Online users nowadays are faced with clever scams, harassment, bullying, blackmail, extortion and grooming or honey trapping schemes on a daily basis. Also, young women and men passing out from hundreds of colleges offering technological degrees are lured with fake job offers in South-East Asian countries. Going by a UN Human Rights report released recently, those digitally capable are inducted into deadly traps and are coerced into committing cyber crimes and financial scams. The hapless new recruits are forcibly engaged in such illegal online scams under grave threats to freedom and life. The ‘Golden Triangle’ – the tri-border region where Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos meet – once earned notoriety for being one of the most significant hubs for illicit drug production and transnational organised crimes.
Historically, the Golden Triangle was known for vast poppy fields and dominated the global heroin and opium trade. But it has now become a hub of nefarious cybercrimes creating nightmare for both women and men drawn into the trade from various Asian countries, including India. Millions are now falling victim to financial frauds that wipe out their hard-earned money, while they remain unclear about the scale of operations of these cyber criminals.
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These criminal rackets have allegedly been subjecting thousands of people to torture, rape and slavery and forcing them to operate online scams and fleece or terrorise innocent online users through fake schemes. Such startling revelations have been made in a recent UN Human Rights report on cyber scam operations and human trafficking in South-East Asia. As the world prepares to mark the centenary of the 1916 Slavery Convention, survivor testimonies gathered by UN Human Rights show that practices amounting to slavery and crime continue to exist within cyber scam operations across South-East Asia. These operations rely on the trafficking of people who are forced to commit online fraud under threat, violence and coercion. Survivors described conditions that include torture, arbitrary detention, debt bondage, rape and servitude that international law explicitly prohibits.
A global cybercrime economy of a size of $64 billion has been built, according to the UN report. Over 300,000 people are estimated to have been trafficked into scam operations across South-East Asia, and the victims come from over 60 countries spanning Asia, Africa, and beyond. The scam compounds, where the recruits are kept confined virtually as bonded labourers, are spread across Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. Survivors reported being forced to work up to 19 hours a day, often without days off. The horror stories have surfaced to warn both aspiring tech professionals and ordinary individuals desperately looking for overseas jobs to build their careers and support families against promises of cyber jobs. They are lured by agents and acquaintances who paint a rosy picture about prospective employment in these South Asian countries. But once they land in the so-called workplaces, they are trapped in a loop of violence and forced cybercrime.
UN Human Rights found that recruiters frequently manufactured urgency, pressuring people to make rapid decisions with limited opportunity to verify offers. Cyber scam operations in South-East Asia have expanded rapidly in recent years, forming what UN experts have described as one of the fastest-growing criminal economies in the world. This form of scam, known as ‘pig-butchering,’ is now so profitable that entire compounds have been set up by criminal groups, housing thousands or even tens of thousands of workers at a time. Run primarily by Chinese and Taiwanese criminal syndicates, illicit cyber scamming has expanded across Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia since 2020, leading to estimated fraud losses of tens of billions of dollars. Victims interviewed by UN Human Rights reported being forced to perpetrate a wide range of online fraud, including cryptocurrency scams, fake gambling operations, romance and impersonation scams and online extortion.
According to the report, many entered the compounds believing they had secured legitimate employment, only to find themselves unable to leave. Such international rackets cannot be run without complicit government agencies protecting them.
The Indian government, which is enthusiastically promoting the idea of a big hirable young population of Indians available for job opportunities abroad, needs to be mindful and keep a watch on recruitment of the country’s young tech talent aspiring for high-paying jobs in South Asian countries by both foreign agencies and local recruiters who eventually sell the recruits to a slave market. This is becoming a literal case of brains behind bars, one way or another.
