ONLINE job scams are on the rise with gullible Goans jumping for job offers in foreign countries, without realizing that they are being used to cheat other gullible people from countries all over the world. This is why Parliament needs to enact a law to regulate those Indians who emigrate to foreign countries on the promise of a lucrative job.
All countries prefer their own nationals for domestic jobs, unless the talent is not locally available and the person from another country possesses special expertise and experience not available in that country.
Needless to say, this is not possible. Every country, howsoever poor, have their own universities who churn out doctors and engineers although the standards of countries in Africa such as Nigeria and Ethiopia may not match the standards of Indian universities. But let us keep that story for another day.
THE most common online scam is offering jobs to Goans (and others) on the condition that they deposit earnest money, to pay for their visas and other documents needed to take them abroad. After the money is deposited, the cheat closes the account and disappears into thin air. While it is possible for the police in India to trace out such online scamsters through their cyber cell, it is impossible to get your money back if the scamster operates from a foreign country.
The Goa Police have no jurisdiction over foreign countries and investigating such scams abroad, requires writing to the police in these foreign countries through their embassies, which are flooded with work and will ignore such requests to investigate the crimes committed on their soil.
ONE such scam was operated from Nigeria which is a hotbed of such crimes. A man posing as an engineer, told some gullible Goans to deposit Rs 50,000 to make a DPC certificate (whatever that means) as processing fees. Some Goans did fall for this trap and lost their family savings.
An advertisement was posted on Instagram over 60 days ago for a call centre job in Thailand. The number given was a Bangalore number and the person who spoke to one of these gullible Goans (let us call him Prasad) interviewed Prasad on Google Meet. The interviewer told Prasad that six persons had been short listed and that his friend from Mumbai had been selected for the job.

MYANMAR BORDER
“He later sent me a flight ticket and on January 14, my friend and I flew to Bangkok from where we were taken to Mae Sot (a city in eastern Thailand close to the Myanmar border) and kept in a resort. The next morning, another vehicle took us to Myanmar. The vehicle crossed the border with ease because of the friendly relationship between the border security personnel of both countries.”
However, when one is desperate for a job, one doesn’t ask too many questions to your recruiters who threaten to repatriate you if you are not happy with your job. So, although his suspicions were aroused, Prasad decided to keep mum. He needed the job to send money back home.
After travelling a couple of kilometres into Myanmar, Prasad and his friends were given accommodation in an area called KK Park, which was 200 metres away from the employer company. The company put the wide-eyed boys to work as trainees at the call centre.
Prasad said he soon discovered that the company he worked for was just a front for cheating gullible investors from all over the world. “I was a trainee and was not doing anything myself but I saw many other employees involved in such online work. They would mostly target US nationals between the ages of 45 and 60 years. They would start chatting with them online pretending to be women. The aim was to get them to invest in our company. There were hundreds of such companies involved in such online scams and our company would funnel the money which we received into all these conduits,” explained Prasad.
PRASAD explained that their work timings were 14 hours from midnight to 2 pm the next day without any weekly offs, which is a gross violation of human rights in India. All employees whether in the hospitality industry, the health sector or the armed forces, have to be given one day as a weekly off after six days continuous work. In Goa, all government offices are shut on Saturdays, specially the second and fourth Saturdays.

NO TORTURE
Prasad said the living conditions were not bad because the bed sheets and toiletries would be changed regularly. Moreover, they were not tortured or subjected to inhuman treatment. Many Indians from the impoverished BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) would willingly work in such conditions because these employees were regularly paid their salaries if they performed well. The point is they were never told where exactly the money they enticed gullible people to invest in, actually went.
Prasad said he and his colleagues were taken aback when they received WhatsApp messages that the armies of both India and Myanmar would be rescuing them. That was the end of his dream of a lucrative job in a foreign country. The motto? If you get a lucrative job in a foreign country, look before you leap.