Southeast Asian governments rescue Indian employees from digital job frauds

• Indian government claims to have rescued 130 Indians who were misled by agents.
• Agency offered fictitious job prospects in the information technology sector.
• The freed Indian workers had been imprisoned and coerced into committing cybercrime.

The Indian government claims to have rescued 130 Indians who were misled by agents who offered lucrative but fictitious job prospects in the information technology sector and compelled them to labor in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia.

The Ministry of External Affairs’ spokeswoman, Arindam Bagchi, claimed on Friday that the freed Indian workers had been imprisoned and coerced into committing cybercrime for businesses involved in digital fraud and fake cryptocurrency.

According to him, the organizations appeared to be operating through agents in Dubai, Bangkok, and certain Indian towns and were using social media to advertise for Indian workers to fill fictitious but extremely lucrative jobs in Thailand.

According to Bagchi, a large number of the workers were transported illegally across the border into a region of Myanmar that is hard to reach due to the local security situation.

He claimed that approximately 50 workers had been transferred from Myanmar to India, while some others were still being questioned by police in Myanmar after entering the country without a visa.

He said that 80 further Indian laborers had been rescued from Laos and Cambodia.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month, MK Stalin, the head elected official of Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, said that 300 Indians, including roughly 50 Tamils from the state, were being kept captive in Myanmar.

Similar frauds have caused harm to residents of other countries in the area, including Cambodia, where an Al Jazeera investigation in July discovered an intricate web of businesses that lured people into slave-like conditions to work in internet scams.

In Cambodia, cyber-scam operations had captured Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malaysian, persons from Myanmar, and others from further afield, according to an investigation by Al Jazeera’s 101 East.

21 Malaysians who had been rescued from human traffickers in Cambodia and Laos were sent back home on Thursday.

Saifuddin Abdullah, Malaysia’s foreign minister, said that 273 of the 401 individuals reported missing in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand have now been found.

Except for 60 people who are currently being processed in immigration detention facilities in those nations, the majority have returned, he said.

According to a UN representative, cyber-scam networks are established in nations with lax law enforcement, luring educated young people with promises of huge salaries. These networks frequently have ties to international organized crime.

If the employees fail to defraud victims into sending money to foreign bank accounts over the phone, they would be threatened with isolation and violence.

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