Nine months after his return, Jignesh (name changed to protect privacy) still wakes up thinking he’s in the compound. The 23-year-old son of a security guard from Ahmedabad had set out for Bangkok on December 8, 2024, for what he was told was a call-centre job. He believed he was joining a growing stream of young Indians seeking work abroad, hoping to earn enough to give their families a better life.
Instead, he was trafficked into Myanmar, labelled an illegal immigrant, and forced into a sprawling cyber-slavery network that has turned thousands of Indian jobseekers into unwilling cogs in the wheels of global fraud operations in recent years.
“By the time I realised what was happening, I was taken into a guarded compound in Myanmar, crossing the river border illegally, and into the machinery of a cyber-fraud empire where Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Africans, and people from other developing countries were held captive and trained to deceive strangers for profit,” he says.
“At night, I still wake up thinking about life in that compound in Myawaddy (a town in southeastern Myanmar). We were real slaves, not employees, waking up every day to cheat people online,” Jignesh says, looking at his friend who was also trafficked to Myanmar via Thailand.
In 2025, two batches of people have been rescued and sent back to India from Thailand-Myanmar cyber slavery: Jignesh and some others in March, and another batch of 465 Indians, of which 64 were from Gujarat, in October. The international operations are coordinated with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) and the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Cyber slavery is a trafficking model in which recruits, lured by fake job offers, are held under physical and psychological pressure and compelled to run organised cyber-fraud schemes.
The job offer Jignesh came across through a social media post had seemed straightforward: data entry and customer support for a Thai company for 25,000 Thai Baht (approximately ₹70,000). The agent who arranged his travel assured him that accommodation and food would be taken care of, and that visa formalities would be handled on arrival. “They told me everything would be settled within a week,” he recalls.
However, when he landed in Bangkok, nothing matched what he had been promised, he says. He was allegedly taken to a hotel far from the city centre and told he needed to wait for a few hours. Later, Jignesh and other victims say they were taken to near the Thailand-Myanmar border after hours of driving. There was a car transfer and finally they were made to cross a narrow river in a small boat — the Moei River, which separates Thailand from Myanmar — at night.
The weight of poverty
“Many are forced to cross the river at gunpoint. The agents have a ‘setting’ with the officials on the border, who give them the date and time to cross,” says Tanmay (name changed), 27, also a resident of Ahmedabad. “Once we crossed the river, they told us what the actual work was. If we refused, they said we had to pay between ₹70,000 and ₹1.5 lakh to be taken back across the river into Thailand,” recalls Tanmay. “Some who managed to arrange the money were simply abandoned on the other side.”
Most recruits could not afford the amount and stayed on, accepting the conditions laid down by the agents. A few, like Jignesh, tried to negotiate their way out. According to him, the recruiters told the men that since the company had spent money transporting them across the border, they were now “in debt,” and their release carried a price tag. For Jignesh, that price was ₹3.75 lakh.
In Ahmedabad, his father, who earns ₹15,000 a month, struggled to understand why his son kept calling for money but understood enough to know that his son was trapped. With no savings to fall back on, he mortgaged their small ancestral home near Gandhinagar and took a loan of ₹3.75 lakh. After weeks of phone calls, negotiations, and transfers, Jignesh was finally permitted to leave the compound and return to Thailand. He came back to Ahmedabad International Airport, the same airport from where he had left with a bundle of dreams, a day before his visa expired. He was thinner, anxious, and burdened by what his father had sacrificed.
Today, he works at an ice-cream factory in Ahmedabad, earning about what his father does. Their days are lived in long shifts, frugal meals, and steady repayments of the loan that bought his freedom. “I went there because I wanted to earn for him,” Jignesh says. “Instead, he had to risk everything for me.” He falls silent before adding, “I came back. But somewhere, another family must still be waiting.”
Several returnees from Gujarat recounted that once inside the compounds in Myanmar, they were trained for one to two weeks and made to work 15 to 18 hours a day. One set of workers was instructed to impersonate women online and engage with people in the United States or the United Kingdom, steering conversations toward fraudulent investment schemes after making them believe they were in a romantic relationship.
Another group was trained for India-focused scams: calling people while pretending to be police personnel or officials from Customs, TRAI, or the RBI, and coercing them with claims of a ‘digital arrest,’ blocked SIM cards due to Aadhaar misuse, or fraudulent investment schemes, including cryptocurrency scams.
“We were given daily targets. If the target amount was not achieved, we were tortured both physically and mentally,” Jignesh says, adding that the companies have their own apps for financial transactions.
The man behind big trouble
After the victims returned to Gujarat, the State Cyber Centre of Excellence (CCoE) began examining their statements, and one name surfaced repeatedly from the people rescued in both March and October: Neel, known among victims simply as “The Ghost”. According to their accounts, Neel contacted and conducted the interviews that lured them abroad. Several victims also told investigators that it was Neel who had received them at Bangkok airport and then facilitated their trafficking across the border into Myanmar.
“Of the 64 persons who were sent abroad, 40 to 50 named Neel as their recruiter. The name of one Hitesh Somaya appeared in 10–12 statements, and a woman, Sonal Phaldu’s name came up from five trafficked people. But as the investigation progressed, we found that Neel was the link connecting both Hitesh and Sonal. That made him our primary person of interest,” says Rajdeepsinh N. Zala, Superintendent of Police, CCoE.
Further technical analysis led investigators to arrest Hitesh and Sonal, who disclosed that “Neel” was actually Nilesh Purohit, 39, a recruiter working under a Chinese handler known in the circuit as Yamaha. A forensic examination of their phones yielded Purohit’s numbers and email IDs. “We traced one of the email accounts, which had been active in the Vidyanagar area of Anand,” says Zala. “A team was rushed immediately to pick him up.”
What followed, the officer recalls, unfolded like a sequence from an action film. “On November 16, while we were en route to Anand on the Ahmedabad–Vadodara Expressway, his live location shifted — he was heading towards Ahmedabad airport. We alerted our teams in the city, and Purohit was intercepted in the airport parking area,” he says.
Investigators say Purohit, who was reportedly scheduled to fly to Malaysia, played a role in trafficking at least 500 Indians to cyber-fraud compounds across Southeast Asia.
Gujarat’s Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghvi says Purohit headed a global syndicate with more than 126 sub-agents and had links with agents in Pakistan and connections with 100 companies across several countries that supplied manpower to cyber-fraud centres.
Records allegedly indicate that Purohit earned between $2,000 and $4,500 per victim, giving 30% to 40% of the amount to his sub-agents. “The financial transactions were routed through mule bank accounts and multiple cryptocurrency wallets,” Sanghvi says.
Future frauds
Under international pressure, Myanmar’s military bombed several buildings inside K.K. Park. The operation led to the arrest of hundreds of alleged scam operators and the rescue of several foreign nationals who are being deported to their respective countries.
Dhaval Joshi (name changed), 28, an Ahmedabad resident who visited the CCoE office in Gandhinagar to give his statement and identify Purohit, described K.K. Park as a tightly guarded complex with armed men in military-style uniforms stationed across the premises. “We believed they were actual military personnel and that the operations were legal and backed by the local authorities,” he says.
Joshi says Neel had picked him up from Bangkok airport and warned that he would have to pay a large sum if he wanted to return home. Inside K.K. Park, he was also asked to lure friends and acquaintances from India, with incentives ranging from ₹2 lakh to ₹3 lakh per person. “I was planning to escape from there, so why would I trap another person there? It was very inhumane, and they were very cruel. There were many women inside as well, mostly foreigners, who were also trapped,” he says. Joshi left for Bangkok in December 2024 and was repatriated in March.
According to investigators, Purohit, a Class-12 pass-out, had earlier worked as an accountant in a cyber-slavery operation before setting up his own network out of Bangkok around September-October 2024.
IPS officer Zala says Purohit routinely monitored Interpol’s wanted list and tracked global cyber-slavery cases to check if his name was mentioned before planning his travel to evade arrest. “He has been extremely uncooperative. From two phones and a laptop seized from him, we found that his next operation was ‘Project India’ — a plan to recruit 1,000 Indian nationals, with commissions of about $4,000 per person for companies in Cambodia.”
Messages recovered from his devices allegedly showed his negotiations with contacts. Jala adds that Purohit, considered one of the most wanted operatives linked to cyber-slavery networks, had travelled to India to strengthen his network for the new project.
“Neel is largely silent, but his phones are not,” the officer says, adding that most leads are emerging from digital evidence. “His devices contain photographs of over 2,000 people and a video of a foreign woman being tortured.”
The victims are trained to identify potential targets by analysing review pages of salons, spas, golf clubs, horse riding clubs, and gambling sites. They are trained in social engineering techniques to send messages using fabricated profiles with profile photos of attractive men and women.
The officer explains that the fraud companies use AI-generated photos, and when victims request video verification, AI-based video calls are arranged. However, in Neel’s case, a network of actual models was also employed to entrap targets, Jala says.
Now, police have another fear: “Those who were victims have the potential to become high-grade cyber fraudsters, capable of running or expanding similar operations within India,” says Jala. They are considering sustained monitoring for internal security purposes.
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
