By Sarosh Bana, Mumbai Correspondent.
Within two months of the Nepal police smashing a Chinese-Nepali-Indian ring of loan app operators targeting poor loan-seekers in India from out of Nepal, a massive human-trafficking scam where Chinese and Thai swindlers have enslaved Indian jobseekers in Myanmar’s cyber fraud factories has come to light.
The brutal loan recovery racket, which drove several borrowers in India to commit suicide and shamed many others on social media, had been operating from Nepal, with the whole enterprise being controlled by local and visiting Chinese fraudsters.
Reports now speak of Thai, Chinese, Malaysian-Chinese and Myanmarese thugs running a multinational operation, where not only unwitting Indians, but also Thai, Chinese, Malaysian, Cambodian, Laotian and Myanmarese people promised jobs in Thailand’s IT sector have been trafficked to work in captive conditions in illegal businesses in Myanmar.
Over 300 Indians have been enslaved and forced to work for cybercriminal operations after being trafficked to Myawaddy, which is on the Thai border and under the control of the Myanmar military and its affiliated Karen State Border Guard Force (BGF).
The victims flew to Thailand on visitor visas, lured by false promises of high salaried jobs in digital sales and marketing. They were then taken captive by trafficking gangs who seized their passports before ferrying them by road and by boat to Myawaddy across the Moei River that separates the two countries. Myawaddy is the most important trading centre in the region and is located in southeastern Myanmar, not far from the Thai border town of Mae Sot.
The victims were forced to labour for nearly 18 hours a day, with little food and water, to make money for the cyber-racketeers by tricking people overseas – across countries like Thailand, China, Brazil, the UK and India – using apps and social media tools or posing as account executives of microfinance companies. Women victims were forced to engage in paid sex chat with their targets.
The heavily-guarded labour camps made escape well-nigh impossible. If anyone was caught trying to flee, retribution was swift and merciless, including being beaten up, administered electric shocks, and made to stand for 24 hours in a water jail without food and water. There were also harsh fines, even as they were paid meagre wages.
Their plight was known only when a couple of them managed to send out an SOS video to their relatives in India. They revealed that when they refused to work or were even unable to exert themselves further, they were starved and attacked with tasers that incapacitated them temporarily.
A few did manage to buy their way out, gaining their freedom after paying a ransom in crypto currency. The family of one IT professional was asked to pay $5,000 for his release, but even after paying, they await the youth’s return. Those released indicated that news of the Indians being held hostage in Myanmar had led to an increase in internal inspections, with some of the captives being shifted to other places.
The Myawaddy area reportedly became a human-trafficking hub after Chinese entrepreneurs flocked to the $15-billion “new city” project opened in nearby Shwe Kokko in 2017 to set up gambling ventures, including casinos, along with cybercrime activities. The project is a joint venture between the BGF and the Yatai International Holding Group of Hong Kong.
Opposition parties in India have been petitioning the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government to ensure the release of the trapped Indians. They point to the bilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that the Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had approved two years ago, in November 2019, on cooperation between India and Myanmar for Prevention of Trafficking in Persons, and Rescue, Recovery, Repatriation and Reintegration of Victims of Trafficking.
Calling for a “multidimensional strategy” in tackling human trafficking at domestic, regional and international levels, the government had affirmed: “Strengthening cooperation between border control agencies and establishment of direct channels of communication between India and Myanmar can be an effective tool in countering trafficking in persons and promoting cross-border and regional cooperation.”
Importantly, the MoU was meant to “protect and assist the victims of trafficking, as also ensuring speedy investigation and prosecution of traffickers and organised crime syndicates”. It also proposed the setting up of ‘Working Groups’ and ‘Task Forces’ to prevent human trafficking, and “developing and sharing database on traffickers and victims of trafficking”.
Woefully for the victims, these lofty goals remained on paper as their relatives spoke of apathy and unhelpfulness from the Indian embassies in both Yangon and Bangkok.
As had been the experience of Indian medical students left stranded in besieged Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion, relatives of those Indians enslaved in Myawaddy have alleged that embassy officials were unresponsive to their pleas for help. Some mentioned that officials actually advised them to pay off the captors to secure their relatives’ release.
