The civil war ravaging Myanmar, which is pushing refugees across the border to India, is also entrapping the Indian citizens in its den of cybercrime. The recent reports of 500 Indians being detained in Thailand who were fleeing Myanmar have unveiled the vibrant world of cybercrime conducted in the lawless country. The matter, which has drawn considerable attention following the reports, has sent ripples around.
Excruciating cybercrime in the neighbourhood
Myanmar has turned into a fertile land of criminal activities with the lack of all-pervading government authority. Since its decolonization in 1948, the Southeast Asian country has gradually plunged into chaos following bloody ethnic struggles, impeding any mission towards national unity. Even the military, ruling the country since 1962, has been like herding cats vis-à-vis the warring ethnic groups. Cybercriminals take advantage of this situation. They lure foreign workers under false pretences of legitimate jobs and hold them as captives in their centres under inhuman and abusive conditions, forcing them to conduct criminal activities. The criminal groups are active in Myanmar’s frontiers with China, India, Laos, and Thailand. On the other han,d the ethnic groups in control of the frontier areas exploit the situation and profit by taxing these scam-industries.
The scam, known as ‘pig butchering’ which reportedly originated in China in 2016, involves traffickers who contact their victims through messages and applications and swindle them into fraudulent investments like phony cryptocurrencies. According to one report, the scammers have stolen $75 billion from around the world in 2024 through crypto exchanges. Federal prosecutors in the USA seized $15 billion in cryptocurrency this October, collected under a pig butchering scam. The prosecutors indicted one Chinese immigrant for money laundering conspiracy. The scam flourished exponentially during the COVID pandemic, taking advantage of the online monetary transactions encouraged during that time.
Indians lured by ‘pig butchers’
Indians are a primary target of this cybercrime, where many victims have suffered significant financial losses. One Indian woman based in the USA lost $450,000 in 2024, falling victim to the scam. There has been a noticeable surge in pig butcher cybercrime in India, targeting investors and propagated through counterfeit trading applications, which are distributed through the Google Play Store. According to one report, these fraudulent applications or apps, presented as legitimate platforms, are meant to lure users into spurious investment schemes. The cybercrime police in Chennai issued an advisory in 2024 against such online trading scams.
However, it is not only about Indians lured to invest in the scams, but also about their being lured as operators of the crime. Some 2,907 Indians are rescued from the cybercrime centres in Southeast Asia. Many Indians are attracted to employment advertisements for digital sales and executives offering healthy pay packages. Once they are lured into the den, they are forced into criminal activities by the scam runners and made subject to inhuman physical torture and mental stress. A growing number of Indians becoming victims of this level of agony comes to light only when they are either rescued from the centres through operations or caught by law-enforcing agencies after they manage to flee from the centres. In March this year, 549 Indians were brought back to India who were freed from the cybercrime centres in Myanmar. These residents of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh were lured to either Thailand or Myanmar with false promises of jobs in the IT sector and then trafficked to cybercrime centres, mostly run by Chinese criminal gangs. Early this November, India repatriated 735 (in total) of its citizens from Thailand who were rescued from the notorious KK Park cybercrime centre located on the outskirts of Myawaddy city on the Thai-Myanmar border. They were among 1,500 people from 28 countries who fled the cybercrime centre.
Actions against the cybercrime cartel
With the pig butchers’ scam expanding tentacles in the area, the governments are now waking up to the reality. The Chinese are mostly accused of running these cybercrime centres in the unruly Sino-Myanmar border. China is now strengthening its sweeping actions on the crime centres at the border, arresting Chinese citizens running scam centres in the border area with the help of Myanmar and Thai security forces. It is also helping the ethnic groups in Myanmar involved in smashing the cybercrime cartel in their respective zones of influence at the Sino-Myanmar border. Meanwhile, the UK and the USA have also resolved to target the cyber criminal network in Southeast Asia. US citizens lost some $10 billion in a pig butcher scam in 2024.
India has also resolved to take the bull by the horns. The government has already issued an alert about the pig butchering scam. The annual report of the Home Ministry has highlighted the growing danger of the scam, adding that unscrupulous individuals and entities have been noticed using Google services platforms to initiate these crimes. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) is coordinating with Google to address this threat. Apart from taking actions internally, India is actively coordinating with Southeast Asian countries through the ASEAN platform to address the issue. The India-ASEAN Plan of Action 2021-25 includes a provision for exploring cooperation in handling cybercrime.
However, more coordinated actions are required to handle this challenge, especially when it emanates from lawless zones of Myanmar. The junta’s lack of authority over the areas makes India’s task difficult. Therefore, it either needs to promote coordination with the ethnic groups in control of the areas or promote coordination with Myanmar and Thailand to employ forces jointly to help India rescue its citizens, or do both. In February this year, India took the help of Myanmar’s Border Guard Force and Thailand to rescue its citizens from the scam centres in Myanmar’s Karen state. At the same time, promoting more awareness among the citizens is required to forestall the migration to these scam centres and falling victim to human trafficking with galvanizing impact potentials.
