New Delhi has warned its citizens against such scams, advising them to “verify credentials of foreign employers through [diplomatic] missions abroad and check the antecedents of recruiting agents and companies before taking up a job offer”.

In February, several persons, including Indians, who were trapped in such centres were rescued following a crackdown on such establishments by Thai authorities.

Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said on February 19 that about 7,000 persons had been rescued from illegal call centres in Myanmar and were waiting to be brought across the border to Thailand.

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.

China and Indonesia repatriated some of their citizens in February, Reuters reported.

In January, 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.

Read Scroll’s reportage of the cyber-scam centres:

The Central Bureau of Investigation and the Intelligence Bureau have recorded statements of the Indians who were brought back home on Monday and Tuesday, The Times of India reported.

“We were told we’d be handed over to state police for clearance,” said one of the persons who had returned. “We’re happy to be back; we feared detention in Myanmar or Thailand.”

The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, under the Ministry of Home Affairs, is also investigating the matter, while the National Investigation Agency is probing the human trafficking rackets that trap job seekers, The Hindu reported.

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 external affairs 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.