Delhi Police nab 2 for trafficking youths into Myanmar 'cyber slavery'

The Delhi Police have made the first arrest in a transnational human-trafficking racket that lured Indian youths with the promise of high-paying overseas jobs but trafficked them into Myanmar’s violent cyber-fraud hubs, where they were held captive and forced to run scams targeting foreign nationals.

The crackdown comes at a time when the government has repatriated nearly 1,500 Indians from Thailand’s Mae Sot town since March this year — most of them escapees from scam compounds in Myanmar’s lawless Myawaddy region. Many returned with accounts of confinement, beatings and being coerced into cybercrime under armed supervision.

The Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police arrested Danish Raja (24) of Bawana and Harsh (30) of Faridabad for allegedly recruiting victims and pushing them into what officials describe as “cyber-slavery”.

The case was triggered by a complaint from Imtiyaz Babu, a resident of Delhi, who was among those rescued by the Myanmar military during a raid on a scam complex in October. After being sheltered at a humanitarian camp, he was repatriated to India on November 19 with the help of the Indian Embassy.

Babu told investigators he had been promised a data-entry job abroad but was instead trafficked from Kolkata to Bangkok and then to Myawaddy, confined inside a scam centre at KK Park, assaulted, and forced to carry out cyber-frauds on US citizens. Armed guards allegedly threatened workers to ensure compliance.

A case under multiple sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Immigration Act was registered by the Special Cell on November 20 and an investigation was initiated. 

Based on intelligence gathered from repatriated victims, an IFSO team arrested Danish Raja from Bawana. The police said he had been deported from Myanmar earlier this year but continued recruiting Indian youths for the same network.

Investigators said the syndicate used illegal border crossings into Myanmar, multiple vehicle transfers under armed escorts, intimidation, torture and confinement to run large-scale cyberfraud modules.

The cops said the money trail was being traced and more arrests are expected as the network stretched across states and international borders. The IFSO is coordinating closely with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Home Ministry.

Over the past year, India has carried out multiple repatriation missions from Southeast Asia, as regional governments move to dismantle cyber scam networks that have trafficked thousands of foreign nationals into forced online fraud work.

International agencies, including the United Nations, have estimated that tens of thousands of people -- many of them young IT professionals from South and Southeast Asia -- remain trapped in such centres across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, where they are coerced into committing large-scale financial scams.