More than 5000 Indians Stuck in Cambodia as Slaves
Around 5000 Indian citizens have been human trafficked to Cambodia on the pretext of job opportunities and are now being forced to scam Indians through honey trapping & Ponzi schemes.
Many people dream of moving abroad for better earnings and a better lifestyle. But for thousands of Indians, this dream has turned into a nightmare. Reports say that around 5000 Indian citizens are stuck in Cambodia and are being forced to work as slaves. Shocking, isn’t it? These people were all tempted with promises of high-paying job opportunities.
One victim, Munshi Prakash from Hyderabad, Telangana, was recently rescued and shared his terrifying experience. Prakash is a B-Tech graduate in civil engineering and was working with an IT firm in Hyderabad. Like many others, he had listed his profile on job websites to seek employment abroad. One day, a man named Vijay, an agent in Cambodia, called Prakash and offered him a job in Australia. Prakash happily accepted the job as it matched his qualifications and aspirations. However, Vijay told Prakash that he needed to have a travel history before going to Australia for the work visa and job security and gave him a ticket to Malaysia.
Prakash reached Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 12th March 2024. A local representative of Vijay met Prakash and collected around $1,020, roughly ?85,000, from him. He then took Prakash to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. There, a Chinese gang seized his passport and took him to Krong Bavet, a secluded area 160 km from Phnom Penh. Krong Bavet has only one large compound with towers around it. Prakash was kept in Tower C with other Indians.
The next day, Prakash and several other Indians were given training for 10 days. They were forcefully taught how to create and use fake social media profiles of girls in Telugu and other Indian regional languages. They were also trained to impersonate enforcement officers and extort money from Indians online.
After the training, the gang asked Prakash to pretend to be a beautiful Indian girl online, honey-trap people, and ask them for money transfers. When Prakash refused, the gang put him in a completely dark room and tortured him for a week. Prakash fell sick during this time. The gang took him out of the dark room but forced him into scamming people online. Prakash managed to record a self-video explaining everything that happened to him and sent it in an email to his sister in Tamil Nadu. His sister informed the authorities, who then informed the Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments. With the help of the Indian embassy in Cambodia, Prakash was rescued.
Prakash’s four months of slavery and torture finally ended. He was deported to Delhi with nine other people on 5th July 2024. Prakash claimed that around 5000 Indian citizens from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Mumbai, and Delhi are trapped in Cambodia. They were all human-trafficked on the pretext of jobs abroad. Prakash also revealed that more than 50% of these trapped Indians are women and they are forced to make nude calls from their detention camps for money. Indian and Cambodian authorities say that the Chinese gang converts all the money received online first into cryptocurrencies, then trades these cryptocurrencies into US Dollars, and finally converts the US dollars into Chinese Yuan to make the online transaction difficult to trace.
According to the Indian government, the Chinese gang has scammed Indians of at least ?500 crore online in the past six months. The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) is working closely with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) of India, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) of India, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), and other experts to rescue the remaining Indians trapped in Cambodia.
