Two months ago, Abdul (name changed) made the decision to leave India in search of a better life, just like millions of other Indians who do the same thing every year. Armed with a college degree, Abdul, who hails from Telangana, had tried his hand at a few jobs in India but found that the income was never enough.

When he was approached by a travel agency, which informed him of a data-entry operator position in Thailand paying Rs 1 lakh per month, the 26-year-old jumped at the chance.

And so began Abdul's extraordinary journey, which took him to a remote area in Myanmar, across the Thailand border, where he was put up in "big buildings" and asked to work not as a data entry operator but as a crypto scammer.

Like Abdul, many others have been lured to Mae Sot, a city in western Thailand that shares a border with Myanmar to the west, and from there to Myawaddy, a border district in Myanmar, with the promise of an IT job.

The problem has become so widespread that the Ministry of External Affairs has now issued a warning about the issue: “Instances of fake job rackets offering lucrative jobs to entice Indian youths for the posts of ‘Digital Sales and Marketing Executives’ in Thailand by dubious IT firms involved in call-centre scam and cryptocurrency fraud have come to our notice recently by our Missions in Bangkok and Myanmar,” says the advisory, dated September 24.

"The victims are reportedly taken across the border illegally mostly into Myanmar and held captive to work under harsh conditions," it reads.The MEA has warned Indian citizens not to get “entrapped in such fake job offers”, which are being promoted on social media and by agents in Dubai and India.

A passage to Mae Sot

Abdul's journey began in July, after he paid Rs 1