30,000 Indians in Southeast Asia Amid Cyber Slavery Allegations

The Bureau of Immigration under the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs has directed states and Union Territories to carry out investigations on individuals who have not returned from Southeast Asia amid allegations that some of these Indians have been trapped in cyber slavery schemes. A report by the bureau reviewed by the Indian Express says that of 73,138 Indians who traveled to Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam between January 2022 and May 2024, almost 30,000 have not returned yet. Reviewing the data on these individuals, it most of the non-returned are male (72 percent), between the ages of 20 and 39 (58 percent) and have used Delhi airport to depart the country (42 percent).

This is despite the fact that the non-returned are from all over the country, with between 3,100 and 3,700 each from the populous states of Punjab, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu and an additional 2,900 from Uttar Pradesh. Delhi itself was the territory with the sixth most people not returned at 2,100 despite its smaller size.

Back in March, reports on 5,000 Indians trapped in cyber slavery in Cambodia had emerged as the Ministry of Home Affairs had worked on a strategy to return individuals home. A source told the Indian Express at the time that in this instant, Southern Indians had been duped into traveling to Cambodia under the pretense of being offered data entry positions, but instead were forced to carry out cyber frauds on Indians back home. Usually, passports are taken away from cyber slavery victims so that they cannot return home. People who end up in these schemes are usually forced to work long hours and endure assaults by their captors if they try to escape.

According to the article from March, the scam brought in 500 crore rupees ($60 million) in just the six months prior. Scamming methods allegedly included fake cryptocurrency investments and extortions in some cases when scam victims were told law enforcement had found incriminating material on them. The issue had come into the spotlight when a cyber crime operation that had been taken people to Cambodia was busted in December in Odisha and eight were arrested. In the aftermath, three people trapped in Cambodia were returned to Bengaluru. The affected said they knew of 200 more Indians held and that they had been working with Chinese and Malaysian nationals in Cambodia.

In March and now, the Bureau of Immigration is working with the Department of Telecommunications. Today, the department said that it had disconnected more than 20 million mobile connections and blocked 200,000 mobile handset that have unclear or forged customer information and are under suspicion of having potentially been used in cyber crime. The department has also been working on blocking spoofing, which refers to the fraudulent display of a local phone number when placing a call instead of a foreign phone number.