New Delhi/Bengaluru: Walls as high as 15 ft run into every direction. Men armed with tasers and batons are on guard 24/7 to apprehend any runaways. On the one side is a seemingly unending shoreline and on the other, rows of multi-storeyed buildings which harbour office spaces, casinos, gambling dens and brothels. Equipped with ‘punishment rooms’ and state-of-the-art AI units, the complex described above is one of many operating in Cambodia.
Thousands from around the world are lured to these complexes on the pretext of a ‘data entry’ job, only to then have their passports snatched and be forced into a round-the-clock multi-billion dollar scam industry as cyber slaves.
Stephen Monthero (22) from Koppa in Karnataka’s Chikkamagaluru was one such victim. He was rescued by Indian authorities in December last year from the complex described above after his family approached the Karnataka government’s Non Resident Indian Forum.
Two others from Karnataka, Ashok from Chikkamagaluru and Jaishankar from Kolar, were also rescued. They were reportedly among the 5,000 Indians held captive in Cambodia where they were being forced to run cyber scams or sextortion rackets.
It is learnt that officials from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), along with those from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) have held several high-level meetings among themselves to discuss the situation in this regard. “We are aware of the situation and a report has been prepared on the same,” a source in the MEA told ThePrint.
In a statement Saturday, the MEA said, “Our Embassy in Cambodia has been promptly responding to complaints from Indian nationals who were lured with employment opportunities to that country but were forced to undertake illegal cyber work.” It added that 250 Indians have been rescued and repatriated so far, 75 in the last three months alone.
But the rescue operation like the one that resulted in the return of Monthero appears to have exposed just the tip of an iceberg underneath which is a thriving multi-billion dollar nexus involving human trafficking and forced labour.
As for Monthero, his story is the same as that of tens of thousands of others who were told by an agent that they were applying for a ‘data entry job’ in Cambodia. Monthero said he was asked to pay Rs 1.5 lakh to the agent who “referred him” to the “employers”.
“We were given tourist visas to Thailand and then taken to an airport close to the Cambodian border. At immigration, it was like they already knew what kind of work we had come for. We were then driven to Cambodia and given a two-month permit at the immigration checkpoint,” he told ThePrint.
Monthero added that he was accompanied by two other Indians, one of whom was an agent. “At the lodge in Phnom Penh, there was a person from Nepal, one from Pakistan and another from Jharkhand,” he recalled.
Once in Cambodia, they were tested for their typing and English-speaking skills before being taken to the main complex. Though he could not remember the name of the city, signs along the way and other hints point to Sihanoukville, a coastal city in Cambodia some 200 km from the capital Phnom Penh which locals also refer to as ‘Chinatown’.
“We were taken (to the compound) in the evening so that we don’t remember the roads. There, we were made to sign an agreement which was almost entirely in Khmer. Even the translated version was in Chinese. They told us that the salary would be Rs 75,000 and that we would be entitled to additional performance-based rewards and perks,” he said.
But Monthero added that during his time in Cambodia he could never manage to earn more than Rs 25,000 per month since his supervisors would deduct salary even for petty mistakes. “The scammers would take the money from the targets and invest in big companies. Then they would give those who worked well incentives from that profit,” said Monthero, the ITI degree holder who now works as a delivery partner in his native town.
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Cambodia’s cyber slaves-run scam industry
Sihanoukville in Cambodia is notorious for being a hub for this multi-billion dollar industry which employs and targets people primarily from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Malaysia.
In September 2022, Cambodian authorities claimed to have carried out a “crackdown” on the industry, raiding building and apartment complexes across Sihanoukville.
While this resulted in several arrests and deportations, as media reports from the time suggest, the industry continues to thrive and has since moved to other parts of Cambodia, namely Pursat, Koh Kong and Kandal provinces and the city of Bavet.
The Covid-19 pandemic too played a role in the growth of this industry.
Cambodia is widely seen as the epicentre of South Asia’s human trafficking industry along with Myanmar, Thailand and Laos. A 2023 report by the United Nations estimated that at least 100,000 people from around the world had been trafficked to Cambodia to run online scams — a claim the Cambodian government had at the time dismissed as “baseless”.
“They are subject to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary detention, sexual violence, forced labour and other forms of labour exploitation as well as a range of other human rights violations and abuses,” the report by the UN Human Rights Office had said.
Script, AI unit & ‘video sex room’
Monthero narrated a detailed account of how the multi billion-dollar cyber scam industry operates — a script to follow, actors on set complete with green screens and AI geniuses, besides punishment rooms for those who refused to take part in the scam.
“The goal is to lure the targets into making large investments on a trading platform and if they don’t agree, then the other way is to trick them into having video sex and forcing them to pay up,” he told ThePrint. Each worker was bound to abide by this fixed sextortion template if the investment scam would not pan out.
The shift for cyber slaves like him lasted for 12 hours each day, said Monthero, adding that his supervisors would play Chinese music on high volume using a 6-ft speaker to ensure that scammers remain active at all times, he added.
Explaining how he was trained, Monthero said, “We were given a seven-day detailed script. It starts with screening through Facebook, Instagram and other social media for good-looking women; models and celebrities.
“The next step was to monitor and imitate their social media activity on a fake profile. We changed their names and ages. If the woman whose image was being used was from southern India, then the fake character’s base was changed to somewhere in northern states or big metros.”
He added, “It started with a normal chat and trying to engage the target into a conversation. For instance, if my character played golf, I posted pictures of the same thing multiple times. If the target didn’t play golf, then I spoke about the sport with confidence to keep the conversation going.”
Monthero said the complex also had an in-house AI-based editing unit.
“If my character (fake profile) goes to the beach with skimpy clothes, our editing unit would use AI to make her look ‘appropriate’ to strike an emotional connection with the target in accordance with Indian sensibilities.”
Subsequently, on days that followed, scammers had to strike up conversations on real estate deals in the US, exhibit business credibility and share (fake) information in order to gauge the business, financial and personal interests of the target. Scammers would share fake business documents that even the “best lawyers cannot detect,” Monthero said.
The third day was for gathering as many details as the scammer could about the target’s personal life – background, family and familial troubles, if any.
Monthero said scammers then asked targets to invest using a trading platform which is banned in India. “Ninety percent of them traded on it. If a person invested Rs 10 lakh, the app showed profits, losses, all details. But these were just on the app as the money had already been taken out. We often used to seek investments by sending documents that looked like originals; even trained professionals could not identify them as forged.”
“If we could not hook the target within seven days, the fake character would abuse them and cut them off,” he added.
However, according to Monthero, most targets were only interested in “video sex” and not investments. He also revealed that one hacker oversaw all aspects of the operations.
“We had two AI rooms, one for video sex and another for chatting. Women as per physical attributes of the character were brought into the video sex room which had a makeup team to match nose rings, tattoos, nails etc. There is a green screen in the background and the woman wears a green dress. This way, if the target wants a video call, the AI matches the face and for the target it appears as though the woman is nude and touching herself even though she is fully clothed in the AI room,” Monthero explained, adding that requests for video calls were only entertained after the fifth day.
Top performers, he told ThePrint, would get incentives like an iPhone 15 Pro Max or bonuses running into lakhs, while underperformers would be subjected to pay cuts and those who refused to take part were sent packing to the dreaded ‘punishment rooms’.
Those lodged inside ‘punishment rooms’ would be deprived of food and human contact for days on end, he added.
“Since I didn’t do most of the things they asked me to, they used to force me to sit on the floor like a murga (cock), sometimes put me out of my room and denied me food.”
‘Many more are stuck there’
Monthero and the two others from Karnataka were rescued only after their families raised the issue with the state government which, in turn, approached the MEA and an Indian embassy official landed up at the complex in Cambodia along with local police officers.
“When the families reached out to us, we immediately started strategizing on how to get these men back. There are many more stuck there. This problem of Indians being lured into Cambodia exacerbated with the pandemic since most people ran into debts and were jobless,” said Dr Arathi Krishna, deputy chairman of Karnataka government’s NRI Forum.
She explained that even when embassy officials try to rescue those being forced to work as scammers, the “captors demand money for releasing them and their documents”. Around 200 more from the same region in Karnataka are still trapped in Cambodia, Krishna added.
In March, the Cyber Police of Rourkela in Odisha with the help of the Bureau of Immigration had arrested two individuals — Harish Kurapati alias Harry and Naga Venkata Sowjanya Kurapati alias Lisa — from Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in connection with a probe into a Cambodia-based cyber fraud racket. The arrests of eight individuals earlier had led investigators to Harry and Lisa, among 14 others.
“The accused persons first went to Cambodia through an Indian agent and joined a scamming company in Phnom Penh in April 2023. Targeting Indian male persons, the accused persons used to collect the profiles from various dating apps like Happn and chat with them posing as girls to dupe people. After some time, when the client started trusting the scamster, they convinced their targets to invest in cryptocurrency trading,” the Rourkela Police said in a statement at the time of the arrests in March this year.
A probe into the matter was initiated last December on the complaint of a senior government official who was reportedly duped of Rs 67.70 lakh.
A source at the Indian embassy in Phnom Penh told ThePrint that most of those who have managed to escape these complexes and return to India never filed a police complaint. “They want to move on from the trauma.”
However, Krishna believes little will change unless more victims come forward to narrate their ordeals. “They undergo harassment and torture for months and have to scramble for every penny to make it back home. They are deprived of food, and made to live in tiny dingy dark rooms. If these people file police complaints, the agencies can track down the companies and something will be done about this syndicate at a global level.”
For instance, even after he was rescued, Monthero said he had to spend another month-and-a-half in Phnom Penh trying to arrange money to buy a ticket for the flight back home. “I had to sell most of our gold to arrange for finances. At Bengaluru immigration, I lied that I was a chef in Cambodia in order not to get caught up in all of this once again.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)