The Indian government said it had rescued and repatriated around 250 Cambodian citizens who had been held captive and forced to engage in cyber scams.
Indian citizens “were attracted by job opportunities in that country but were forced to take up illegal IT jobs,” the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in a statement, adding that it had rescued 75 people in the last three months .
It also said it was working with “Cambodian authorities and agencies in India to crack down on those responsible for these fraudulent schemes.”
The development comes in the wake of an Indian Express report that more than 5,000 Indians stranded in Cambodia have been forced into “cyber slavery” by organized crime rackets to defraud people in India and extort money by masquerading in some cases as government forces. ‘order. .
The report also follows an earlier disclosure by INTERPOL, which characterized the situation as a fraud fueled by industrial-scale human trafficking.
Among them was an accountant from Telangana state, who was “lured to Southeast Asia where he was forced to participate in online fraud schemes under inhumane conditions.” He was later released after paying a ransom.
In another case highlighted by the Indian Express, one of the rescued men was recruited by an officer in the southern Indian city of Mangaluru for a data entry job, only to be asked to create fake social media accounts with photographs of women and use them to contact people.
“We had goals and if we didn’t meet them, they wouldn’t give us food or allow us into our rooms,” the individual, identified only as Stephen, was quoted as saying.
China and the Philippines have undertaken similar efforts to free hundreds of Filipino, Chinese and other foreign nationals who had been trapped and forced into criminal activities, carrying out what are called pig slaughter scams.
These schemes typically begin with the scammer adopting a phony identity to trick potential victims into investing in non-existent cryptocurrency assets designed to steal their funds. Scammers are known to gain the trust of their target by deluding themselves into believing they are in a romantic relationship.
In a report published in February 2024, Chainalysis said that cryptocurrency wallets associated with one of the pig slaughter gangs operating in Myanmar have recorded nearly $100 million in cryptocurrency inflows, some of which are estimated to also include payments of redemptions made by families. of workers who are victims of trafficking.
“The brutal conditions that trafficking victims face in the compounds also add urgency to solving the problem of romance scams: Not only are consumers being cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars every year, but the gangs behind these scams are also perpetuating a crisis humanitarian,” the blockchain analytics firm said.
News of the rescue efforts also follows research from Check Point that threat actors are exploiting an Ethereum feature called CREATE2 to bypass security measures and gain unauthorized access to funds. Details of the scam were previously disclosed by Scam Sniffer in November 2023.
The crux of the technique is the use of CREATE2 to generate a new “temporary” wallet address that has not been flagged for criminal activity, thus allowing threat actors to make illicit transactions to the address once the victim approves the contract and circumvent protections that report such addresses.
“The attack method involves tricking users into approving transactions for smart contracts that have not yet been deployed, allowing cybercriminals to subsequently deploy malicious contracts and steal cryptocurrencies,” the Israeli company said.