The Goa Police have arrested three persons, including a Kazakh national of Chinese origin, for their alleged involvement in trafficking Indians to cyber-scam call centres in Thailand, The Times of India reported on Thursday.

Those arrested are 22-year-old Adithya Ravichandra, a resident of Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore, 36-year-old Rupnarayan Gupta from Maharashtra’s Mumbai and 22-year-old Talaniti Nulaxi, a Kazakhstan citizen. They allegedly ran a travel agency that duped people on the pretext of promising jobs abroad before forcing them into cyber slavery.

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:

Nulaxi was apprehended at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport on Wednesday, the same day a look-out notice was issued for him as he tried to escape the country, Hindustan Times reported quoting police officials.

“The gang was also involved in hiring of the victims for committing forced financial fraud using social media platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat and Zoom,” Superintendent of Police Rahul Gupta was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times. “The gang conducted meetings and interviews on Zoom to discuss their functioning.”

The police said they were investigating the possibility that this group was “looking at starting call centres similar to those in Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar, in India, Nepal and a few other countries”.

Nulaxi stayed in Bengaluru for five days where he was “in talks to hire space in multi-storey buildings for the same”, Goa’s Director General of Police Alok Kumar said.

Kumar also said that the group was involved in recruiting young women with promises of “work from home” jobs, only to later exploit them in honey traps and other forms of extortion.

Honey trapping refers to a person being enticed into revealing information through romantic or sexual relationships.

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