CYBER-SLAVERY OF INDIAN YOUTH IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN SCAM CENTRES: TRAFFICKING FOR FORCED CRIMINALITY AND THE LIMITS OF INDIA’S ANTI-TRAFFICKING RESPONSE
Arvind Singh Kushwaha,
Assistant Professor, School of Law, UPES Dehradun, India
and Ph.D. (Research Scholar) at Faculty of Law, University of Delhi, India.
Email – arvind.kushwaha@ddn.upes.ac.in.
ABSTRACT
The paper examines the emerging phenomenon of Indian youth being trafficked to cyber-scam centres in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, where they are coerced into operating large-scale online frauds. Drawing on doctrinal analysis and desk-based empirical research, the study reads international instruments (Palermo Protocol, ILO and UNODC guidance) and Indian constitutional and criminal-law provisions alongside secondary materials, including NCRB data, MEA and CBI statements, parliamentary replies, investigative journalism and NGO/INGO reports. It argues that the characteristic patterns of recruitment (fraudulent job offers and deceptive online/offline intermediaries), movement (staged use of legal visas followed by illicit transfers to lawless border zones) and exploitation (confiscation of passports, confinement, threats, violence and forced cyber-fraud under quota regimes) clearly satisfy the elements of trafficking in persons and forced labour, and fall within the emerging category of trafficking for forced criminality rather than mere irregular migration or “bad” overseas employment. On the response side, the paper finds that while India has mounted notable rescue and repatriation operations, issued public advisories and initiated some prosecutions against recruiters, its anti-trafficking and cybercrime frameworks are struggling to adapt normatively and institutionally. Legal characterisation remains inconsistent, data architecture renders cyber-slavery largely invisible, and victim protection and rehabilitation schemes are only weakly aligned with the non-punishment principle or the specific needs of cyber-slavery survivors. The paper concludes by proposing targeted legal, institutional, data and victim-centred reforms to align India’s practice more closely with international standards on trafficking for forced criminality.
Keywords: Cyber-slavery, Trafficking for forced criminality, Cyber-scam compounds, Indian migrant youth, Victim protection and non-punishment principle etc.
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the past few years, Southeast Asia has emerged as a major hub for large-scale online fraud operations run from fortified “scam compounds” in countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. These compounds typically operate from special economic zones or loosely governed border areas, where weak law enforcement, corruption and the presence of armed groups create near-total impunity. Inside these walled enclaves, transnational criminal networks run industrialised cyber-fraud operations: workers sit in rows of computers, using scripted conversations, fake investment apps and romance scams to defraud victims across the world. Reports by international organisations, investigative journalists and human rights groups describe these sites as spaces of high-tech exploitation, where digital infrastructure is combined with old-fashioned violence and coercion to produce a new configuration of exploitation that many commentators now characterise as “cyber-slavery”.
For India, this phenomenon is not a distant regional curiosity but an emerging trafficking and security concern. Indian nationals – particularly young, educated job seekers from urban and semi-urban backgrounds – are increasingly being lured with advertisements for high-paying jobs in “customer support”, “IT” or “digital marketing” in Thailand, Myanmar or other Southeast Asian destinations. Once they arrive, their passports and phones are confiscated, they are transported to isolated compounds and coerced into running online scams. High-profile rescue operations, consular interventions and media exposés have begun to reveal the scale of the problem, with stories of Indians escaping under fire, paying ransom for release, or being repatriated in batches after complex diplomatic negotiations. This makes cyber-slavery not only a matter of individual victimisation but also a challenge for India’s migration governance, cybercrime policy and anti-trafficking framework.
Against this backdrop, “cyber-slavery” can be understood as a new form of trafficking in persons that merges digital economies with coercive labour regimes. The core features – deception at the recruitment stage, cross-border movement, confiscation of identity documents, restriction of liberty, threats and physical abuse, and the extraction of labour (in this case, criminal online fraud) for the profit of organised networks – mirror the classic elements of trafficking and forced labour recognised in international law. What is novel is the specific purpose: instead of being trafficked into brothels, construction sites or brick kilns, victims are forced into high-volume cybercrime. This shift disrupts traditional images of human trafficking and demands that legal and policy analysis move beyond a narrow focus on sexual exploitation or manual labour to acknowledge forced criminality in online spaces as an equally serious form of human trafficking.
1.2 Statement of the problem
This study examines the trafficking of Indian youth into cyber-scam compounds in Myanmar and other Southeast Asian jurisdictions for the purpose of forced criminality. Young Indians are recruited through online and offline channels, including social media advertisements promising attractive salaries in foreign call centres, encrypted messaging groups, dubious placement agencies, and local “agents” who arrange travel and documentation. Many are issued legitimate visas to ostensibly legal destinations such as Thailand, but are then transported onward—by land or through irregular border crossings—into lawless enclaves where scam compounds operate. Once inside these compounds, individuals are subjected to coercive control: passports are seized, movement is restricted, and compliance is enforced through threats, physical violence, financial penalties, and the fear of being “sold” to more abusive operators. Under these conditions, they are compelled to participate in cyber fraud (e.g., contacting strangers, operating fake investment platforms, manipulating victims online) not as voluntary offenders, but under duress with limited capacity to refuse. A core finding is the conceptual and institutional confusion surrounding how this phenomenon is understood and addressed. State institutions often frame these cases as cybercrime, illegal employment abroad, visa fraud, or generic “job scams.” As a result, victims may be treated as irregular migrant workers who made a poor choice—or even as potential cyber offenders—rather than as trafficked persons entitled to protection. This framing materially affects which legal provisions are invoked, investigative priorities, how cases are recorded in official statistics, and the remedies available. When cyber-slavery is not recognised as trafficking for forced criminality, anti-trafficking tools, victim protection mechanisms, and international cooperation frameworks are underutilised or bypassed. The central problem, therefore, is both the existence of cyber-slavery and the gap between the lived reality of trafficked Indian youth and the legal–conceptual categories currently applied to their situation.
1.3 Objectives of the study
Considering the foregoing background and problematisation, the study pursues a set of interlinked objectives. First, it seeks to map the modus operandi of trafficking networks that funnel Indian youth into Southeast Asian scam centres, with particular attention to recruitment channels, transit routes, intermediaries and the organisational linkages between Indian-based agents and foreign operators. Secondly, it aims to analyse the profile and lived experiences of trafficked Indians as they appear in available case material, including official records, investigative reports and survivor accounts, in order to capture patterns of vulnerability, coercion and resistance within cyber-scam compounds.
Thirdly, the study proposes to examine the extent to which these practices conform to, or challenge, existing international and Indian legal frameworks on trafficking in persons, forced labour and forced criminality, thereby clarifying the appropriate legal characterisation of cyber-slavery. A fourth objective is to evaluate the legal–institutional response of key state actors – including the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTUs), the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), specialised cybercrime cells and the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) – in terms of prevention, investigation, rescue, data collection and victim protection. Finally, the study seeks to identify key data and policy gaps in the current approach and to propose reforms that are explicitly victim-centred, emphasising recognition of trafficked persons, non-punishment for coerced criminality, and more robust cross-border cooperation.
II. CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATIONS
At the core of this study lies the concept of human trafficking, which, in international law, is generally understood as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means such as threat or use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, or giving/receiving payments to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation itself is interpreted broadly to include, at a minimum, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, and sexual exploitation. In other words, trafficking is not limited to the movement of a person across borders; it is a process that combines an act (what is done), a means (how it is done), and a purpose (why it is done), culminating in a situation of exploitation.
Within that broad category, forced labour refers to any work or service which is exacted from a person under the menace of any penalty and for which the person has not offered themself voluntarily. It is typically characterised by indicators such as deception in recruitment, retention of identity documents, restriction of movement, non-payment or underpayment of wages, excessive working hours, surveillance, threats, and physical or psychological violence. Forced labour therefore focuses on the condition of work – the “labour relation” – rather than on how the person arrived there, though in practice it frequently overlaps with trafficking where deceptive recruitment and movement for exploitative work are involved.
A more specific notion relevant to this paper is forced criminality – situations where individuals are compelled, through coercion, threats or deception, to engage in unlawful activities for the benefit of another. International guidance increasingly treats trafficking for forced criminality as a recognised subtype of trafficking in persons, where the purpose of exploitation is not merely economic gain through lawful work under abusive conditions, but the use of trafficked persons as instruments to commit crimes such as theft, drug cultivation, fraud, or cybercrime. The coerced person is, in principle, a victim rather than a typical offender, and the law is expected to respond by recognising their trafficked status and applying the “non-punishment” principle.
In this context, the study employs “cyber-slavery” or cyber-scam exploitation as a working conceptual term to describe the situation of persons who are recruited (often through fraudulent promises of IT or BPO work), transported across borders, confined in secured compounds, and forced to carry out online frauds and scams under threats and violence. Although “cyber-slavery” is not yet a formal legal category, the term captures the fusion of digital labour (running chat scripts, operating fake investment platforms, phishing, romance scams) with forms of control that resemble contemporary slavery and forced labour. It is used here to foreground the fact that, despite the white-collar appearance of computer-based work, the underlying relationship is one of coercion, dispossession and extreme dependency, rather than free employment.
It is also important to distinguish trafficking from related but distinct phenomena such as smuggling and irregular migration. Smuggling of migrants generally involves the consensual facilitation of a person’s illegal entry into another state, typically in exchange for payment, with the relationship between smuggler and migrant ending after arrival. Trafficking, by contrast, can occur with or without border crossing and is defined by the presence of exploitation as the ultimate purpose, with coercive or deceptive means playing a central role. Irregular migration, meanwhile, refers more broadly to movement that does not conform to the legal requirements of the sending, transit or receiving states (for example, overstaying visas or working without proper permits), but does not automatically imply exploitation. In cyber-scam scenarios involving Indian youth, an individual may begin as a seemingly voluntary migrant responding to a job offer, but once deception, coercion and exploitative control emerge, the situation crosses into trafficking and forced labour, even if the initial travel was lawful.
2.1 International legal framework
The principal international instrument governing trafficking in persons is the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (the Palermo Protocol), which supplements the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. The Protocol conceptualises trafficking through a three-part structure of act–means–purpose. The act element covers any recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons. The means element refers to threat or use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, or giving/receiving payments to achieve the consent of a person having control over another. The purpose element requires that these acts and means be directed towards exploitation, which expressly includes, inter alia, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, and servitude. For children, the “means” element is not required. Within this framework, once the constituent elements are present, the apparent “consent” of the victim is legally irrelevant.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) further operationalises the notion of forced labour by identifying a set of indicators that help practitioners determine whether a particular situation is one of forced labour in practice. These indicators include, among others: deception during recruitment; retention of identity documents; restriction of movement; isolation; physical and sexual violence; intimidation and threats; debt bondage; abusive working and living conditions; and excessive overtime. The presence of multiple indicators, especially in combination with an obvious imbalance of power, is treated as strong evidence that the work or service in question is not truly voluntary but is being exacted under the menace of penalty.
International agencies such as UNODC and IOM have, in recent years, elaborated guidance on trafficking for forced criminality and the corresponding non-punishment principle. This line of guidance stresses that when trafficked persons are compelled to commit offences as a direct consequence of their trafficking situation—for example, drug cultivation, pickpocketing, benefit fraud, or cyber-fraud—their criminal conduct should be assessed through the lens of coercion and exploitation. States are encouraged to adopt laws and policies that prevent the prosecution or punishment of such victims for unlawful acts they were compelled to commit, provided those acts are a direct result of their trafficked status. The rationale is that treating coerced individuals as offenders, rather than victims, undermines the objectives of anti-trafficking law, deters victims from seeking assistance, and ultimately reinforces impunity for traffickers who operate behind them.
Viewed against this normative backdrop, the recruitment and exploitation patterns associated with cyber-scam compounds align closely with the international definition of trafficking and the ILO indicators of forced labour. The process typically begins with fraudulent recruitment: individuals are promised legitimate jobs in customer service, IT support or digital marketing, with attractive salaries and benefits. Once they accept, they are moved across borders, often with valid visas, but then diverted to lawless zones where their passports are confiscated and their movement is tightly controlled. Inside the compounds, they are subjected to coercive and exploitative working conditions—long working hours, unrealistic financial targets, constant surveillance, threats of violence, and, in some cases, beatings or torture. Non-compliance may result in physical harm, financial penalties, or being “sold” to another operator.
This pattern encapsulates the Palermo act–means–purpose structure: recruitment and transportation (acts) are carried out through deception and abuse of vulnerability (means) with the ultimate purpose of exploitation, namely, the extraction of labour in the form of systematic online fraud. Simultaneously, multiple ILO forced labour indicators are present: deception, retention of identity documents, restriction of movement, threats and violence, abusive conditions, and excessive overtime. Because the exploited activity is itself criminal—perpetrating cyber scams against third-party victims—the situation also falls squarely within the emerging category of trafficking for forced criminality. Under international guidance, the persons running these scams under coercion should be treated primarily as trafficked victims entitled to protection and non-punishment, while the true authors of the criminal enterprise are the networks controlling the compounds and reaping the profits from their labour.
2.2 Indian legal framework
The Indian legal response to trafficking and exploitative labour is anchored, at the constitutional level, in Article 23, which prohibits “traffic in human beings and begar and other similar forms of forced labour”. This guarantee operates both vertically and horizontally, protecting individuals against exploitation by the State as well as private actors, and has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to cover a wide range of coercive labour arrangements, including bonded labour and work for less than the minimum wage. In the statutory domain, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013 redefined section 370 IPC and introduced section 370A IPC, providing a detailed offence of trafficking of persons and of exploiting a trafficked person, closely modelled on the Palermo definition. With the coming into force of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), these provisions have been substantially carried forward and restructured, notably through section 143 BNS (trafficking of person), section 144 BNS (exploitation of a trafficked person) and section 146 BNS (unlawful compulsory labour), situated within the chapter on kidnapping, abduction, slavery and forced labour. Parallel legislation – such as the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976, the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956 (ITPA), the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986, and provisions under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act addressing forced or bonded labour of Dalits and Adivasis – supplements this framework by criminalising specific exploitative practices and mandating rescue and rehabilitation measures.
In relation to cyber-scam exploitation, several other legal regimes are engaged. The Information Technology Act 2000 (as amended) criminalises unauthorised access and data misuse and, more pertinently, cheating by personation using computer resources (section 66D IT Act), which is frequently invoked in online fraud cases. These provisions operate alongside general IPC/BNS cheating and fraud offences (e.g., sections 415, 420 IPC and their BNS counterparts), as well as offences relating to criminal conspiracy and organised crime, including BNS provisions which explicitly mention cyber-crimes and trafficking within the definition of “organised crime”. The Passports Act 1967 and Emigration Act 1983 provide the basis for regulating overseas recruitment, emigration clearance and passport misuse, and are often used against unauthorised recruiting agents involved in sending workers abroad under false pretences. In principle, therefore, the trafficking of Indian nationals into scam compounds can be addressed through a combination of trafficking offences, forced labour provisions, cybercrime laws and migration-control statutes.
However, forced criminality as a specific purpose of trafficking is not explicitly named in Indian criminal legislation. The statutory illustrations of “exploitation” in section 370 IPC and section 143 BNS emphasise physical or sexual exploitation, slavery, servitude, beggary and forced organ removal. Doctrinally, nonetheless, the breadth of the language—particularly references to slavery-like practices, servitude and unlawful compulsory labour—permits an interpretation that includes coerced participation in criminal acts where the trafficked person’s labour is systematically extracted for the benefit of an organised crime syndicate. Moreover, the constitutional prohibition of “traffic in human beings and other similar forms of forced labour” in Article 23 is wide enough to encompass situations where individuals are compelled to perform online fraud under threats and violence, even if the activity itself is categorised as an offence under other parts of the code.
Indian case law on trafficking and forced labour has, to date, been more fully developed in the context of bonded labour and exploitative manual work than in relation to forced criminality. In People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India (the “ASIAD workers” case) and Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India, the Supreme Court gave a broad, purposive reading to Article 23, holding that “forced labour” includes work performed under the compulsion of poverty, indebtedness or other forms of indirect coercion, and not merely labour extracted at gunpoint. In Gaurav Jain v. Union of India, dealing with prostitution, the Court emphasised the need for rescue and rehabilitation of women and children in situations of sexual exploitation, underscoring that they are rights-holders rather than offenders to be penalised. While these decisions do not directly address cyber-scam settings, they establish a normative trajectory: persons in situations of trafficking and forced labour are to be treated primarily as victims whose rights to dignity and rehabilitation must be secured, even where their activities would otherwise fall foul of criminal law. Jurisprudence that explicitly articulates a non-punishment principle for trafficked persons compelled to commit offences remains limited, but the combination of Article 23 doctrine, trafficking statutes and rehabilitation-oriented judgments provides a doctrinal foundation on which recognition of trafficking for forced criminality can be built.
2.3 Analytical lens for the study
Against this legal backdrop, the study employs an analytical framework with two principal axes. The first axis asks whether the practices observed in cyber-scam compounds meet the legal elements of trafficking and forced labour under Indian law, read in harmony with international standards. This involves systematically mapping empirical patterns—fraudulent job offers, cross-border movement, confiscation of passports, confinement, threats and violence, coercive work conditions and extraction of profit—onto the act–means–purpose structure embedded in section 370 IPC and section 143 BNS, together with Article 23 and the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act. Where these elements are satisfied, the study treats the situation as trafficking for forced labour/forced criminality, even if the official narrative or charge-sheet uses narrower labels such as “job scam” or “cyber fraud”. Particular attention is paid to the purpose element: whether the labour extracted—running online scams—is so structured and coerced that it can be characterised as exploitation within the meaning of trafficking provisions, notwithstanding its criminal nature.
The second axis evaluates whether state responses are aligned with international anti-trafficking and human rights standards, including the Palermo Protocol, ILO forced labour indicators and UNODC/IOM guidance on trafficking for forced criminality and the non-punishment principle. Here, the study examines the conduct of Indian institutions—MHA, MEA, AHTUs, CBI, cybercrime cells and NCRB—along four dimensions: (i) legal characterisation (which offences are invoked, how victims are described); (ii) operational practice (investigation, inter-agency coordination and cross-border cooperation); (iii) data practices (whether trafficking for forced criminality is visible within crime statistics and administrative records); and (iv) victim treatment (identification, rescue, non-punishment, rehabilitation and access to remedies). The benchmark is not only formal compliance with international instruments, but also the substantive spirit of victim-centred protection that underpins both Article 23 jurisprudence and global anti-trafficking norms.
Taken together, these two axes yield a set of criteria that guide the analysis in later sections. A particular scenario is treated as trafficking for forced criminality if the facts satisfy the constructed legal tests, regardless of how authorities have labelled it. Conversely, the adequacy of state response is assessed by comparing actual practice with the composite standard derived from domestic law and international obligations—rather than by accepting official classifications at face value. This dual lens allows the study to expose gaps between legal potential and enforcement reality, and to frame cyber-slavery of Indian youth not as an anomalous cybercrime problem but as a test case of how flexibly and faithfully India’s anti-trafficking framework can adapt to new forms of exploitation.
3.1 Recruitment mechanisms
Reports emerging over the last few years suggest that recruitment into Southeast Asian cyber-scam compounds increasingly mirrors the digital environments in which these scams operate. Online, prospective victims are approached through social media platforms, job portals and encrypted messaging apps. Advertisements for “customer support”, “crypto trading support”, “digital marketing executive” or “IT/BPO back-end” roles circulate on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and generic job sites, often promising high salaries in USD, free accommodation, “5-day weeks” and “growth opportunities” in Thailand, Cambodia or “near Bangkok”. Telegram and WhatsApp groups dedicated to overseas jobs act as informal marketplaces, where recruiters post short, enticing messages with minimal details, asking interested candidates to “DM for package”. Communication quickly shifts to encrypted chats, where recruiters offer to handle tickets, visas and “paperwork”, sometimes sharing photographs of modern office interiors and high-rise buildings to establish credibility.
Offline, recruitment is reinforced by localised social networks and intermediaries. In a number of documented cases, the first point of contact is not an anonymous online ad but a known person: a friend, former colleague or relative who claims to be working in a lucrative overseas role and encourages the victim to “join the same company”. In other instances, small, often unregistered “placement agencies” and travel shops in Indian cities act as brokers, promising “full package” overseas placement for a fee. These entities may have informal tie-ups with sub-agents in tier-II and tier-III towns, who identify young, tech-savvy candidates—frequently with some college education or basic IT exposure—and persuade them to sign up, sometimes with the assurance that “if you don’t like it, you can come back in three months”.
Across both online and offline channels, deception and elements of debt bondage are central to the recruitment process. Victims are misled about the nature of the work (told it is legitimate customer service or IT support), the country of final destination (told “Thailand job”, but actually taken onward to Myanmar or Laos), and the terms of employment. Many are asked to pay upfront “processing charges” or “service fees”, or to sign informal acknowledgements that the employer has spent significant sums on tickets, visas and “training”. Once they reach the scam compound, these supposed costs are converted into debts, which the victims must repay through their labour, with fabricated “penalties” added for alleged under-performance, refusal to work, or attempts to leave. Pressure is intensified by constant reminders that their families back home could be harmed, or that they will be jailed abroad if they complain. The profile of those targeted—young, aspirational, digitally literate and often frustrated by precarious employment in India—underscores that the recruitment strategy is not random but finely tuned to exploit both economic vulnerability and the lure of the digital economy.
3.2 Migration routes and movement
Once recruitment is successful, the movement of Indian youth into scam compounds typically follows staged routes that initially rely on lawful travel, before slipping into irregular transport and coercive confinement. A commonly reported pattern involves victims being flown from Indian cities to Thailand on valid tourist or work visas, with itineraries that appear unremarkable on their face. At this stage, the travel documents are genuine, tickets are booked through regular airlines, and the journey resembles that of any ordinary migrant worker headed for a foreign job. On arrival at airports such as Bangkok, victims are met by handlers who speak some Indian languages or English and are told they will be taken to the company’s “campus” or “office” after a short transit.
The deception becomes apparent in the second leg of the journey. Instead of being settled into urban workplaces, many are transported by road to border regions and then moved overland or by river into territories of Myanmar or other loosely governed zones, often at night and with minimal explanation. At some point in this process, passports and phones are confiscated, ostensibly “for visa processing” or “company safety policy”, and contact with family is restricted or tightly monitored. Similar two-stage trajectories have been documented for movements from India to Cambodia or Laos: an initial legal flight, followed by internal transfers that culminate in entry into walled compounds under the control of private security forces or armed groups.
These routes reflect the involvement of organised, transnational criminal networks that connect recruiters in India with scam-centre operators abroad. Indian-based agents handle the front-end tasks: advertising jobs, identifying candidates, arranging visas and flights, and collecting fees. Once the victims cross the border into the destination country, control shifts to regional brokers and compound managers, who oversee onward transport to the scam hubs and manage the day-to-day regime of discipline and exploitation. Payments flow along the chain—placement fees, “sale prices” for workers transferred between compounds, commissions for meeting fraud targets—ensuring that multiple actors have a financial stake in sustaining the pipeline. The use of legal travel documents in the initial phase helps to mask the trafficking process as ordinary labour migration, reducing the risk of detection at airports and emigration checkpoints; only after the victim is physically and legally dislocated from their home state does the full machinery of coercion, confinement and forced participation in cybercrime become visible.
3.3 Nature of work and coercion in scam compounds
Accounts from repatriated Indian nationals and regional investigations paint a consistent picture of life inside cyber-scam compounds. Upon arrival at the final destination—often after an apparently legal journey to Thailand or Cambodia and onward illicit movement—workers are typically required to surrender their passports and mobile phones to “HR” or security staff. Officially, this is explained as a temporary measure “for visa processing” or “security”, but in practice it operates as a key mechanism of control: without documents or independent communication, escape becomes logistically and legally far more difficult.
Within the compounds, workers are housed in locked dormitories and subject to pervasive surveillance. CCTV cameras monitor common spaces; access between floors or buildings is controlled through guards, keycards or biometric systems; and movement outside the compound, if permitted at all, is in supervised groups. The working regime typically involves long hours at computer terminals, often 12–16 hours per day, with only short breaks, and a strict quota system under which workers must meet targets for generating leads, persuading victims to invest in fraudulent schemes, or moving money through designated channels. Those who fail to meet targets face punishments ranging from verbal abuse and forced overtime to physical violence, fines, or threats of being “sold” to another company.
The core activity in these compounds is forced online fraud directed at foreign and sometimes Indian victims: romance scams, crypto-investment cons, fake trading platforms, phishing operations and other forms of cyber-enabled deception. Indian workers are assigned scripts, “playbooks” and detailed personal data of targets—phone numbers, Aadhaar details, bank information—and required to build trust with victims over messaging apps or investment dashboards before inducing them to transfer funds to controlled accounts. Refusal to participate in this cyber-criminal work is rarely a real option: workers report beatings, electric shocks, food deprivation, solitary confinement, and credible threats of being handed over to local militias or law enforcement if they resist or attempt escape. In some cases, families in India are contacted and told to pay substantial “release fees” or ransoms to secure the return of their relatives; failure to pay may result in the victim being transferred, or “sold”, to another scam operator with even harsher conditions.
These conditions correspond closely to multiple ILO indicators of forced labour—including deception in recruitment, retention of identity documents, restriction of movement, isolation, intimidation and threats, physical and sexual violence, debt bondage, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime. Simultaneously, when read through the Palermo act–means–purpose lens, the factual pattern reveals classic trafficking elements: recruitment and transportation (acts) are carried out through fraud, deception and abuse of vulnerability (means), with the explicit purpose of exploiting labour in cyber-fraud operations that generate profit for criminal networks. The confiscation of passports, the locked dormitories and constant surveillance are not incidental abuses but integral tools to maintain a state of coercion and dependency, ensuring that workers continue to perform criminal tasks despite their lack of genuine consent. In short, the everyday functioning of these compounds operationalises trafficking for forced labour and forced criminality in a systematic, industrialised form.
3.4 Illustrative case studies
To ground these patterns in concrete experience, this subsection presents brief vignettes drawn from official and media sources involving Indian nationals trafficked into scam centres.
Case 1: Telangana youths trafficked to Myawaddy, Myanmar: In 2025, the Telangana Cyber Security Bureau (TGCSB) reported dismantling a network of agents who had recruited Indian youths via social media with offers of high-paying data entry and customer support jobs in Thailand. Victims were instructed to join Telegram and WhatsApp groups where “HR managers” conducted perfunctory online interviews and promised to handle tickets and visas. After flying legally to Bangkok with valid documents, they were taken by road to the Myawaddy region of Myanmar, where their passports were seized and they were confined in a scam compound. There, they were forced to carry out online fraud—contacting foreign victims, pushing fake investment platforms—under threat of violence, with long working hours and strict targets. Two victims who eventually returned to India reported these abuses to TGCSB, triggering an investigation. With the cooperation of the Myanmar authorities, Indian missions and the Ministry of Home Affairs, at least 45 trafficked individuals were repatriated, and five recruiting agents in India were arrested under trafficking, cheating and IT Act offences.
Case 2: Meerut graduate lured to Thailand, trafficked to Myanmar: A separate case from Meerut involved a 23-year-old MBA graduate who was approached by an acquaintance in India offering a lucrative job in Thailand, with a promised salary well above what he could earn domestically. After an online interview and assurances that the company handled “end-to-end relocation”, he flew to Bangkok on a valid ticket and visa. Upon arrival, instead of being taken to an office, he was abducted by intermediaries and transported by boat to Myanmar, where he was delivered to a cyber-scam compound. His passport and belongings were confiscated; he was confined in poor living conditions and compelled to engage in online fraud for Chinese-run syndicates, facing threats and physical abuse for under-performance. When his family in India lost contact, they alerted the Indian embassy, which coordinated with local authorities. A raid on the compound resulted in his rescue after four months of captivity, followed by repatriation to India and registration of criminal cases against the recruiter and other associates.
Case 3: Kerala graduates in Cambodian cyber-slave camp: An investigative report from late 2024 documents the ordeal of a group of seven young men from Kerala, many of them graduates with basic IT skills, who were enticed by online ads and a local intermediary with promises of “good money and free food” in Cambodia. After flying legally to Phnom Penh, they were taken by road to a remote compound controlled by a Chinese crime syndicate, where their passports and phones were taken away. They were trained to operate fake trading and investment platforms, given Indian and foreign phone numbers and Aadhaar and bank details of potential targets, and forced to maintain relationships with victims via apps to induce repeated deposits. Those who failed to meet monetary targets were beaten, deprived of sleep or threatened with being sold. After months of abuse, the group staged a risky escape and, with help from local civil society organisations and Indian officials, were eventually repatriated. Their accounts describe classic features of debt bondage and forced criminality, including arbitrary “fines”, threats against family members, and a complete inability to leave without the consent of their controllers.
Case 4: Large-scale repatriations coordinated by MEA: Beyond individual stories, official data reveal the scale of the problem. In March 2025, the Ministry of External Affairs announced the release and repatriation of 283 Indian nationals from scam centres in Myanmar, noting that they had been lured with fake job offers and made to engage in cybercrime and other fraudulent activities along the Myanmar–Thailand border. Parliamentary briefings and later media reports indicate that, over a broader period, more than 2,900 Indians have been freed from similar operations in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, with multiple rescue missions in March, April and November 2025 alone. While these official accounts provide fewer individual details, they confirm that large numbers of Indians were trapped in scam centres where they were compelled, under coercive conditions, to participate in cyber-fraud schemes. Taken together, these vignettes show recurring patterns: fraudulent recruitment, reliance on legal travel routes at the outset, subsequent illegal movement or confinement, confiscation of documents, coercive working conditions, and eventual rescue through a combination of diplomatic, law enforcement and sometimes self-help efforts.
The empirical patterns outlined above allow for a clear legal characterisation of the phenomenon affecting Indian youth in Southeast Asian scam centres. In each case, recruitment involves fraud or deception about the nature of the job, destination and working conditions; transportation and transfer across borders is arranged and controlled by intermediaries and criminal networks; and, on arrival, individuals are harboured and received in compounds where their autonomy is stripped through confiscation of documents, confinement and violence. These factual elements satisfy the act and means components of trafficking as defined in the Palermo Protocol and reflected in Indian law.
The purpose component is equally clear: the exploitation of trafficked persons’ labour in a highly organised system of online scams and frauds that generate substantial illicit profits. The work is not merely unpleasant or underpaid; it is extracted under the menace of serious penalties—physical assault, extended confinement, sale to other operators, threats to family, and financial exactions—such that any initial “consent” to travel or to take up employment is vitiated. This aligns closely with multiple ILO forced labour indicators (deception, retention of identity documents, restriction of movement, intimidation and threats, physical violence, abusive conditions, excessive overtime, and debt bondage) and with UNODC and IOM descriptions of trafficking for forced criminality in scam operations.
Crucially, the fact that the coerced activity is itself criminal—perpetrating cyber-fraud—does not alter the underlying relationship of exploitation. International guidance emphasises that when persons are compelled, through trafficking, to commit offences for the benefit of others, they should be treated as victims of trafficking for forced criminality, not as ordinary offenders. The Indian cases surveyed here exhibit precisely this configuration: trafficked youth serve as the visible “frontline” of scams, while the real architects and beneficiaries are transnational criminal syndicates operating behind layers of corporate and digital anonymity. In legal terms, therefore, the situations documented in this chapter consistently meet the criteria for trafficking in persons, forced labour and forced criminality, and ought to be recognised and addressed as such in both domestic and international anti-trafficking practice.
4.1 Overview of relevant institutions
India’s response to the trafficking of its nationals into cyber-scam compounds is distributed across a multi-layered institutional architecture, each node addressing a different part of the problem. At the external front, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) operates through Indian embassies and consulates in Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and neighbouring jurisdictions. These missions are responsible for consular protection, verification of distress calls, liaison with host-country authorities and coordination of rescue and repatriation flights. MEA’s press release of 10 March 2025, announcing the release and repatriation of 283 Indian nationals from scam centres along the Myanmar–Thailand border, illustrates this role: the statement explicitly acknowledges that these citizens had been lured through fake job offers and compelled to engage in cybercrime. MEA also issues public advisories warning against fraudulent overseas employment offers and amplifies these through social media and CyberDost-type campaigns.
Within India, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) is the central node for internal law-enforcement coordination. Its Anti-Trafficking Cell (ATC), housed in the Centre–State Division, was set up as a focal point for strengthening the law-enforcement response to trafficking in human beings. The Cell issues guidelines to States/UTs, convenes coordination meetings with Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTUs), interfaces with other Ministries (including MEA, MWCD and Labour), and supports conferences and judicial colloquia to sensitise police and judicial officers. Alongside this, MHA also oversees the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) and the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal, through which citizens can lodge cybercrime complaints online and via the 1930 financial cyber-fraud helpline, now operational across all States/UTs.
The State police forces, particularly their specialised AHTUs, form the frontline investigative machinery. AHTUs have been established across India (696 units as of 2022) and are partially funded by MHA to investigate human trafficking cases, coordinate victim rescue, and support prosecution. They work in tandem with local cybercrime police stations and state-level cyber cells—for example, the Telangana Cyber Security Bureau (TGCSB), which has taken a lead in identifying and dismantling networks recruiting youth to Myanmar scam centres.
At the federal investigative level, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has begun registering specific offences relating to the trafficking of Indian nationals to cyber-crime scam compounds in Myanmar, arresting recruiters and middlemen who operate across state boundaries. In November 2025, CBI publicly reported arrests in such cases and described the Myanmar-based “cyber-scam factories” as fortified compounds run by transnational syndicates where trafficked individuals are treated as bonded labourers.
Finally, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) serves as the central repository for crime data compilation, including human trafficking and cybercrime statistics. NCRB’s Crime in India reports draw on data furnished by State/UT police and AHTUs, and provide national-level figures on trafficking cases registered, charge-sheeted, tried and disposed, as well as cybercrime trends and conviction rates. However, as later sections will argue, NCRB’s current categorisation does not yet make visible “trafficking for forced criminality” or cyber-slavery as distinct sub-types.
4.2 Patterns of official response
Official responses to the trafficking of Indian youth into scam compounds have so far been most visible at the level of rescue and repatriation, led by MEA in partnership with MHA and foreign governments. In March 2025, MEA reported that 283 Indian nationals had been released from scam centres along the Myanmar–Thailand border and flown back to India, explicitly acknowledging that they had been induced into cybercrime and other fraudulent activities after being lured by fake overseas jobs. Subsequent statements and social-media updates from MEA and CyberDost indicate that over 1,500 Indians were repatriated from Myanmar scam centres in 2025 alone, with additional batches rescued from Cambodia and Laos. These operations typically involve coordination between Indian missions, local law-enforcement agencies and, in some instances, the Myanmar Army or other security actors controlling the territories where scam compounds are located.
On the investigative side, both CBI and state police agencies have begun to register dedicated cases targeting the recruitment pipelines operating from India. In November 2025, CBI announced the registration of cases regarding human trafficking of Indian nationals to cyber-crime scam compounds in Myanmar, and the arrest of agents who had accompanied rescued victims back to India. At the state level, the Telangana Cyber Security Bureau’s recent operation—arresting five agents who used social media to lure unemployed youth and facilitating their travel to the Myawaddy region—illustrates a growing recognition that these are not merely visa or job-fraud cases but trafficking for forced labour in cyber-scam factories. TGCSB has paired enforcement with prevention, launching a statewide “Fraud Ka Full Stop” awareness campaign on cybercrime, including job scams, and directing citizens to report suspicious offers via the 1930 helpline and the national cybercrime portal.
In terms of public communication and prevention, MEA has repeatedly issued advisories cautioning potential migrants about fraudulent job offers in Southeast Asia, and its March 2025 statement expressly “reiterated its caution” about such rackets through traditional and social media channels. Cybercrime awareness campaigns by I4C and state cyber cells—under the “CyberDost” brand—explicitly warn against offers of unrealistically high salaries, free visas and “overseas call-centre” jobs routed through encrypted apps.
These developments reflect some positive trajectories. First, media and parliamentary attention to the issue of Indians trapped in scam centres has increased, with questions in Parliament eliciting official trafficking and cybercrime data and prompting clarifications of government action. Second, there is evidence of coordinated rescue efforts that rely on operational cooperation between Indian agencies and foreign authorities—an essential element in addressing transnational trafficking. Third, state-level units like AHTUs and cybercrime bureaus are beginning to treat these cases as a combined problem of trafficking and cybercrime, rather than only as job fraud. At the same time, as later subsections will argue, these responses remain uneven and often reactive: prosecutions against recruiters and syndicates are still limited compared to the numbers repatriated; NCRB data structures do not capture cyber-slavery as a distinct pattern of trafficking; and conviction rates for cybercrime more broadly remain low, with national data showing pendency and modest conviction rates in cybercrime trials despite rising registrations. This gap between visible rescues and relatively weak systemic follow-through is central to the critique developed in the remainder of this chapter.
4.3 Legal characterisation and charging practices
Available information suggests that Indian cases arising out of cyber-scam compounds are being legally characterised in a fragmented and sometimes inconsistent manner. Where the focus is on recruitment networks operating inside India, FIRs and charge-sheets typically invoke provisions on cheating and fraud (e.g., IPC/ BNS cheating provisions and section 66D of the IT Act on cheating by personation using computer resources), along with forgery, criminal conspiracy and immigration or passport violations relating to misuse of travel documents and illegal recruitment for overseas jobs. In some of the more recent, better-framed cases—such as those registered by the CBI on trafficking of Indians to Myanmar scam compounds or by state cyber units like the Telangana Cyber Security Bureau—investigators have also begun to add trafficking and wrongful confinement provisions, treating the luring and transport of youth for exploitative cyber work as a form of organised trafficking. However, this remains uneven: many police reports and media summaries still describe the offences primarily as “job scam”, “visa fraud” or generic “cybercrime”, with trafficking sections either absent or mentioned only in passing.
A related concern is how victims are framed within these legal processes. In cross-border scam operations, the individuals physically operating the phones and computers are, in principle, ideal suspects from a narrow cybercrime perspective, because they appear to be directly executing the fraud. Where foreign law enforcement has raided scam centres (e.g., in Cambodia or Myanmar), some workers have reportedly been detained or treated as offenders before their trafficked status was recognised. In the Indian context, returnees have sometimes been questioned as potential accomplices in cyber offences, and there is anecdotal evidence—especially in earlier cases—of reluctance to treat them unequivocally as trafficked persons entitled to protection. Only gradually, as narratives of coercion, confiscation of passports, confinement and abuse have become more widely known, have official statements (for example, MEA’s March 2025 press release on repatriation of 283 Indians from Myanmar) begun to consistently describe them as victims “lured on the pretext of jobs” and forced into cybercrime.
This ambivalence is difficult to reconcile with the non-punishment principle embedded in international anti-trafficking standards. UNODC and IOM guidance stresses that when individuals are compelled, as a direct result of trafficking, to commit offences such as online fraud, they should not be prosecuted or punished for those acts; instead, the legal system should focus on the traffickers and organisers who exercise control and reap profits. Under Indian constitutional and statutory law, a similar approach can be grounded in Article 23 (prohibiting forced labour) and in trafficking and bonded-labour jurisprudence, which emphasise the primacy of victimhood and rehabilitation even when the victim’s conduct intersects with illegality. The continued tendency, in some investigations, to privilege cybercrime and immigration frames over trafficking frames risks sliding back into treating coerced workers as wrongdoers, contrary to this principle. For Indian practice to align with international standards, charging strategies and investigative narratives need to consistently reflect that cyber-scam workers in these compounds are presumptively trafficked persons unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, and that their coerced participation in online fraud should not become a basis for their criminalisation.
4.4 Data architecture and invisibility of cyber-slavery
The way India’s official crime statistics are structured further contributes to the invisibility of cyber-slavery as a distinct problem. The National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India reports contain separate chapters on human trafficking and on cybercrime, but neither chapter currently provides a category that directly captures trafficking for forced criminality in cyber-scam compounds. In the trafficking chapter, cases are classified by purposes such as sexual exploitation, forced labour, domestic servitude, forced marriage and other familiar forms of exploitation; there is no explicit sub-category for exploitation through forced participation in criminal activities, let alone cybercrime. In the cybercrime chapter, offences are broken down by type (fraud, identity theft, online financial scams, etc.) and by technical modality, but there is no variable that distinguishes between crimes committed by organised syndicates using coerced workers and those committed by non-trafficked offenders acting voluntarily.
This data architecture has significant implications. First, it renders cyber-slavery statistically invisible as a trafficking phenomenon: even if a case is correctly registered under trafficking sections at the police station, its “purpose” may be misclassified or subsumed under a residual category, making it indistinguishable from other forms of labour exploitation in national tables. Second, cybercrime statistics report rising numbers of online fraud cases and low conviction rates, but do not reveal how many of those cases involve victims coerced into front-line offending. As a result, policymakers examining NCRB dashboards see two disconnected problems—rising cybercrime and a persistent but differently profiled trafficking caseload—rather than a single, hybrid pattern of trafficking for forced criminality in digital environments.
The absence of a clear statistical category feeds into a broader policy blindness. In contemporary governance, phenomena that are not measurable within official data systems struggle to gain sustained, targeted policy attention. If cyber-slavery of Indian youth remains buried under generic cybercrime and trafficking labels, it is harder to justify specialised AHTU–cybercell protocols, tailored training modules, or dedicated rehabilitation schemes for returnees from scam centres. Conversely, once NCRB and related administrative datasets introduce disaggregated fields that capture “trafficking for forced criminality/cyber-scam exploitation”, the scale, geography and demographic profile of the problem would become more visible, enabling evidence-based interventions. Until then, the mismatch between lived reality and statistical representation will continue to impede India’s ability to design and evaluate focused responses to this emergent, hybrid form of exploitation.
4.5 Structural and jurisdictional challenges
Even where trafficking and cyber-scam operations are formally recognised, India’s capacity to respond is constrained by a series of structural and jurisdictional obstacles. At the cross-border level, investigations depend on mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs), letters rogatory and ad hoc cooperation with countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. In practice, the success rate of such instruments is modest: requests often confront delays, incomplete execution or outright non-response, partly because some scam compounds operate in territories controlled by non-state armed actors or in special economic zones with weak regulatory oversight. Law enforcement agencies therefore face the paradox of trying to address an organised crime problem that is territorially anchored in spaces where the effective reach of formal state institutions is limited. Lawless or semi-governed border regions—such as those along the Myanmar–Thailand frontier—provide ideal conditions for scam operators to relocate compounds, intimidate victims and evade sustained enforcement pressure.
Investigative agencies must also navigate distinct evidentiary and technological hurdles. Cyber-scam operations generate large volumes of digital evidence—server logs, chat records, wallet addresses, platform backends—that are often stored on infrastructure located outside India, accessible only with cooperation from foreign states or multinational technology companies. Tracing the command-and-control structure behind a scam compound requires technical expertise in blockchain analysis, OSINT tools and multi-jurisdictional data preservation, capacities that are unevenly distributed across state police forces. Language barriers compound these problems: many internal instructions, training materials and financial channels in scam compounds are operated in Chinese or local Southeast Asian languages, while Indian investigators primarily work in English and Indian languages. Furthermore, the scam networks exhibit high technical sophistication and adaptability; once a particular modus operandi or platform is exposed, operators rapidly shift to new domains, apps or laundering channels, shortening the evidentiary shelf-life of any given investigative insight.
These transnational and technical challenges interact with institutional silos within India’s own enforcement architecture. Anti-Human Trafficking Units have traditionally concentrated on sexual exploitation, bonded labour and child trafficking, with limited exposure to complex cybercrime patterns, while specialised cybercrime cells have tended to focus on online fraud from the perspective of financial loss and digital evidence, rather than as a site of trafficking and forced labour. In the absence of robust joint protocols, cases involving scam compounds can oscillate between units, with no single agency clearly owning the trafficking-for-forced-criminality dimension. Information flows from MEA missions to MHA, from AHTUs to cyber cells, and from CBI to state police are improving but still fragmented, resulting in missed opportunities for combined operations, shared intelligence and harmonised victim-handling procedures. Without structural incentives and formal frameworks for cross-unit collaboration, India’s response risks remaining a patchwork of episodic rescues and isolated prosecutions rather than a coherent, sustained campaign against the entire supply chain of cyber-slavery.
4.6 Evaluation
Viewed against Research Question 2—concerning the adequacy of India’s legal and institutional response—the picture that emerges is mixed and transitional rather than uniformly bleak. On the positive side, India has demonstrated significant operational capacity in effecting rescues and repatriations. MEA’s coordination of large-scale evacuations from Myanmar and other Southeast Asian scam hubs, coupled with the growing involvement of MHA, CBI and state cyber units, indicates that the phenomenon is no longer invisible at the highest levels of government. Public advisories on fraudulent overseas jobs, cyber-awareness campaigns targeting job scams, and the activation of helplines and portals such as 1930 and cybercrime.gov.in show a clear effort to educate potential migrants and provide channels for early reporting. These measures, together with the gradual inclusion of trafficking sections in FIRs against recruiters, represent genuine progress when compared to earlier eras in which such cases might have been dismissed as mere “bad migration choices” or individual contract disputes.
At the same time, the response remains normatively and operationally inadequate in several fundamental respects. Legally, the prevailing framing still oscillates between cybercrime, job fraud and irregular migration, with trafficking for forced criminality only slowly gaining recognition. This has direct consequences for how victims are treated: in practice, returnees are not always systematically identified as trafficked persons entitled to the full range of protections, and the non-punishment principle for coerced cyber-offending is yet to be explicitly embedded in Indian law or standard operating procedures. Institutionally, cross-border investigations continue to be hampered by the structural constraints outlined above, and there is no dedicated mechanism for joint AHTU–cybercell investigations and victim-centred prosecution strategies in scam-centre cases.
From a data and policy standpoint, the absence of a distinct statistical category for trafficking into cyber-scam operations means that cyber-slavery remains largely invisible within official crime figures, impeding evidence-based policy design and resource allocation. Rehabilitation frameworks, too, are still oriented towards more traditional trafficking scenarios and have not been significantly adapted to the specific needs of survivors of cyber-slavery, who may grapple with unique forms of trauma, debt and digital stigma. In sum, while India’s current response is relatively strong in reactive rescue and in broad-based awareness-raising, it is fragile in terms of legal characterisation, victim protection, systemic data capture and sustained, structurally coordinated enforcement. Bridging this gap between emerging practice and normative aspiration is essential if India is to fully align its response with international standards on trafficking for forced criminality.
5.1 Victim status vs offender status
A central tension in the emerging response to cyber-slavery is the ambiguous positioning of returnees as both potential offenders and putative victims. Many Indians who have escaped or been rescued from scam compounds report that, upon return, they encounter stigma and suspicion from neighbours, local police and sometimes even officials involved in debriefing. The fact that they spent months engaging in online fraud—however coerced—creates an intuitive association with criminality; families may fear reputational damage, and local law-enforcement officers, especially those more familiar with conventional cybercrime, may initially treat them as sources of incriminating information rather than as trafficked persons requiring protection. In some cases abroad, media and NGO reports indicate that workers found in raids on scam compounds have been detained as immigration or cybercrime offenders before their status as victims of trafficking and forced labour was acknowledged and they were channelled into protection systems.
This ambivalence stands in contrast to international practice on the non-punishment of trafficked persons. UN instruments and soft-law guidance increasingly affirm that individuals who have been trafficked and compelled to commit offences as a direct consequence of their exploitation should not be prosecuted or punished for those offences, or for related immigration violations. The rationale is twofold: first, that their “criminal activity” is in fact an extension of the coercive environment imposed by traffickers; and second, that punishing victims discourages self-identification and cooperation with law enforcement, ultimately strengthening impunity for the organisers who profit from their labour. Applied to cyber-slavery, this principle implies that Indian workers coerced into running scams in Myanmar or Cambodia ought, in principle, to be treated as victims rather than perpetrators, with law-enforcement efforts focusing on dismantling the networks that recruited, transported and exploited them, rather than on their own coerced online conduct.
In the Indian context, a robust non-punishment approach can be grounded not only in international guidance but also in the spirit of Article 23 of the Constitution and existing trafficking and bonded-labour jurisprudence, which emphasise the primacy of dignity, rehabilitation and the impermissibility of forced labour. However, because cyber-slavery sits at the intersection of trafficking and sophisticated financial crime, there is a persistent risk that returnees will be morally and legally conflated with voluntary cyber offenders. The challenge, therefore, is not merely to acknowledge them as victims in public statements, but to institutionalise non-punishment in practice—through explicit protocols, presumptions in favour of victim status, and clear guidance to police and prosecutors that coerced participation in cyber-fraud should not, by itself, expose returnees to criminal liability.
5.2 Rehabilitation and reintegration pathways
Once trafficked persons are identified and returned to India, their prospects depend on the availability and quality of rehabilitation and reintegration mechanisms. On paper, survivors of trafficking and forced labour can access a range of short-term shelters and protection homes, run either directly by state agencies or through schemes that fund NGOs to provide accommodation, basic healthcare, and immediate support. Various central and state-level compensation schemes—including victim compensation under the Code of Criminal Procedure and specialised funds in some states—offer financial assistance to victims of trafficking and related offences, contingent on police reports and, in some cases, progress in prosecution. A number of government and NGO programmes also provide skill-development and placement support, aiming to equip survivors with employable skills and link them to safer labour markets, although these programmes have historically been designed with victims of sexual exploitation or manual bonded labour in mind.
Civil society organisations play a crucial, if unevenly distributed, role in this landscape. NGOs and community-based organisations often provide legal aid, psychosocial counselling, family mediation and accompaniment through the criminal-justice process, especially in states with a longer history of anti-trafficking work. For some returnees from scam compounds, these actors have been instrumental in facilitating reintegration: arranging temporary accommodation when families are unwilling or unable to receive them, helping them obtain identity documents, and mediating with local police to ensure that they are treated as victims rather than suspects. In principle, returnees from cyber-slavery can tap into the same ecosystem of shelters, compensation mechanisms and NGO services that exist for other trafficking survivors.
However, the fit between existing rehabilitation frameworks and the specific experiences of cyber-slavery survivors is far from seamless. First, there is a notable absence of specialised services that address the particular forms of harm they have suffered. Many returnees emerge with significant debts—to recruiters, to relatives who paid ransoms, or to informal lenders who financed their initial migration—which conventional trafficking rehabilitation schemes are not designed to address. Their digital skills, which were weaponised in scam compounds, may now feel morally compromised or “contaminated”, complicating efforts to place them in legitimate IT or BPO roles. Second, mental-health support remains weak and patchy. Survivors may experience trauma related to confinement, physical abuse, complicity in harming others through scams, and guilt or shame about monies lost by victims; yet access to structured, long-term psychological care is rare, especially outside major urban centres.
Additionally, existing programmes often do not explicitly recognise cyber-slavery as a category, leading to inconsistencies in eligibility and support. Returnees may fall through gaps if their trafficking experience does not match the more familiar narratives of brothel raids or brick-kiln rescues that frontline workers are accustomed to. Without targeted guidelines, there is a risk that they will receive minimal, short-term assistance—such as a brief stay in a shelter and a one-time compensation payment—without the sustained, tailored support needed to rebuild their lives, manage debt and re-enter the labour market in ways that do not expose them to re-trafficking or criminalisation. A truly victim-centred approach would require adapting existing schemes and designing new ones to reflect the digital, financial and psychological specificities of cyber-slavery, rather than treating it as just another variation of conventional trafficking.
5.3 Human rights implications
Viewed through a rights-based lens, cyber-slavery of Indian nationals in scam compounds raises concerns that go to the heart of the right to life and personal liberty. The decision to migrate for work, even under economic pressure, does not extinguish a person’s entitlement to security, dignity and autonomy. When Indian youth are deceived into travelling abroad, stripped of their documents, confined in guarded compounds and subjected to violence or threats for refusing to commit cyber-fraud, their basic guarantees of life and liberty are directly engaged. The combination of physical confinement, credible threats to bodily integrity, and the constant fear of reprisals against themselves or their families situates these practices well within the zone of serious human rights abuse, rather than merely “bad working conditions” or contractual disputes gone wrong.
The freedom from forced labour and from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is equally implicated. Article 23 of the Constitution prohibits traffic in human beings and “other similar forms of forced labour”, while international instruments prohibit both slavery-like practices and torture or ill-treatment by state and non-state actors alike. In cyber-scam compounds, the extraction of labour is not only non-voluntary; it is enforced through beatings, electric shocks, deprivation of food and sleep, threats of being sold, and psychological pressure arising from the knowledge that one’s coerced work is harming others. This constellation of practices reflects the classic elements of forced labour and, in the more extreme cases, crosses into torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. A failure by states—both of origin and of destination—to prevent, investigate and remedy such abuses raises serious questions under their human rights obligations.
For Indian nationals exploited abroad, the right to consular assistance becomes a critical safeguard. International law recognises that foreign nationals detained or in distress are entitled to communicate with and have access to their consular officials. When victims in scam compounds manage to contact family members or Indian missions, the responsiveness of those missions—accepting complaints, verifying locations, pressing host-country authorities for access and facilitating evacuation—is not merely an act of benevolence but a concrete expression of this right. Conversely, inadequate or selective consular engagement, or a narrow view that treats victims primarily as immigration offenders or cybercrime suspects, can amount to a denial of effective consular protection, particularly in lawless border zones where the home state may be their only realistic source of protection.
Finally, cyber-slavery cases implicate the right of trafficked persons to an effective remedy and adequate reparation. This encompasses not only access to courts and complaint mechanisms, but also the practical ability to obtain compensation, rehabilitation and guarantees of non-repetition. When returnees are treated ambiguously—as quasi-offenders or as “unwise migrants” rather than as rights-holders—access to victim compensation schemes, tailored rehabilitation services and long-term support becomes uncertain and contingent. The absence of clear legal recognition of trafficking for forced criminality, and of robust non-punishment norms, undermines survivors’ ability to claim remedies for the harms they have suffered, including physical and psychological trauma, lost earnings, and debts incurred during migration. Taken together, these failings mean that non-recognition and inadequate protection of trafficked persons in scam centres are not just policy shortcomings; they amount to serious breaches of core human rights obligations relating to liberty, protection from forced labour and ill-treatment, consular protection and effective reparation.
5.4 Normative and policy proposals
Responding adequately to cyber-slavery therefore requires not only operational improvements but clear normative commitments that re-centre trafficked persons as rights-holders. A first step is the explicit adoption of a non-punishment principle in Indian law and policy for victims of trafficking who have been compelled to commit offences, including cyber-fraud. This could take the form of a statutory provision, interpretive guidelines, or both, clarifying that where there is credible evidence of trafficking and coercion, prosecutors should refrain from charging victims for offences directly arising from their exploitation, and courts should treat such coercion as a bar to conviction or punishment. Embedding non-punishment in standard operating procedures for police, prosecutors and immigration authorities would give practical effect to the rights-based approach discussed above.
Second, there is a need to create or strengthen confidential reporting channels tailored to the realities of cyber-slavery. Indian missions and consulates in high-risk countries should establish dedicated, multilingual helplines and secure digital contact points through which Indian nationals can report being trapped in scam compounds without fear of immediate criminalisation. Within India, the national cybercrime portal and the 1930 helpline could incorporate specific options for reporting suspected trafficking linked to overseas job offers, triggering referral not only to cyber cells but also to AHTUs and MEA. Confidentiality guarantees, clear assurances against punitive immigration consequences for self-reporting victims, and proactive outreach in migrant-sending communities would enhance the likelihood that coerced workers seek help at an early stage.
Third, guidelines for law enforcement on interacting with returnees are essential to translate these norms into daily practice. Such guidelines should instruct police, AHTUs and cyber cells to presumptively treat individuals returning from scam centres as potential victims of trafficking; to prioritise trauma-informed interviewing; to avoid handcuffing, custodial interrogation or public parading of returnees; and to coordinate closely with protection services and legal-aid providers. They should also set out protocols for evidence-gathering that minimise re-traumatisation—for example, relying on recorded statements and avoiding repetitive questioning by multiple agencies unless strictly necessary.
Finally, any reform agenda must ensure the integration of cyber-slavery survivors into existing victim compensation and rehabilitation schemes, while also adapting those schemes to their specific needs. This could involve issuing clarificatory circulars that explicitly list trafficking into cyber-scam compounds as an eligible category for state and central victim-compensation funds; prioritising returnees in relevant skill-development and livelihood programmes; and commissioning specialised NGOs or mental-health providers to design counselling modules for survivors of forced criminality in digital environments. Over time, dedicated budget lines for the rehabilitation of cyber-slavery survivors—covering debt relief, psychosocial care, legal aid and safe employment pathways—would signal that the state recognises this as a distinct form of exploitation requiring targeted, rights-consistent responses, rather than an afterthought to conventional anti-trafficking work.
6. Conclusion
Read against the first research question, the study finds that the recruitment and exploitation patterns affecting Indian youth in Southeast Asian scam centres clearly satisfy the elements of trafficking in persons, forced labour and forced criminality. Recruitment is systematically grounded in fraud and deception, including false promises of legitimate IT/BPO or customer-service jobs, misrepresentation of destination countries, and concealment of the true nature of the work. Movement commonly begins with lawful visas and flights but culminates in clandestine transfers to lawless border zones and fortified compounds. Inside, passports and phones are confiscated, movement is restricted, surveillance is constant, working hours are long and coercive, and compliance is enforced through quotas, physical and psychological violence, and threats of being “sold” or punished. These features align with internationally recognised indicators of forced labour and the act–means–purpose structure of trafficking, while compelled cyber-fraud under duress places the cases within trafficking for forced criminality.
In relation to the second research question, the findings indicate a mixed and transitional record in India’s legal and institutional response. India has shown capacity to identify affected nationals, coordinate rescues and repatriations, issue public advisories, and initiate proceedings against some recruiters and intermediaries, including through MEA evacuation operations and involvement of MHA, CBI and state cyber units. At the same time, the response remains normatively and structurally weak: legal framing still oscillates between cybercrime, job fraud and irregular migration, with trafficking for forced criminality only partially reflected in FIRs and charge-sheets. NCRB and related systems do not capture cyber-slavery as a distinct pattern, and victim protection and rehabilitation mechanisms remain uneven and insufficiently tailored. The non-punishment principle for coerced cyber offending is not yet clearly embedded in domestic practice.
The analysis is constrained by data and access limitations. There is no disaggregated official category for trafficking into scam compounds for coerced cyber-fraud, and the trafficking–cybercrime intersection is not recorded as a distinct variable in national statistics; the study therefore relies on indicative figures from official statements, parliamentary replies and secondary sources. Evidence on recruitment, movement and exploitation is drawn largely from media investigations, NGO reports and selected official documents that may be incomplete. Direct fieldwork in scam compounds or border areas is beyond scope and would raise serious safety and ethical concerns, while host-country enforcement records and internal scam-operator documentation are highly restricted; even in India, survivor and official interview access is limited and often mediated.
Notwithstanding these constraints, the findings point to concrete reforms. Legally, India should explicitly recognise trafficking for forced criminality in policy and practice and operationalise clear non-punishment protections for trafficked persons compelled to commit cyber offences, alongside stronger regulation and monitoring of overseas recruitment and placement intermediaries. Institutionally, joint protocols between Anti-Human Trafficking Units and cybercrime units should establish unified case-classification standards, joint investigations, shared training, and designated nodal officers so trafficking and cybercrime dimensions are pursued together. Data systems should add categories for “exploitation through coerced criminal activity” and flags indicating potential victimisation among alleged cyber offenders, while international cooperation should be strengthened through MLAT/SOP improvements and liaison mechanisms with relevant Southeast Asian jurisdictions and multilateral partners. Victim-centred rehabilitation should be expanded to include psychosocial care, debt and reintegration support, and safe employment pathways, with further research prioritising primary qualitative work with survivors and frontline officials, comparative analysis across source countries, and quantitative mapping of scam-economy dynamics and cyber-fraud networks.
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