Traffickers working in sync with foreign agents: NIA

New Delhi/Gurugram: Siddharth Chandrashekhar Yadav, 24, who lives in a chawl in Thane, was excited to work in Thailand and earn a handsome salary of ₹65,000 per month with his food and accommodation taken care of. To get the job, Yadav first had to pay ₹50,000 to an agent in Mumbai.

As soon as he arrived in Thailand with a girl from Pune in December 2022, their passports were confiscated. They discovered that there were many other Indians like them present there. Two Indian agents – Godfrey Thomas Alvares and Sunny Gonsalves – gave them local SIM cards, an American SIM card and phones and explained their work – which involved creating fake ID cards and profiles with fake names strangers on Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok. and chat with users.

The target users were all from the United States, Europe, and Canada. The uses of cryptocurrency and how to invest in it had to be explained to them by staff. “We were talking to around 200-250 customers every day, convincing them to download a cryptocurrency-related app. Users were only seeing profits on the app, but they were not making money,” Yadav said.

Like Yadav, there were thousands of young people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China, Nepal and other countries working on a huge campus, a sort of IT hub.

“It’s a big campus of crooks. In one of the buildings, 1,500 to 2,000 young people were working and involved in e-commerce fraud. They encouraged people to invest in various projects. The campus had 10 to 12 buildings,” he adds.

For about two months, when Yadav worked there as a “cyber slave”, he received no pay and was forced to work for 12 to 14 hours, with the agents threatening to kill them if they divulged any information or contacted the authorities.

But Yadav was lucky and was rescued from Laos by the Indian embassy. He is currently at home but unemployed and has given statements to several agencies, including the Mumbai Police and the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

In fact, around 400 Indian citizens who were made to work as cyber slaves in Cambodia have been repatriated.

However, investigators say there are several hundred who are stranded in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and other regions where they are forced to work with cyber crooks.

As part of the investigation, the NIA, in coordination with police from several states, including Gurugram police, raided several locations on Monday and arrested five members of the trafficking network, including the social media influencer – Balwant alias Bobby Kataria. Others arrested include Manish Hingu from Vadodara, Pahlad Singh from Gopalganj, Nabialam Ray from southwest Delhi and Sartaj Singh from Chandigarh.

The federal agency resumed the investigation into the plot on May 13 and is currently searching for several of these agents.

An NIA spokesperson said Monday evening that the organized trafficking syndicate was engaged “in luring and trafficking young Indians to foreign countries on the basis of false promises of legal employment.”

“The youth were forced to work in fake call centers in Laos, the Golden Triangle SEZ and Cambodia, among others, as part of a racket, controlled and operated mainly by foreign nationals. They were forced to undertake illegal activities online, such as credit card fraud, cryptocurrency investments using fake apps, honey trapping, etc.

“Investigations further revealed that the arrested accused were coordinating with traffickers operating across the international border to facilitate illegal smuggling of Indian youth from Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam into the Laos SEZ. They worked at the behest of foreign agents belonging to well-organized unions active in several districts of Maharashtra, UP, Bihar, Gujarat, Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, etc. These syndicates were further linked to agents based in other parts of India. as well as foreign countries like UAE, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos SEZ, etc. », added the spokesperson.

The central government had already constituted a high-level inter-ministerial committee on May 16, chaired by Special Secretary (Internal Security) of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), to probe the cybercriminals involved in this trafficking. The committee, comprising officials from the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Finance, Electronics and Information Technology, Department of Telecommunications, CBI, NIA, CBIC and Department of Posts, met twice so far.

The Gurugram police on Tuesday produced Balwant Kataria alias Bobby Kataria before the court and sent him to three-day judicial remand.

Karan Goel, Deputy Commissioner of Police (West), said the teams have recovered ₹20 lakh in cash from Kataria's possession and four mobile phones which were used to commit fraud along with documents of many victims. “An NIA team has questioned Kataria and we are conducting a thorough investigation into the link to human trafficking. We found out the role of Manju Kundu, Kataria’s partner who recorded and uploaded videos on social media platforms with Kataria,” he said.

Goel said Kataria used to upload videos offering special packages to the US, Canada and other countries for couples and work visas. “As he has multiple accounts and is popular as an influencer on social media, people fell prey to such videos and ended up losing thousands of dollars,” he said.

The two victims, Arun Kumar and Manish Tomar from UP, told police that hundreds of unemployed men had visited the Kataria office and paid registration fees of ₹2,000 to start the process. “I was told that I had to stay in Laos for a few days and then I would be sent to Singapore. Later, we entered an office in a building in Vientiane where security personnel were deployed outside and men were seen making calls. No one had a smile on their face, they had bruises on their faces and it was obvious they had been attacked recently,” he said.

Tomar said they wanted all the victims rescued and sent home. “There are many offices where Indians are held captive and they are not even paid initially. They only pay salaries to those who voluntarily start working for them,” he said.

Goel said he has identified a few more suspects linked to Kataria and their details will be analyzed by the police cybercrime team, based on which further arrests will be made. “Raids will be conducted at Kataria's newly opened offices in Rajasthan and Faridabad, where he used to frequently visit and meet people willing to go abroad. We wonder who was funding his offices,” he said.