Nine months after his return, Jignesh (name changed to protect privacy) still wakes up and thinks he is on campus. The 23-year-old son of a security guard from Ahmedabad left for Bangkok on December 8, 2024, after being told it was a call-centre job. He believed he was joining the growing stream of young Indians looking for work abroad in the hope of earning enough to provide a better life for their families.
Instead, he was smuggled into Myanmar, labeled an illegal immigrant, and forced into a vast cyber-slavery network that has in recent years turned thousands of Indian job seekers into unwilling contingents of global fraud operations.
He says, “By the time I realized what was happening, I had been taken illegally across the river border to a guarded compound in Myanmar, and taken into the machinery of a cyber-fraud empire, where Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Africans and people from other developing countries were held captive and trained to defraud strangers for profit.”
“At night, I still think about life in that compound in Myawaddy (a town in southeastern Myanmar). We were real slaves, not employees, waking up every day to cheat people online,” Jignesh says, looking at his friend, who was smuggled into Myanmar via Thailand.
In 2025, two batches of people were rescued from Thailand-Myanmar cyber slavery and sent back to India: Jignesh and a few others in March, and another batch of 465 Indians in October, 64 of whom were from Gujarat. International operations are coordinated with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Center (I4C) and the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Cyber slavery is a trafficking model in which recruits, lured by fake job offers, are put under physical and psychological duress and forced to carry out organized cyber-fraud schemes.
The job offer Jignesh received through a social media post seemed straightforward: data entry and customer support for a Thai company for 25,000 Thai baht (about ₹70,000). The agent arranging his travel assured him that accommodation and food would be taken care of, and visa formalities would be completed on arrival. “They told me everything would be finalized within a week,” he recalls.
However, when he landed in Bangkok, there was nothing like what he was promised, he says. She was reportedly taken to a hotel away from the city center and told she needed to wait for a few hours. Later, Jignesh and other victims say that after hours of driving they were taken to near the Thailand-Myanmar border. Transfers were made by car and eventually they were asked to cross a narrow river at night in a small boat – the Moi River, which separates Thailand from Myanmar.
burden of poverty
Tanmay (name changed), a 27-year-old resident of Ahmedabad, says, “Many people are forced to cross the river at gunpoint. Agents have ‘settings’ with officials at the border, who give them the date and time to cross.” Tanmay recalls, “Once we crossed the river, they told us what the actual work was. If we refused, they said we would have to pay between ₹70,000 to ₹1.5 lakh to be taken back across the river to Thailand.” “Some people who managed to arrange money were left on the other side.”
Most of the recruits could not afford such a sum and stayed there, accepting the terms set by the agents. Some people like Jignesh tried to find their way out by talking. According to him, the recruiters told the men that since the company had spent money taking them across the border, they were now “in debt” and that there was a price to pay for their release. That price for Jignesh was ₹3.75 lakh.
In Ahmedabad, his father, who earns ₹15,000 per month, was struggling to understand why his son kept calling for money, but he understood that his son was trapped. With no savings, he mortgaged his small ancestral house near Gandhinagar and took a loan of ₹3.75 lakh. After weeks of phone calls, negotiations and transfers, Jignesh was finally allowed to leave the premises and return to Thailand. He arrived back at Ahmedabad International Airport, the same airport from where he had left with the bundle of dreams a day before his visa expired. He was thin, worried and burdened by his father’s sacrifice.
Today, he works in an ice cream factory in Ahmedabad, and earns equal to what his father earned. Their days are filled with long shifts, cheap meals, and regular repayments on the loan that bought their freedom. “I went there because I wanted to earn for her,” says Jignesh. “Instead, she had to risk everything for me.” He becomes silent before adding, “I came back. But somewhere, there must be another family still waiting.”
Many returnees from Gujarat said that once inside the complexes in Myanmar, they were trained for one to two weeks and made to work for 15 to 18 hours a day. A group of workers were instructed to impersonate women online and interact with people in the United States or the United Kingdom, leading them to fraudulent investment schemes after tricking them into believing they were in a romantic relationship.
Another group was trained for India-centric scams: calling people pretending to be police personnel or officials of Customs, TRAI, or RBI and coercing them with claims of ‘digital arrest’, SIM cards blocked due to misuse of Aadhaar, or fraudulent investment schemes including cryptocurrency scams.
“We were given daily targets. If the target amount was not achieved, we were physically and mentally tortured,” says Jignesh. He pointed out that companies have their own apps for financial transactions.
the man behind big trouble
After the victims returned to Gujarat, the State Cyber Center of Excellence (CCOE) began investigating their statements, and one name cropped up repeatedly among those rescued in both March and October: Neel, It is known among victims as “The Ghost”. According to their accounts, Neel contacted them and arranged interviews, luring them to go abroad. Several victims also told investigators that it was Neel who received them at Bangkok airport and then helped smuggle them across the border into Myanmar.
“Of the 64 persons who were sent abroad, 40 to 50 took the name of Neel as their recruiter. In 10-12 statements, the name of one Hitesh Somaya came up, and the name of a woman, Sonal Faldu, of the five trafficked people came up. But as the investigation progressed, we found that Neel was the link connecting both Hitesh and Sonal. This made him our primary person of interest,” said the CCOE police. Says Superintendent Rajdeepsingh N Zala.
Further technical analysis led investigators to arrest Hitesh and Sonal, who revealed that “Neil” was actually 39-year-old Nilesh Purohit, a recruiter working under a Chinese handler known in the circuit as Yamaha. Forensic examination of his phone revealed Purohit’s number and email ID. “We traced an email account that was active in Vidyanagar area of Anand,” says Zala. “A team was immediately sent to get it.”
The officer recalls that what happened next unfolded like a sequence from an action film. “On November 16, when we were heading towards Anand on the Ahmedabad-Vadodara Expressway, his live location changed – he was heading towards the Ahmedabad airport. We alerted our teams in the city, and Purohit was stopped at the airport parking area,” he says.
Investigators say Purohit, who was reportedly on board a flight to Malaysia, played a role in the smuggling of at least 500 Indians into cyber-fraud complexes in Southeast Asia.
Gujarat Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghvi says Purohit led a global syndicate with over 126 sub-agents and had links with agents in Pakistan and 100 companies in several countries that supplied manpower to cyber-fraud centres.
Records reportedly indicate that Purohit earned between $2,000 and $4,500 per victim, and gave 30% to 40% of the amount to his sub-agents. “The financial transactions were conducted through mule bank accounts and multiple cryptocurrency wallets,” says Sanghvi.
future fraud
Under international pressure, Myanmar’s army bombed several buildings inside KK Park. The operation led to the arrest of hundreds of alleged scammers and the rescue of several foreign nationals who were being deported to their respective countries.
Dhawal Joshi (name changed), 28, a resident of Ahmedabad, who had gone to the CCOE office in Gandhinagar to give his statement and identify Purohit, described KK Park as a tightly guarded complex, with armed men in military-style uniforms deployed throughout the complex. He says, “We believed that they were genuine military personnel and that the operations were legal and supported by local authorities.”
Joshi says that Neel picked him up from Bangkok airport and warned him that if he wanted to return home, he would have to pay a huge amount of money. Inside KK Park, they were also asked to woo friends and acquaintances from India with incentives ranging from ₹2 lakh to ₹3 lakh per person. He says, “I was planning to escape from there, so why would I trap another person there? It was very inhumane, and they were very cruel. There were many women inside, mostly foreigners, who were also trapped.” Joshi left for Bangkok in December 2024 and was brought back in March.
According to investigators, Purohit, a class 12 pass, had worked as an accountant in a cyber-slavery operation before setting up his network out of Bangkok around September-October 2024.
IPS officer Zala says Purohit regularly monitored Interpol’s wanted list and kept track of global cyber-slavery cases to check whether his name was mentioned before planning his travel to avoid arrest. “He has been extremely uncooperative. From two phones and a laptop seized from him, we learned that his next operation was ‘Project India’ – a plan to recruit 1,000 Indian nationals for companies in Cambodia with a commission of about $4,000 per person.”
Messages recovered from his devices reportedly showed his conversations with contacts. Jala says Purohit, considered one of the most wanted operatives linked to the cyber-slavery network, had traveled to India to strengthen his network for the new project.
The officer says, “Neel is largely silent, but his phones are silent.” He said that most of the clues are coming from digital evidence. “Their devices contained photographs of over 2,000 people and a video of a foreign woman being tortured.”
Victims are trained to identify potential targets by analyzing review pages of salons, spas, golf clubs, horseback riding clubs and gambling sites. They are trained in social engineering techniques to send messages using fabricated profiles with profile photos of attractive men and women.
Officials explain that fraudulent companies use AI-generated photographs, and when victims request video verification, AI-based video calls are arranged. However, in Neel’s case, a network of real models was also employed to trap the targets, says Jala.
Now, police have another fear: “Those who were victims have the potential to become high-ranking cyber fraudsters, capable of running or expanding similar operations within India,” says Jala. They are considering constant surveillance for internal security purposes.
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
