Cambodia's Cyber Slave Camps: The Story of the Keralites Who Escaped

In March, the media reported that 5000 Indians were forced into cyber slavery in Cambodia.

In January, 23-year-old Abhi N (name changed), an Indian, was forced into a horrifying reality: scamming his own countrymen from a Cambodian cyber slave camp. A flicker of defiance emerged when he tried to warn a potential victim about the fraud. But his act of conscience was met with brutal punishment. Camp masters beat him savagely with an iron rod. 

“The first blow sent me crashing to the floor. Pain exploded in my back as they rained down hit after hit with that iron rod. I screamed but it was a raw, desperate sound that died unheard. A kick slammed into my gut, the air whooshing out of me. Finally, spent, they left me there. My friends, faces etched with fear, dragged me back to the room. Orders barked: no bed. For 15 days, I was forced to sleep sitting up, the floor my only companion. One meagre meal a day was all they deemed me worthy of. All this, for a single act of defiance – warning a stranger they were being scammed,” Abhi said in an exclusive interview with The Quint.  

Abhi, like many other Keralites driven abroad by Kerala's high unemployment rate, found himself in Cambodia. Lured by false promises, he'd paid a hefty fee to fraudulent recruitment agents back home. 

As per the Indian government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey, Kerala has the highest unemployment in the country at 28.7 percent while the national average is 10 percent.  

"I studied hotel management and tried for a job in Kerala, but my efforts were in vain. It was then that I connected with a recruitment agent offering a job in Cambodia. I trusted him and paid Rs 3.8 lakh in total. But I was fooled, trafficked, and enslaved. I had to struggle a lot to return,” Abhi said. 

Abhi was first sent to Singapore, but the airport authorities denied him transit to Cambodia, so he had to return to India. The agent sent him to Singapore again, and this time, he was allowed to travel to Cambodia.

Upon arrival at the Cambodian camp, a chilling reality unfolded. The first few days weren't spent on welcome greetings – his fingers were drilled for speed, then twisted to become weapons of deceit. Luring, trapping, scamming – these became his new curriculum. 

The cyber slave camp masters, Indians and Chinese, equipped Abhi with a stolen identity: fake social media profiles of young Indian women and a burner phone loaded with Indian SIM cards. The mission was horrifyingly simple: become their prey's fantasy.

Abhi would chat with unsuspecting Keralite men, weaving a web of connection as a woman from their homeland. Trust, once built through carefully crafted conversations and a facade of intimacy, would be ruthlessly exploited. The endgame? Luring them into a digital trap – fake investment opportunities in cryptocurrency and other bogus portfolios.

"They set a brutal quota: $2,500 a month. We toiled for ten to twelve hours a day, minimum. But missing that target was a nightmare. It meant gruelling eighteen-hour shifts, punishment on top,” Abhi added.  

According to Abhi, there are thousands of enslaved Indian youths like him in the camp. There are Tamilians, Hindi-speaking youngsters, and even young Keralite girls. All were trafficked like him under false promises. 

“Tamilian workers should target Tamil-speaking clients, and Hindi-speaking workers should target Hindi-speaking clients. We will be provided with materials (Indian SIM cards nude pictures and sex chat templates) to engage with potential clients and lure them into the trap. If the interaction progresses to a video call, women staff will take over to complete the task,” Abhi added.

The guilt of cheating people and violating everything Abhi believed in became a suffocating weight. In a desperate act of defiance, he reached out to a potential victim, revealing the truth. But his courage came at a heavy price. He was caught red-handed and brutally punished. Yet, even in the face of pain, Abhi wouldn't be silenced. He smuggled messages to his friends and family back home, igniting a spark of hope.    

After various negotiations and agreeing to give up his unpaid salary, Abhi finally returned to India in February. He didn't remain idle. He pursued the case, prompting the Keralite police to raid multiple locations, dismantle a key network, and arrest a group of Keralites who were supplying SIM cards to these Cambodian slave camps. 

In April, the Kerala cyber wing police uncovered the identity of around 50 Keralites, including women, in Kerala, working for Cambodia-based operators engaged in running online financial rackets. The initial inquiry revealed that 59 SIM cards were obtained from Kerala using bogus documents. 

When Abhi returned, it paved the way for another Keralite, J Rejin (name changed), to come back.

Rejin was trafficked to Vietnam, then taken by car to Cambodia, where he was enslaved in a cyber camp. He was promised a salary of $1,200 per month but received only $1,200 in total for six months of work, with the rest withheld for not meeting targets. Finally, he raised money from his sister in Kerala and managed to escape from the camp in May. Born into a fisherman's family on the South Kerala coast, he had migrated to Cambodia with high hopes due to unemployment.

Rejin also endured torture similar to what Abhi faced when he rebelled against scamming Indians online. 

"It was hell. I somehow managed to escape. Now, I am stranded and have a huge debt to pay back. I am clueless about what to do next," Rejin added. 

According to Abhi and Rejin, there are hundreds of Indians, including young girls, in the camp where they worked.

In March, the media reported that 5000 Indians had been forced into cyber slavery in Cambodia. In April, the Indian government issued an advisory notice stating that Indian nationals are being lured by false promises of lucrative job opportunities in Cambodia and Laos, falling prey to human traffickers who coerce them into undertaking online financial scams and other illegal activities. The government cautioned Indian nationals intending to seek employment in Cambodia to do so only through authorised agents. 

Unfortunately, Indians are not only trafficked and enslaved in Cambodia but also in Myanmar and Thailand. In May, the Indian government issued an advisory notice urging Indians not to fall prey to such trafficking networks. 

[The Quint reached out to the Ministry of External Affairs with a query regarding the story and waited for 24 hours for a response. The story shall be updated if and when a response is received.]

According to a report from the USIP Senior Study Group on Transnational Organized Crime in Southeast Asia released this May, as of the end of 2023, a conservative estimate of the annual value of funds stolen worldwide by these syndicates approached $64 billion. 

The report adds that Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos form the epicentre of the regional scamming industry. It also states that the scamming operations are powered by hundreds of thousands of people, many duped by fraudulent online ads for lucrative high-tech jobs and trafficked illegally into scam compounds, where they are held by armed gangs in prisonlike conditions and forced to run online scams.  

According to the report, “These victims of forced labour (along with a small number of workers who willingly participate) come from more than 60 countries around the world. The scam compounds in Myanmar have an additional perimeter of armed protection provided by border guard forces under the authority of the Myanmar military or its proxies. In Cambodia, speculative real estate investments—casinos and hotels left empty by the COVID pandemic’s suppression of tourism—have been fortified and repurposed for online scamming in a vast web of elite-protected criminality spread across the country. In Laos, SEZs such as Zhao Wei’s notorious Golden Triangle SEZ are the dominant mode of criminal operation.”  

(Rejimon Kuttappan is an independent journalist, labour migration specialist and author of Undocumented [Penguin 2021]. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)