3 arrested for allegedly trafficking Indians to cyber-scam centres in Thailand

The Goa Police have arrested three persons, including a Kazakh national of Chinese origin, for their alleged involvement in trafficking Indians to cyber-scam call centres in Thailand, The Times of India reported on Thursday.

Those arrested are 22-year-old Adithya Ravichandra, a resident of Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore, 36-year-old Rupnarayan Gupta from Maharashtra’s Mumbai and 22-year-old Talaniti Nulaxi, a Kazakhstan citizen. They allegedly ran a travel agency that duped people on the pretext of promising jobs abroad and before forcing them into cyber slavery.

In January, Scroll published a series of extensive reports about Chinese crime syndicates that run cyber crime centres from Southeast Asia, mainly Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. These highly sophisticated “scam compounds” are staffed with thousands of people, many of them from India, who are lured with fake job offers and then forced to work on scamming people back home.

Read Scroll’s reportage of the cyber-scam centres:

• India’s cyber-scam epidemic is part of a multibillion global industry. This series traces a full arc
• The scammers who got scammed: How jobless Indians were lured into cyber slavery
• I travelled to ground zero of the cyber scams targeting India. Here is what I found

Nulaxi was apprehended at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport on Wednesday, the same day a look-out notice was issued for him as he tried to escape the country, Hindustan Times reported quoting...

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