Voices Pushpesh Pant S Vaidhyasubramaniam Ravi Shankar Preeti Shenoy Dinesh Singh mata amritanandamayi THE new sunday express MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment april 7 2024 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Exclusive Web of Slavery Thousands of Indians are being trafficked, trapped and tortured in cyber slave camps across South-East Asia. An investigation N By Suruchi Kapur-Gomes andan Sah was living an ordinary but peaceful life at Behra Sikta in Bihar’s West Champaran. For this 30-year-old father of three, the proceeds from running a photocopying stand at home contributed to the budget of the joint family he was part of. Sah has a diploma in computer science; he fancied a better vocation. To his joy, a dream job came calling last December when he was offered a position as a data operator in a foreign country . The salary promised seemed like a life-changer, and Sah signed up immediately . For a fee of `1,30,000, his Delhi agent placed him in Cambodia. Sah packed his bags for a better life. Only, life became worse. He was put to work on internet scamming operations with a team of others trapped like him. Sah just couldn’t take it, not the long hours, not the criminal activity He protested, and . was beaten to an inch of his life. He was given electric shocks and tasered, and left to die alone in a Cambodian forest. Nearby villagers helped him call for rescue. Sah is back home now, battered and impoverished, but way wiser. Sah’s brutalisation was like a computer algorithm. Another unfortunate young man who rebelled against forced criminality was run through the same. “They used tasers, again and again. They hit my knees and joints with sticks. When we asked for water, they beat us more. I was bleeding, and sure I would die,” he says. Sah’s ordeal continues; it has only mutated into a search for justice. “I am at home now, recovering, and have begged my agent to return my money,” Sah says. The agent also took him to a hospital for treatment, but without an FIR, no one was willing to help. With no other option, Sah returned to Behra Sikta, and tried filing an FIR there, but was told that the “issue” was beyond the jurisdiction of that station. He has since written letters to the Prime Minister, Ministry of External Affairs, Union Minister S Jaishankar and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, all with a 16-GB pen drive that has “proof of torture and accounts of others”. “It is my prayer that someone helps us as we are left to die in such scam companies. I am poor and cannot afford a lawyer,” says Sah. He revealed two mobile numbers, both of Indians still stuck in a Cambodia fraud factory, but when contacted they refused to speak for fear of their lives. Nandan Sah's plight is a classic example of a new form of exploitation and human trafficking called cyber slavery, where computer-literate job-seekers are lured into cyber-scamming outfits offering attractive salaries for jobs that sound like marketing and currency trading. These dupes are almost always made to pay significant amounts of money to get the ‘job’. They are then put to work, scamming people with a myriad of fraud business opportunities and fake online romantic liaisons, mostly in the West and wealthy sections of developing countries. Long hours are par for these cyber slavery courses; those who can’t keep up are usually subjected to brutal punishment. In short, cyber slavery is human trafficking for forced criminality or exploitation in scamming activities run on the Web. Bad news broke through the woolly clouds of the election cycle last week: 5,000 Indians were found to have been forced into cyber slavery in Cambodia. These unfortunate captives were being bullied to cheat people living in India, extorting money by pretending to be law enforcement officials who said they had found contraband or suspicious materials in parcels addressed to their targets. They allegedly duped their marks of at least `500 crore over the past six months. The Indian government had to swing into action, and it did. Early last month, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) held a meeting with officials of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Ministry of Electronics `10,319 cr lost to cyber fraud between April 1, 2021 and December 31, 2023 and Information Technology (Meity), the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) and other security experts to draw up a strategy to rescue such ensnared Indians in Cambodia. The effort is beginning to yield results: a group of 80 Indians has been rescued from Cambodia by government operatives. Some are still stuck in Myanmar, however, since they entered the country illegally . Cyber slavery is a three-headed monster, encapsulating human trafficking and forced labour to create a vast criminal empire. It’s relatively new, having been seeded during the Covid pandemic, but estimates of the number of cyber slaves run into the thousands. And that’s a conservative figure. The Humanity Research Consultancy, a non-affiliated group dedicated to the fight against slavery and trafficking, estimates some 25,000 cyber slaves toiling in South-East Asia, largely in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines. Others say the figure could be four times that. 50% of cyber crime complaints received on the national cyber crime helpline originate in China, Cambodia and Myanmar No wonder then the issue was discussed at the ASEAN meet in May last year. Evidence reveals that cyber slavery is exploding. It began with The Virus: the ban on travel from China during the pandemic meant Chinese gangs running gambling and casinos in South-East Asia were cut off from their clientele. Given that these gangs had their own places, the lucrative world of cyber scams was a throw of the dice they couldn’t resist. All they needed was people familiar with English and computers. So the personnel had to be lured in. Making them work long hours and abusing them for ‘non-performance’ was the forced labour bit, and the criminal defrauding of nameless victims on the world wide web completed the triad. A worrying aspect of cyber slavery is its expansion to conflict. Sufiyan from Telangana is an example. The prospect of a high-paying IT job led him right into the middle of the warzone in Ukraine. Deceived into joining the Wagner Group, a mercenary force fighting for Russia, 22-year-old Sufiyan made an SOS call from the warzone even as shells exploded all around, killing a Gujarati boy next to him whom he knew. This Narayanpet boy’s family has contacted the Indian embassy in Moscow, appealing to officials for his safe return. There’s no word yet. Another Hyderabad lad, Mohammed Afsan, 30, was reportedly killed in bombings near the Ukraine frontlines. His family awaits the body. Sufiyan’s contract was to serve in the armed forces of Russia in an IT job, on a ‘letterhead’ from the ministry of defence of the Russian Federation for a military service contract in Kostroma district. Enticed by the `1.5 lakh per month salary, travel included, he and three other young men from Karnataka’s Kalaburagi district ended up as cannon fodder on the Donestk front in eastern Ukraine. Another 60 Indians are believed to have been drafted similarly through an agent running a YouTube channel in Maharashtra. Cyber slaves are being recruited from across India. The Rourkela Police recently detected a cyber crime syndicate with links to cyber slavery, stock fraud, suspected forgery of passports, etc. The accused were arrested following 210 complaints from India as per data from JCCT Management Information Systems (JIMS) of I4C, MHA. The accused—of their own volition—joined a scamming company in Cambodia where they posed as girls to target Indian males through a dating app called Happn. Once they established a modicum of trust, targets were convinced to invest in crypto currency trading. The perpetrators later joined another company focused on investment scams by creating fake online applications showing Indian stock market fluctuations, targeting Indians to invest in fake stock options by showing fake returns online. Gifts were also offered to sweeten the deal. Victims were first lured into investing, getting paltry initial returns. Then the app stopped payouts. This gang confessed to defrauding about 40 people, one of `2 crore. In the world of cyber slavery, closing the deal on a victim and extracting money as the final step is called pig butchering, a term that is rather apt for the final act of these crimes. In the swampy world of online and digital scams, the runaway growth of cyber slavery shows how human capital is expendable—riding the hopes of the less fortunate or those looking to make a quick buck illegally India’s job . hopefuls from the lower strata are easy targets. The I4C, entrusted with providing a framework and eco-system for law enforcement agencies (LEAs) for dealing with cyber crime, helps investigate and research cyber crimes and forms the knowledge arm. The understandable greed of job-seekers and the criminality of syndicates working through what is called social engineering feeds cyber slavery . In 2023, some 13 lakh cases of online financial fraud were reported in India, with about 1.41 lakh of them related to social media. Many job-seekers acquiesce to the illegal nature of work, and the few that oppose it are held captive, their documents confiscated. Turn to page 2 Mohammed Afsan, a 30-year-old from Hyderabad, was reportedly deceived into enlisting in the Russian army. He has lost his life in the Ukraine conflict
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