If you added on top being in a foreign country and needing your employer for your visa, I think you'd basically have the same situation as the article?

So that's a little precarious. I hope you have some savings built up.

A situation like you describe is ripe for abuse. H1Bs here deal with similar precariousness, though not on the level of what it sounds like you're dealing with. I hope your situation improves and you gain some security.

> The reason the company rents us rooms is because we're not paid enough to afford normal rent.

So they're paying you in the form of subsidized housing that is tied to work, instead of paying more. Yeah this should be illegal.

And if there's a fire? Jobless, homeless, and without papers. You should give your passport and all other important papers to your employer for safekeeping.

>seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin

I know the answer but why amass $15 billion, more money than a person could spend in a lifetime, and still conduct this scam? You think a person would say "enough" and escape to a beach somewhere.

If you would be able to withdraw (you wouldn’t be able to) that money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from other people who were scammed.

No one is going to get beaten because of your interactions with scammers. They’re going to be beaten because they are enslaved.

The phrase playing with fire comes to mind.

The returns show are general on app/paper only not something you can actually withdraw

First taste is free. Don't engage with criminals even if they run crying to western media about being “enslaved.”

The catch-22 is that these people are nearly always immigrants, and the criminals have taken their documentation, so the best case scenario is they get rescued and then deported, possibly via a spell in immigration detention. The worst case scenario is the cops turn up, laugh, collect the day's bribe money and then the person who called the cops gets beaten.

(this is an important dynamic in sex trafficking as well)

The government is somewhat complicit - there are even reports that the police take escapees back to their captives for a bribe

From TFA:

>The relative leniency of Muzahir’s compound, says Harvard’s Sims, likely stems from scam operations’ sense of total control in Laos’ Golden Triangle region—a zone of the country controlled largely by Chinese business interests that has become a host to crimes ranging from narcotics and organ sales to illegal wildlife trafficking. Even human trafficking victims who escape from a compound there, Sims points out, can be tracked down relatively easily thanks to Chinese organized crime’s influence over local law enforcement. “These guys don’t have to be held in a cell,” Sims says. “The whole place is a closed circuit.”

What you see is exactly how those systems function

Found this archive link:

https://archive.is/2026.02.02-090119/https://www.wired.com/s...

We have quite a bit of insight into Indian scam centers thanks to the work of scambaiters like Jim Browning[1] who frequently hack into their CCTV cameras and desktops.

The big difference is that the workers in India are voluntarily employed. In fact they often work for companies that do legitimate customer support as well, so they maintain the facade of doing “service” for their “clients”.

It’s also worth noting that Indian call centers focus more on tech support scams rather than romance scams.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/JimBrowning

They run the same corporate style operations. Management team, performance reviews etc all that jazz