The Indian Foreign Ministry announced Monday that 283 Indian nationals rescued from enslavement by cybercrime rings in Southeast Asia have been brought home from Thailand by the Indian Air Force (IAF).
The United Nations published an alarming report in August 2023 about criminal gangs using fake job ads to lure people from India, China, and Indonesia, into camps where they were enslaved as email and telephone scammers.
The scam centers, scattered across Southeast Asia but heavily concentrated in the Thailand-Myanmar border region, forced their prisoners to work in rackets such as crypto fraud, illegal online gambling, and online dating swindles. The gangs found it easy to lure eager young job seekers with attractive tech-sector job offers, then lock them up in sweatshops surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard towers.
Victims who escaped from the scam centers reported they were beaten and tortured if they tried to escape, or failed to generate enough revenue. Crime rings made billions of dollars in profit from their phone and cybercrime networks.
In January, a young Chinese actor named Wang Xing was kidnapped by Thai gangsters who lured him with a phony casting call. Wang was held captive for three days, during which time the gangsters shaved his head and began training him to work as a scam operator.
Wang was rescued in a secretive operation by Thai police. His story became a sensation on Chinese social media, angering the Chinese government and terrifying Thai officials, who depend on Chinese tourism for national income.
Wang’s case appears to have been the last straw for Southeast Asian governments. The ugly junta that runs Myanmar was evidently pressured by China, one of its key allies, to crack down on the scam centers in its border regions. Over 7,000 prisoners from two dozen countries were freed by police raids in early March.
Thailand conducted its own raids, arresting a hundred Thai nationals — and issuing arrest warrants for two Chinese nationals described as “gang leaders.”
Organized crime experts say most of the scam rings are run by Chinese bosses. The largest share of victims are Chinese as well — about 2,000 of the 7,000 prisoners rescued since the international crackdown began a month ago were Chinese nationals. China has been treating all of its repatriated citizens as criminals.
The Thai government began studying the feasibility of building a wall along the border with Cambodia to prevent human trafficking and other smuggling activities.
Indian officials arranged for seven buses to carry its nearly three hundred rescued citizens from the Myanmar border to Thailand’s Mae Sot airport, where they boarded a military transport aircraft for the flight back to India.