3,000 Indians used as slaves by cyber criminals: Chinese scammers in Cambodia force Indian women to make nude calls back home

HYDERABAD: Many Indian women trafficked to Cambodia by Chinese cybercriminals are being forced to honey-trap unsuspecting people back home by making nude calls.
The modus operandi was revealed by Telangana-resident Munshi Prakash who fell prey to Chinese frauds.
A BTech graduate in civil engineering, Prakash had been working with an IT firm in Hyderabad and had posted his profile on job sites seeking employment abroad.
"One Vijay, an agent in Cambodia, called me and offered me a job in Australia. He said I needed travel history before going to Australia and gave me tickets for Malaysia," said the native of Mahabubabad's Bayyaram Mandal.
"From Kuala Lumpur, I was taken to Phnom Penh on March 12. A local representative of Vijay collected US dollars worth Rs 85,000 from me. Then, Chinese nationals seized my passport and took me to Krong Bavet. It's a large compound with towers. I was put in Tower C, with other Indians. We were given ten days of training to create and use fake social media profiles of girls in Telugu and other languages," he said.
They put me in a dark room for a week and tortured me, he added. "When I fell sick, they took me out but forced me to continue scamming. I managed to record a selfie video, narrating my traumatic experiences. I sent an email to my sister in Tamil Nadu, who informed the authorities," he said.
It prompted the Indian embassy there and Telangana and Andhra Pradesh govts to rescue him.
Prakash was earlier rescued from traffickers by Cambodian police on April 16 but was arrested on a fake charge, foisted on him by the Chinese gang.
He spent 12 days in jail. "After the authorities found out that the charge was fake, I was deported to Delhi on July 5," Prakash said. Nine others were rescued with him.
He said 3,000 Indians, many of them from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, are trapped in Cambodia.
These include girls forced to make nude calls from their detention camps. He met people from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Mumbai, and Delhi. All of them had been duped into believing that they would get jobs abroad.
The money that the gang makes from these cyber slaves is converted into cryptocurrency, then into US dollars, and finally converted into Chinese Yuan.