Scroll’s Ayush Tiwari on Sunday won the 2025 Asian College of Journalism award in the investigative journalism category.

Tiwari was awarded for his investigative series on cybercrime published in January 2025 and February 2025.

Tiwari reported on Chinese crime syndicates that run cybercrime 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.

However, those who make scam calls from such centres are victims themselves, having been lured into going abroad through fake job offers, Tiwari’s investigation found.

The three-member jury was “particularly impressed by the broad canvas of the story and the dogged pursuit of its various strands across countries”, the journalism college said.

Read stories from the cybercrime series here.

The special series tracked the full arc of this terrifying story in which even the scamsters are victims.

Tiwari reported on people who lost their lifetime savings to cyber frauds, as well as the Indians who went to Southeast Asia and were trapped as cyber slaves to carry out these scams. In the final part of the series, he took readers to ground zero of the cyber scam industry – the first ever such report in the Indian media.

The jury noted that Tiwari was the first Indian journalist to report on the crisis from towns in Cambodia.

“With cybercrime complaints in India including digital arrests having risen to an average of 6,000 a day, he traces the scam’s origin in China and the political patronage in Cambodia that allows these operations to thrive,” the jury said. “His series exposes the grim human price of unemployment in India.”

Scroll’s Tabassum Barnagarwala received a special mention for her investigative series “Silent killers are stalking Indian hospitals. Who is responsible?” The reports investigated the untold story of hospital-acquired infections in India.

The jury members were media commentator Sevanti Ninan, journalist Nirupama Subramanian and Mumbai-based photojournalist Sudharak Olwe.

The Chennai-based journalism college announces the annual award on World Press Freedom Day.

Scroll’s Arunabh Saikia had won the award in 2022 for his investigation titled “Adani power stations get coal from Hasdeo Arand mine allocated to Rajasthan”.

Analysing railway freight records obtained using the Right to Information, Saikia had found that millions of tonnes of coal from a mine in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand forest were sent to Adani-owned power stations.