New Delhi: Barber, cow breeder, restaurant owner, cybercrime ‘mastermind’.
Suresh Kumar Sain has been all of the above. Diagnosed with a kidney ailment about five years ago, the 43-year-old was always on the edge of a sinking ship until he went rogue in April 2023. Over the next few months, Sain trained and worked as a scamster specialising in ‘digital arrests’ and allegedly recruited at least 100 others to defraud fellow Indians.
Sain worked as the ‘India link’ for Chinese syndicates running scam farms in Cambodia. He made frequent trips to Cambodia, scheduling interviews for new recruits and making sure they got hired as digital scamsters.
With the money he earned as commission, Sain opened a restaurant in Cambodia. But his joy ride came to an end when he was taken into custody by the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (STF) from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport on 25 January this year upon his return from Cambodia. This was in connection with a ‘digital arrest’ case lodged in Lucknow last August on a complaint by one Dr Ashok Solanki.
In his complaint to the police, Solanki alleged receiving a call from persons impersonating as Crime Branch officials working with the ED and the CBI. He was confronted about a courier containing pen drives, passports, credit cards and 420 grams of the illegal drug MDMA. Solanki said scamsters duped him of Rs 48 lakh over two days.
Police sources told ThePrint that Sain, among the 12 arrested in the case, was the ‘mastermind’ of the India arm of this international cybercrime racket. Those arrested also include one Pankaj Surela from Rajasthan’s Alwar, who said he travelled to Cambodia for training at Sain’s directions and upon his return joined the racket, for Rs 3 lakh per month.
Surela later confessed to the police that callers employed by these Chinese-run syndicates would “pose as CBI, Crime Branch or ED officers” and follow a script: tell targets they were being investigated and would be placed under digital arrest till the probe is over.
Once the trap was set, the target was intimidated and told to transfer funds to bank accounts in India in exchange for closure of the case.
According to Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), the nodal agency under Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) dealing with cybercrime, as many as 92,323 cases of digital arrests were reported across India between January and November last year. During this period, complainants claim to have lost a total of Rs 2,140.99 crore to ‘digital arrest’ scams—and that’s just the figure for cases reported to the authorities.
In Part 1 of this two-part series, ThePrint looks at how a man earning a living as a barber in Rajasthan got involved with Chinese-run ‘digital arrest’ scam farms in Cambodia and ended up recruiting for them in India.
Life-changing trip to Cambodia
Suresh Kumar Sain belongs to Ram Nagar in Rajasthan’s Alwar district. His father, who was a barber by profession, died in 1994. Four years later, Sain lost his elder brother. The breadwinner responsible for his six sisters and his late brother’s family, Sain married his late brother’s widow in 1999.
During interrogation, Sain said he started working as a barber in Alwar in the year 2000 before relocating to Haryana’s Gurugram where he continued to work as a barber till 2011. Between 2011 and 2015, he worked at a dairy farm. He then opened his own grocery shop and was working as a vendor till 2019. The next three years changed everything.
Sometime in 2019, Sain was diagnosed with a kidney ailment.
A senior police officer familiar with the case told ThePrint on condition of anonymity, “He (Sain) said during questioning that the operations (for kidney ailment) cost him Rs 18 lakh and he ended up in huge debt.”
After he recovered, Sain bred cows for a living till April 2023. This was when he learnt, through an agent he identified as one Rafiq Bhati, about Indians going to Cambodia and earning Rs 3.25 lakh per month. The agent, introduced to Sain by his daughter’s in-laws, arranged for his travel to Cambodia from Delhi via Kolkata and Bangkok.
Upon his arrival in Phnom Penh, Sain met a Bangladeshi man who took him to a hotel where he stayed for five days. Sain had been in contact with the Bangladeshi, introduced to him by Nitin, a Mumbai-based agent.
Sain told interrogators that the Bangladeshi took him to “five call centres in and around Phnom Penh city” but he did not make the cut despite multiple rounds of interviews. Then, two Pakistani-origin men—Madi and Yasin Chaudhary—took him to a cyber fraud call centre in the Cambodian capital run by the Chinese. Here, Sain was selected, along with men from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, among other Southeast Asian countries.
Narrating the early days of his 10-month stint in Cambodia, Sain told interrogators: “After the selection, I underwent training for several days to commit digital arrest fraud in countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal by pretending to be a CBI, narcotics or crime branch officer. I was also given training to dupe people with tempting offers of doubling money in a short time by investing in online trading, shares, etc.”
Sain: The ‘intermediary’
Sain’s story is different from others who claim they were lured to Cambodia or Laos on the pretext of a job and forced into ‘cyber slavery’ as digital scammers. Instead, Sain returned to India from Cambodia with an in-depth understanding of these syndicates and decided to expand their tentacles.
He began by accompanying willing Indians to Cambodia, where he helped them land a job as a digital scammer. In addition to the commission he charged recruits, the scam farms paid Sain USD 500 per recruit.
“He would be the intermediary between the Chinese companies and the new recruits and would take them around for interviews and also ensure that they qualify,” said a second senior police officer familiar with the case.
Sain revealed during interrogation that the interviewers were also from India, Pakistan, Nepal or Bangladesh. He admitted to getting about “30 callers selected” while another “75 were selected through Yasin Chaudhary”.
Among those who landed the job was Pankaj Surela who told interrogators that he paid Rs 4 lakh to Sain who promised him a job in Cambodia.
Surela said a Pakistani citizen picked them up from the airport and took them to the Chinese-run scam farm some 500 km away, where callers were trained to “impersonate officers from customs and narcotics departments”.
They, according to Surela, were given a script: tell the target that a parcel is being sent to Malaysia, Sri Lanka or China etc. in their name and it contains illegal drugs, fake passports and other items; the targets were then told that the case has been transferred to crime branch, narcotics or CBI.
Adding that the callers were given contact details of potential targets, Surela said the task was to convince the target they had a parcel waiting, or they were being placed under digital arrest since law enforcement agencies from another country couldn’t immediately arrest them physically.
He also told interrogators that scam farms use AI and ChatGPT to forge documents that are then shown to the targets.
The targets, he said, are placed under constant surveillance using Skype, with multiple scammers working on a single target at any given time.
Surela also said that digital scammers intimidate the targets enough to force them to share personal details, which are then used to keep the scam running.
Further, Sain and Surela revealed that a large chunk of the proceeds of the scam were converted into cryptocurrency for the Chinese bosses, besides about 30 percent paid to bank account holders and their operators in India.
On his ties to Yasin, Sain said the two parted ways in March 2024 after which he opened a restaurant in Phnom Penh. He had to close it after a mere two months and opened another named Manorath in Kampot city.
Sain told interrogators that visas for the callers were sent to his restaurant and he charged Rs 1.5 lakh from each India willing to go to Cambodia. He then charged the scam farms a commission of USD 1,000 per recruit.
“This time too, I had come to India to take some callers back to Cambodia,” Sain said, when questioned about his return to India which led to his arrest.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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