Patralekha Chatterjee | Why Are So Many People Being Scammed by Job Opportunities and Cyber ​​Fraud?

Why are so many young, educated Indians still being duped by fake job offers from transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Asia? A series of recent reports suggest that instead of their dream jobs, victims are ending up in prison-like complexes, mostly in parts of Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, where they are forced to work as online scammers. Some have been rescued. Many have stayed. Survivors who have managed to escape come from different parts of the country. The most recent case involved unemployed young men in their 20s from Greater Noida who were lured into a trap by a cybercriminal gang 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 that 130 Indian professionals had been rescued from Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia after being scammed by fake job offers in Thailand but eventually taken elsewhere and forced to commit cyber fraud by criminal networks.

Since then, state governments in India and the Centre have repeatedly issued advisories warning Indians about “fake job offers” abroad. “Got a job in Cambodia, Myanmar, Lao PDR? You could become a cyber slave. Check the offer, the organisation carefully and check the work visa details,” the cybercrime wing of the Tamil Nadu police warned on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Despite warnings, dozens of articles about the notorious scam complexes, crackdowns and arrests in Southeast Asia, the horror story continues. Young professionals are still falling into the trap.

The big question: why?

There are no easy answers. However, there are a few things that stand out.

Firstly, criminal gangs systematically target young people, highly educated, with some technical skills, but with little experience in the world.

“Trafficking victims are lured by job offers that offer high salaries and interesting professional work. The victim gets the ‘job’ after one or more fake interviews, signs a six-month work ‘contract’ and then quickly travels to Southeast Asia for what they think will be an exciting new professional role… The modus operandi of organized 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, are familiar with social media and have some working knowledge of cryptocurrency. These conditions are important to organized crime groups because they need a skilled workforce to carry out criminal activities in cyberspace, from various scams to money laundering and illegal gambling,” according to 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 found that most trafficking victims are forced to “commit online fraud using a range of platforms, including fake gambling websites and cryptocurrency investment platforms, as well as romance and financial scams (the so-called ‘pig slaughter’), where fake romantic relationships or friendships are used to extort significant sums of money from online users.”

Secondly, recruiters of criminal networks target the comfort zones of young people: selected social media platforms. “Fraudulent job postings and messages have also been identified on Facebook (Meta) and Instagram. Contact between organised crime groups and potential victims of trafficking occurs via WhatsApp, Line, Telegram and Messenger,” says UNODC.

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

“Instead of posting their announcements to the media or recruitment agencies,” the newspaper noted, “the recruiters have written them in groups and channels created for the purpose of finding jobs or networking sites among expatriates in the Kingdom.” The recruiters, the report points out, do not name or identify companies or businesses. Instead, they say the job will be located “in commercial centers, particularly Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville and Poipet.”

Third, the desperation for jobs “abroad,” coupled with a lack of awareness of the outside world, makes for a deadly mix. Especially at a time when a decline in white-collar jobs in information technology has left many recent graduates and young people unemployed. Online hiring activity for both hardware and software IT was down 18 percent last year compared to 2022, business news channel CNBC reported in 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 makes things even more complicated.

Global criminal syndicates are turning to social media to target gullible youth. The warnings and advice about fake jobs are meant to reach the exact same spaces. India is extremely vulnerable because it has a large number of young people with IT skills who are relatively low paid, unemployed or in jobs that do not match their qualifications. They are easy targets for organized crime networks that are particularly interested in recruiting young people who are familiar with social media, smartphones and cryptocurrency.

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

This is a good sign. But we must remember that the cross-border criminal networks have strong ties with each other and are always moving to new locations to evade capture. Several analysts have pointed out that these criminal activities are often concentrated in Chinese-run special economic zones (SEZs) and other legal loopholes in the middle Mekong region, particularly in areas of Shan State. There is a lot of publicly available information about what is happening in these SEZs. Recently, China has been trying to crack down on cross-border cybercrime. Analysts say that a crackdown by Chinese law enforcement in late 2023 on such illegal complexes along the China-Myanmar border has led to much of this activity moving south to Myanmar’s Karen State, bordering Thailand, and into Cambodia and Laos.

Against this backdrop – industrial-scale cyber fraud coupled with technological innovation and increasing professionalization of transnational criminal networks in Southeast Asia – India must use every available platform to warn young people who could be easy targets. At the same time, India must work with other affected countries in the region and beyond.