Nepalis in ‘scam camps’ escape to tell the tale
Twenty-year-old Girendra had just completed high school when he was forced to step up to support his family. His father’s contracting business went under, and his mother lost her private sector job.
Like many Nepalis, Girendra’s parents decided that an overseas job would be the best option for their son. Girendra was offered a security guard position in Dubai by an acquaintance of his mother’s, but he refused the job.
He then met a woman named Sunita in Kathmandu who identified herself as an agent for a recruiting agency, and offered him a marketing job in Thailand that would pay him Rs150,000 monthly.
All he needed, Sunita told him, was typing and data entry skills, and Rs400,000 to get to Thailand. Girendra went back to his village in Udaypur to get the money, dreaming of earning enough to then fulfil his end goal of joining the French Foreign Legion.
In September last year, Girendra arrived at Kathmandu airport to fly to Bangkok accompanied by Sunita’s brother Naresh. But both men were stopped because they did not have proper travel documents.
Sunita then bribed the officials who let the two through to catch their Nepal Airlines flight to Bangkok two days later.
The pair were met at the Suvarnabhumi Airport by their contact, Marku, a heavy-set, tattooed man who held a placard bearing their names. They were put inside a black Toyota Fortuner, and driven seven hours through four security checkpoints to the city of Mae Sot on the border with Burma.
Marku took their photos, and set them up in a hotel. Girendra and Naresh were met the next morning by a tall Chinese man who again took their photos and loaded them up at the back of a red Ford pickup.
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They drove past a sign for the Thai–Myanmar Friendship Bridge, but instead of going across, the truck took a route through the jungle to the Moei River, where their belongings were confiscated by men in motorbikes. The two were then put on a boat to cross over into Burma.
“It was a whirlwind of activity, we barely had any time to think,” recalls Girendra. “But a chill ran down my spine when I heard the Chinese men on the boat laughing like monsters.”
On the other side, they were loaded into another truck, which passed remote villages, encountering teenagers in bulletproof vests carrying AK47s, and soldiers having lunch or smoking cannabis.
The truck finally stopped at a big compound, where Girendra and Naresh had their passports and phones confiscated. They were made to sign a document that read ‘Human trafficking, drugs and mobile phones are prohibited.’
As grand as the compound looked from the outside, its interior was dark, marble walls crumbling. There was sound of weeping from a group of young African women huddled in a corner with bruises all over their bodies.
Girendra’s worst fears were confirmed: they had been sold to Burma. The pair were led into a conference room where a group of men of various nationalities were at work stations. A Malaysian man on a sofa informed them bluntly that they had been sold into an online scam ring.
“You are trapped here now,” Girendra recalls the man telling him. “After hearing this I went to the restroom and wept.”
Soon after, the two were led to an ‘interview’ by men who tested them on their English language skills, travel experience and typing speed, then given laptops.
The first thing Girendra did was to find out where he was via Google Maps. They had ended up in the Burmese border town of Myawaddy in Kayin State, that has been ruled for 15 years by the Karen State Border Guard Force (KGBF), one of the most powerful among the self-governing armies that separated from the Burmese military in 2024, and is now known as the Karen National Army.
Cyber scam rings began to thrive along the Burma-Thailand border in the years after its control was ceded to the ethnic army, particularly in the Kayin State. The Kokang region located in northeastern Shan State that borders China is just as notorious for cyber scam centres.
Chinese gangs have been recruiting youth from across the world into their scam networks. They are made to pose as women and lure men under the guise of lucrative jobs in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. But Burma has become fertile ground ever since its 2021 military coup.
A 2024 study on transnational crime in East Asia published by the United States Institute of Peace found that cyber scams in Burma are defrauding people of $64 billion annually. The UN estimates that at least 100,000 people have been trafficked and forced to work in cyber scam centres in Burma, terming it ‘modern-day slavery’.
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In Myawaddy, the two Nepalis were asked to change their names. Girendra chose 'Netra', hoping that the light would one day guide him away from the darkness of his circumstance. Naresh chose the name 'Ram'.
There were 11 Nepalis in the compound, including two women who had also been trafficked. They warned the newcomers of the extremes that their Chinese bosses would go to force them to meet extortion targets.
Girendra soon witnessed the punishment, which included electrocution, beatings, isolation without food or water, and exposure to extreme outdoor heat.
His routine involved him posing online everyday from 3PM to 9AM as ‘Alicia Farooq’, the persona of a wealthy 30-year-old fashion designer based in Singapore. Armed with a list of phone numbers everyday, ‘Alicia’ would gain trust and establish relationships with unsuspecting individuals, often sending intimate videos to tempt young men to engage.
They would then be tricked into ordering goods from the scamming platform Bitubi Binance in exchange for a $30 commission deposited into the spender’s account.
The final ‘killing’ entailed Alicia asking the target individual to deposit a larger amount on the platform in exchange for a bigger commission. By the time the person at the other end realised the cryptocurrency and binance accounts are a sham, ‘Alicia’ would have vanished with the money.
Girendra was given the goal of collecting at least $10,000 every month. The entire scam network in Mywaddy had 20,000 people, a town unto itself. The compound had its own casinos, clubs, restaurants, bars, markets, even money exchange centres.
“If you had money, you had everything except your freedom,” says Girendra. “I would see new people arrive, and was helpless to do anything but watch as they fell into the same trap that I did in front of my eyes.”
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Two months after Girendra and Naresh arrived in Burma, five fellow Nepalis were somehow rescued. Girendra secretly contacted the returnees, who over the next two months put him in touch with a man named Bibek Rai in Nepal. In exchange for Rs150,000, Rai said he could get them out, but Girendra did not have that kind of money.
Bibek Rai visited the Burmese Embassy in Kathmandu to appeal for the release of Nepalis trapped in Burma. Girendra then got the contact of Sanjay Pradhan, a Burmese citizen of Nepali origin, and sent him the information of the remaining Nepalis at the compound who wanted to get out.
By now, Girendra had failed to meet his target extortion amount, and was subject to harsh physical punishment which hurt his neck.
Pradhan messaged Girendra that they were working on their release from the compound, but their first round of negotiations for ransom with the KGBF to enter its jurisdiction fell through.
Two weeks later, armed KGBF militia suddenly came to collect the Nepalis, calling them by their passport numbers.
“I cried uncontrollably when I came out of that cage,” Girendra recalls. Over the next few days, Pakistani, Indian, and Philippine nationals were also released from the compound.
One Nepali, who had been appointed ‘leader’ by the Chinese bosses at the compound, refused to return because it was more profitable for him to stay back.
An NGO then took charge, paying for their return from Burma to Thailand in a convoy of 20 military vehicles. Each person was given 10,000 Thai baht ($300) for further travel expenses.
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The Nepalis then got in touch with the Nepal Embassy in Bangkok asking for tickets home, but Girendra says they were treated like criminals.
“Embassy staff told us that they were not our parents,” he adds. Finally, the rescued Nepalis found other ways to pay for their flights back to Kathmandu and returned last month.
Bob's Story
In Chitwan, Bob’s family farm never recovered after being hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. So, when he saw an ad on Telegram about a sales and marketing job opportunity in Thailand that promised zero recruitment fees and a $1,500 salary, Bob immediately messaged the Telegram account to apply for the job.
He heard back from someone named Barsha that candidates would be selected through a video interview. Bob’s interviewers kept their video on mute during the meeting.
Finally, he was called to Kathmandu, where he was asked by Barsha to pay Rs150,000 that would be returned to him once he reached Thailand.
Bob reached Kathmandu airport on the day before the Phulpati festival last year, where he met Samir Thapa Magar, an IT student from Gorkha who had also responded to the ad in Telegram. He had been offered a job as a cleaner in Thailand. Samir paid Barsha Rs105,000 in cash and Rs25,000 in cryptocurrency.
Bob and Samir landed at Rangoon airport three days after they left Kathmandu, and were told that they would be taken from there to Thailand.
Their passports were taken by their employers, after which they were driven for a whole day, changing vehicles 20 times before finally reaching Myawaddy.
“It was only there that we realised that we had been scammed,” remembers Bob.
The two men were coerced into working as online scammers disguised as women. They would have to extort $10,000 a month, failing which they were tortured by armed militia. Samir now regrets scamming people out of up to $22,000 in a month.
Last year, a Chinese gang was apprehended in Kathmandu working under the cover of a beauty salon named YYP Services to recruit Nepalis into ‘scam camps’ in Burma.
In July 2023, Chinese national Liang Jun was arrested by Nepal Police after a woman who had been forced into a scamming ring in Burma since July 2022 returned to Nepal and filed a complaint at the Anti-Human Trafficking Bureau.
The woman had been promised a monthly salary of $1,000, and had paid Rs100,000 in recruitment fees, but had been sent back to Nepal after she fell ill due to exhaustion while working in a scam network in Burma.
The Kathmandu District Court sentenced Liang to two years in prison, the minimum punishment for human trafficking. Since then, some other Nepalis who have returned from scam rings in Burma have filed complaints with the Bureau, but no one else has been arrested.
The Dubai connection
Traffickers have not just targeted desperate Nepalis seeking foreign employment, but also Nepali migrant workers already employed in the Gulf. Agents also use Dubai as a transit point, taking unsuspecting Nepalis on visit visas, setting them up in apartments before dispatching them to scam rings across Southeast Asia.
Of the 11 people in Burma sent back to Nepal by the Karen State Border Guard Force, half had arrived in Burma from Dubai. One of them, Yograj Liwang from Jhapa, had been working in Dubai on a visit visa, and had reached Burma in October 2022, initially receiving information on Facebook.
Last August, Nepal’s Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) arrested 36 individuals including two Chinese nationals after raiding a cryptocurrency trading ring in Lalitpur which had been trafficking Nepalis in Dubai. That syndicate with tentacles in the UAE, Nepal, and China had defrauded people of more than Rs105 million.
“The Chinese had contacts in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia,” says a Deputy Superintendent of Police involved in the investigation. “Although there is no evidence that this group sent Nepalis to those countries, we have reason to suspect that they are responsible.”
There is no way to know how many Nepalis have been scammed into working as scammers across the other three Southeast Asian nations. Returnees estimate that around 2,000 Nepalis have been forced into working for online scam rings.
Some names have been changed.