A total of 6,998 Indian nationals have been rescued from cybercrime centres in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos between 2022 and 2025, the Union government told Parliament on Thursday.
Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh was responding to a question by Trinamool Congress MP Saket Gokhale about Indians having been trafficked to or entrapped in cyberscam compounds in Southeast Asia.
In his written reply, Singh said that the Union government has been made aware of “dubious firms” being involved in fake recruitment job offers and luring Indian nationals to Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos “to carry out cyber crime and other fraudulent activities from scam centres”.
“The exact number of Indian nationals stranded in these countries is not known as Indian nationals reach these scam centres on their own volition through fraudulent/unscrupulous recruitment agents/agencies and through illegal channels,” the minister of state told Parliament.
Singh added that between 2022 and 2025, the Indian government rescued 2,533 citizens from cybercrime compounds in Cambodia, 2,297 from Laos and 2.168 from Myanmar.
New Delhi has raised the matter of Indians being trapped and forced to work at cybercrime centres in these countries with their respective governments, said the minister of state.
In January 2025, Scroll published a series of extensive reports about Chinese crime syndicates that run cyber crime centres from Southeast Asia, mainly Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. These highly sophisticated “scam compounds” are staffed with thousands of people, many of them from India, who are lured with fake job offers and then forced to work on scamming people back home.
However, those who make scam calls from such centres are victims themselves, having been lured into going abroad through fake job offers, Scroll found. When they tried to leave, they were “beaten mercilessly”.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs has warned citizens against fake job offers in Cambodia and Laos, and urged them to seek employment only through authorised agents approved by the government.
Read Scroll’s reportage of the cyber-scam centres:
India’s cyber-scam epidemic is part of a multibillion global industry. This series traces a full arc
The scammers who got scammed: How jobless Indians were lured into cyber slavery
I travelled to ground zero of the cyber scams targeting India. Here is what I found
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