The scammers who got scammed: How jobless Indians were lured into cyber slavery

In November, at a fruit and vegetable shop near Uttar Pradesh’s Dasauli village, Ram Janam Rao, 35, stared into his phone. He was reading out an email from the Indian embassy in Myanmar.

On August 6, Rao had written to the embassy about his 22-year-old brother-in-law, Ajay Kumar, who had been “stuck in Myanmar’s Myawaddy area for five months”.

“Please have patience,” said the embassy in an email sent a day later. “The area is inaccessible, beyond the control of Myanmar authorities so rescue/release is challenging for the embassy.”

In March 2024, Kumar and two friends from a nearby village – Sagar Chauhan and Arush Gautam – were offered jobs at a call centre firm in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

“There are no jobs here,” said Rao. “I was happy Ajay got something and felt assured because the three of them were going to work together.”

But the jobs turned out to be fake.

A month later, the three men were sitting in front of computers inside a compound in Myawaddy, a town on Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand, trafficked with hundreds of others from across the world, and forced to scam their victims by pretending to be Chinese women looking to meet wealthy men.

In previous stories in this special series, Scroll has reported on…

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