Patralekha Chatterjee | Why do so many get duped in job scams, cyber fraud?

Why do so many young, educated Indians continue to be tricked by fake job offers from transnational crime syndicates based in Southeast Asia? A slew of recent reports suggests that instead of their dream job, the victims find themselves in prison-like compounds, typically in parts of Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, where they are coerced into working as online scammers. Some have been rescued. Many remain. Survivors who have managed to flee come from different parts of the country. The most recent instance involved jobless young men in their twenties from Greater Noida who had been trapped by a cybercrime ring in Cambodia. They managed to escape after paying huge sums of money.

It is not a new story. We have heard similar stories from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and the National Capital Region, and other countries.

In October 2022, the Laotian Times reported 130 Indian professionals had been rescued from Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. They had been duped by fake job offers in Thailand but eventually taken elsewhere and coerced into committing cyber fraud by criminal networks.

Since then, state governments in India as well as the Centre repeatedly issued advisories, cautioning Indians against “fake job offers” abroad. “Got a job in Cambodia, Myanmar, Lao PDR? You may end up as a cyber slave. Please verify the offer, organisation carefully and check details of work visa,” warns Tamil Nadu police’s cybercrime wing on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Despite the cautionary words, dozens of articles about Southeast Asia’s notorious scam compounds, crackdowns, arrests, the horror story continues. Young professionals still get trapped.

The big question: Why?

There are no easy answers. However, a few things leap out.

First, the criminal gangs are systematically zeroing in on the young, educated, equipped with some technical skills but low exposure to the world.

“The trafficking victims are lured by job advertisements that offer high pay and interesting professional work. The victim secures the ‘job’ after one or more false job interviews, signs a six-month work ‘contract’, then quickly travels to Southeast Asia for what they believe will be an exciting new professional role… The modus operandi of the organised crime networks in terms of carrying out scams and fraud is quite consistent across countries in the Mekong region… They primarily target university graduates who are fluent in multiple languages, have skills in information technology, familiarity with the social media, and some working knowledge of cryptocurrency. These conditions are important for the organised crime groups because they require a skilled labour force to carry out criminal activities in cyberspace, from various scams to money laundering and illegal gambling,” says a September 2023 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Another 2023 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights notes that most trafficking victims are forced to perpetrate “online fraud using a range of platforms, including fake gambling websites and cryptocurrency investment platforms, as well as romantic and financial scams (so-called “pig-butchering”), where fake romantic relationships or friendships are used to defraud online users of significant amounts of money.”

Second, recruiters from crime networks are targeting youth comfort zones: select social media platforms. “Fraudulent job advertisements and posts have also been identified on Facebook (Meta) and Instagram. Contact between organized crime groups and potential trafficking victims occurs through WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, and Messenger,” says UNODC.

A report (April 18, 2024) by Cambodian journalist Taing Rinith in the Khmer Times, a Phnom Penh-based English-language newspaper, flags “messages on Facebook and Telegram, the two most popular platforms in both India and Cambodia, posted by users that appeared to be ‘recruiters’ specifically looking for Indian candidates to fill positions based in Cambodia”.

“Instead of posting their announcement with the media outlets or job recruitment agencies,” the newspaper noted, “the recruiters have written them in groups and channels created for the purposes of finding jobs or networking sites among the expats in the kingdom”. The recruiters, the report points out, do not mention the name or identity of companies or businesses. Instead, they say that the job will be based “in commercial hubs, specifically Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville and Poipet”.

Third, the desperation for jobs “abroad”, along with scant knowledge of the world outside, makes for a lethal mix. Especially at a time when a fall in white-collar jobs in the information technology sector has left many fresh graduates and young people jobless. Online hiring activity for both hardware and software IT had plummeted by 18 per cent last year from 2022, reported business news channel CNBC this April, citing data from Foundit, a popular job portal.

Fourth, scammers are now using artificial intelligence to convince victims that they are talking to a real person. This complicates things further.

Global crime syndicates are focusing on social media to target gullible youths. The warnings and advisories about fake jobs must reach the exact same spaces. India is extremely vulnerable because it has many young people with IT skills who are relatively low-paid, without jobs, or in jobs that don't match their qualifications. They are easy targets for organised crime networks who are mostly interested in recruiting young people who are familiar with the social media, smartphones, and cryptocurrency.

Just a few days ago, French news agency AFP reported that security forces in Laos had arrested nearly 800 people working for a cyber scam network in a shady “special economic zone” on the border with Myanmar and Thailand.

This is a good sign. But one must remember that the trans-boundary criminal networks have strong links with each other and are always shifting to new locations to evade capture. Several analysts have pointed out that these criminal operations are often concentrated in Chinese-run special economic zones (SEZ) and other regulatory voids in the middle Mekong region, particularly in areas of Shan State. There is lots of publicly available information about what goes on in these SEZs. In recent times, China has attempted to crack down on cross-border Internet crimes. Analysts say a crackdown by China’s law enforcement in late 2023 on such illegal compounds along the China-Myanmar border led many of these operations to move south to Myanmar’s Karen State, bordering Thailand, as well as to Cambodia and Laos.

Given this backdrop -- industrial-scale cyber fraud operations alongside technological innovation and increasing professionalisation of transnational criminal networks across Southeast Asia, India must use every available platform to alert young people who may be easy targets while simultaneously engaging with other affected countries in the region and beyond.