2LT International News

MAE SOT, Thailand: India repatriated the first group of its citizens who fled to Thailand from Myanmar, where they had been working at a center linked to large-scale online scam operations.

The facility, known as KK Park, is located on the outskirts of Myawaddy, a border city in Myanmar, and is infamous for housing major cybercrime networks. Myanmar’s army raided the complex in mid-October as part of a crackdown on cross-border online scams and illegal gambling operations.

An Indian Air Force transport plane took off from Thailand this week carrying Indian nationals back home, followed later in the day by another aircraft. About 270 of the 465 Indians scheduled to be repatriated have now left Thailand, with the remaining individuals expected to return to India on November 10, Maj. said. Gen. Maitree Chupreecha, commander of Thailand’s northern Naresuan Task Force.

This is not India’s first such operation. In March, the government repatriated 549 citizens following an earlier crackdown on cybercrime activities along the Myanmar-Thailand border.

The group that returned to India is part of more than 1,500 people from 28 different countries who fled Myawaddy after the October raid. In Thailand’s border town of Mae Sot, authorities established temporary shelters to process and assist foreign nationals, including not only Indians but also citizens from China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

According to an April report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), hundreds of industrial-scale scam centers in Southeast Asia collectively generate close to $40 billion in annual profits.

The region—particularly Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos—has become a global hotspot for online scams, where tens of thousands of people are deceived into working for criminal organizations. Many victims are lured by false job offers and later forced to participate in fraudulent schemes involving online investments, romance scams, and illegal gambling.

Human trafficking is a significant element of these operations, with many foreign workers trapped under exploitative conditions resembling modern-day slavery.

State media in Myanmar reported that the raid on KK Park was part of broader efforts launched in early September to dismantle illegal online networks and gambling rings. Witnesses and Thai army sources said parts of the compound were destroyed in explosions during the raid.

Despite the military action, independent outlets like The Irrawaddy have reported that cybercrime activities continue in and around Myawaddy, suggesting that organized criminal groups are still operating in the region.

The global scale of the issue has drawn international concern. Last month, the United States and the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on the leaders of a major cyber-scam network based in Cambodia. A U.S. federal court in New York later indicted the alleged ringleader.

In South Korea, public outrage grew after reports emerged that a young man was killed after being tricked into traveling to Cambodia for what he believed was legitimate work, only to find himself caught in a cyberscam operation.