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WHEN MADAN, a 29-year-old from Nepal, responded to what looked like a job posting for computer work, his friend reassured him it was straightforward. “One of my friends told me it was an easy computer job,” he later told investigators from OCCRP, a global investigative journalism network. It was not. Madan ended up in a guarded compound in Myawaddy, Myanmar, where he was beaten and starved for failing to meet daily targets for online fraud. He was one of 47 Nepalis rescued from Myanmar scam compounds and returned to Kathmandu in December 2025. Hundreds more remain.
Nepal’s Anti-Human Trafficking Bureau rescued 799 people in fiscal year 2024-25, compared to 252 three years earlier. Since 2019 nearly 2,000 Nepalis have been extracted from trafficking situations. These are only the ones who were identified and returned. The actual number of Nepalis inside Southeast Asia’s guarded scam compounds at any given time is unknown. The UN estimates that Myanmar’s compounds alone hold SOME 100,000 trafficked workers from dozens of countries; Cambodia holds roughly as many again. Nepalis, with their high English literacy and growing base of IT-trained young people, are a valued commodity in this market.
The economics that drive the recruitment are not tough to understand. Nepal’s minimum wage is Rs19,550 a month ($127). The job advertisements that appear on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Telegram offer between $1,000 and $2,000 a month for roles in digital marketing, customer service, data entry or online trading. The advertisements are professionally designed. Many include what look like real company logos, salary structures and office photographs. Some candidates are put through fake interviews and language tests to increase the sense of legitimacy. When the chasm between what the formal economy offers and what a trafficker’s advertisement promises is a factor of ten or more, the advertisement does not need to be convincing, meaning it only needs to be plausible.
The route to Myanmar runs through Bangkok. Recruiters arrange legitimate flights to Thailand. From Bangkok, they move candidates by road to the Thai-Myanmar border. Some are told they are being taken to a different job site. Others are told the company’s Thai office is near the border. The moment they cross, their passports are taken. The uniformed personnel at the compound are not Thai authorities. The person who recruited them is reachable no more Working hours stretch to 19 hours a day. Those who fail to generate enough fraud revenue face physical punishment. Women are raped. Men are beaten and chained to desks. A victim quoted in a UN human rights investigation published in February 2026 said his group went almost without food for 15 to 20 days and “became so weak we could not even stand”.
The industry they are forced into is enormous. A 2024 study by the United States Institute of Peace, a government institute, estimated that scam compounds in Myanmar alone generate $64bn a year. Americans lost at least $10bn to these operations in 2024, according to the US Treasury Department. This is a business on a scale comparable to Nepal’s entire gross domestic product. Its workforce is produced by trafficking victims from at least 66 countries.
Nepal’s vulnerability comes from three places. The first is straightforward economic desperation. The second, perhaps counterintuitively, is relative education: traffickers specifically target people with English skills and some IT background, because those workers can credibly run romance scams and cryptocurrency fraud in real time.
The third is the informal loan market. Many Nepali migrants borrow heavily before travelling abroad, using the “meter byaj” system—informal lending at usurious rates—to cover recruitment fees and travel costs. One victim paid Rs150,000 before leaving, expecting it to be reimbursed on arrival. This upfront debt, combined with seized passports and no means of communication, is what makes it so hard to leave even when the reality becomes apparent.
Nepal’s government has issued travel advisories, and its embassy in Bangkok has mounted successive rescue operations, extracting 37 people in November 2025 and 47 more in December. These are real efforts producing real results for the individuals involved. They are also, structurally, a bucket under a leak. The visit visa route, through which 274,428 Nepalis traveled abroad in 2024 alone, is the primary trafficking channel. Monitoring it requires resources and interagency coordination that Nepal’s migration enforcement apparatus does not currently have.
The conditions that produce victims will not change until the domestic economy can close even a fraction of the gap between what Nepal pays its educated young people and what a trafficker’s advertisement promises. That gap is currently a factor of ten. Until it narrows, the advertisements will keep circulating on Facebook, the compounds will keep receiving workers and the embassies will keep coordinating rescues. ■
