This story by Sumit Kumar Singh originally appeared on Global Voices on November 30, 2025.
In the dim glow of his smartphone screen, the job advertisement seems perfect. Good salary. Reputable company. The application process is deceptively simple. A young man in rural Bangladesh reads it again, his heart racing with hope. He cannot yet see that this moment — this single click — may decide whether his family’s sacrifices lead to prosperity or unmanageable debt.
Bangladeshi migrant workers have always been vulnerable to fraud, but digital technology has transformed the scale and speed of deception. Fake recruitment schemes, online betting traps, and identity theft now reach even remote rural villages of Bangladesh through social media, mobile apps, and messaging platforms.
The pattern became especially visible between 2022 and 2024. Thirty-three Bangladeshi workers filed a lawsuit after paying up to USD 6,000 (MYR 25,000) each for jobs that never existed. They arrived in Malaysia only to find themselves stranded, without work, their passports confiscated. Over 480,000 Bangladeshi workers entered Malaysia during this period, many recruited through digital channels and social media that promised their quick placements. A syndicate trafficked these workers to funnel them into forced labor, extracting an estimated two billion dollars.
In just the first four months of 2025, over 3,500 Bangladeshis were denied entry to other countries and deported back to Bangladesh, victims of digital recruitment scams. They had spent their life savings. They had borrowed from relatives. They had sold their land. All based on job offers that appeared legitimate on their phone screens.
A newer trend has emerged as well. Traffickers operating in Dubai are luring Bangladeshi migrants with false promises of high-paying IT and customer service jobs in Thailand, circulated through online platforms. Instead, these workers are kidnapped at gunpoint and trafficked to scam centers in Myanmar, where they are forced to work in horrific conditions.
The workers are now vulnerable to another trap: online betting and investment scams. The Cyber Crime Investigation Division of Dhaka Metropolitan Police analyzed 406 cases from recent years and found that 24 percent were related to online scams disguised as betting, gambling, gaming, and investment schemes. These gain traction through targeted advertisements on YouTube and Facebook.
In June 2024, an estimated five million people in Bangladesh were active on gambling sites. Many are aspirant migrants, desperate to multiply their meager savings before leaving for a foreign country. Workers who are already burdened with migration-related debt, lose even more to these digital traps. Unknowingly, some become involved in money laundering networks through mobile banking and digital wallets.
Many Bangladeshi workers are less familiar with mobile financial services and digital banking, leaving them exposed to cybercriminals who exploit these gaps. Many can hardly distinguish genuine recruitment portals from fraudulent ones and often fail to recognize phishing attempts.
The broader migration system compounds these risks. For overseas employment, Bangladesh relies heavily on hundreds of thousands of informal brokers, or dalals, who operate nationwide. Their involvement leaves workers vulnerable to scams, unsafe job placements, and exploitation. When the process is already built on personal networks and verbal assurances, workers have little experience distinguishing credible digital opportunities from fabricated ones. The legitimate and illegitimate blend together for them.
The data offers a clearer picture. In 2024, over one million Bangladeshi workers went abroad for employment. This was actually a 22.5 percent decrease from 2023, when 1,305,453 workers migrated. Saudi Arabia remained the largest destination, accounting for 60 percent of all migrations.
Who are these workers? Most are young men between 18 to 45. Nearly 90 percent leave without written job contracts. More than half still depend on intermediaries for their employment arrangements. Only six percent of migrants in recent years were women, and even this small number has been declining due to reports of unsafe workplaces.
These workers face staggering migration costs. Low-skilled workers who left between 2015 and 2018 paid an average of BDT 478,000 (USD 3,900) in migration expenses, requiring approximately 17 months of average salary just to recover their expenses. The contrast is stark: Vietnamese workers need only 2.7 to 4.5 months’ earnings to cover their initial costs for Malaysia, while Pakistani workers spend about USD 3,100 — still USD 500 less than what Bangladeshis typically pay to reach Saudi Arabia.
Every year, thousands return home within months, their dreams shattered and their debts still looming. A recent study found that 36 percent of workers were forced to return within just three months of departure.
The labor migration process is increasingly shifting to digital platforms. But here is the problem: digitization is happening without proper safeguards. It is being mediated through the same informal networks that have always controlled migration. A syndicate led by individuals using technology platforms misappropriated two billion dollars by inflating migration costs and leaving workers stranded. The system was built on fake quotas for fictitious companies, all processed through digital channels.
When a worker books a ticket online, pays a recruiting agency through mobile banking, and travels with an e-visa, every step now leaves a digital trail. But most workers do not understand this trail and fail to determine how costs are being inflated to cheat them. They barely know how their digital footprints can be tracked, how their accounts can be hacked, or even how their identities can be stolen.
The fraudulent groups working across borders have grown sophisticated. Their methods are deliberate and multi-layered. First, they exploit social media and digital channels for recruitment. They create fake company pages on Facebook. They run ads on YouTube showing happy workers in gleaming offices abroad. They post doctored photos of large salary payments on WhatsApp. They run Telegram groups where “successful migrants” (who are scammers) share stories and convince others to join.
Second, they use layers of legitimacy. Workers are shown approval letters that appear official. They receive emails from addresses resembling government domains. They are presented with job contracts that seem authentic. Some are even told that Bangladesh’s high commission has verified the offers. How is an ordinary worker supposed to spot the fraud?
They also exploit digital payment systems to siphon money. They ask for payments in installments through mobile banking channels. Each worker reportedly spent between USD 4,500 and USD 6,000, often paying through digital transactions that are difficult to trace or recover. By the time the worker realizes it was a scam, the money has moved through multiple accounts and vanished.
In Southeast Asia, scam networks use satellite internet and digital platforms to establish “scam cities” — hubs for romance scams, investment fraud, illegal online gambling, cryptocurrency fraud, and human trafficking. Migrant workers are sometimes held captive and forced to operate these scams, targeting victims in other countries.
The Bangladesh government launched ScamCheck in January 2025, a platform allowing citizens to upload suspicious links, emails, or messages for AI-powered analysis to identify potential scams. This is a good start, but the platform needs to be available in Bengali and expanded specifically to address migration-related fraud.
If an overseas employment offer can be verified through a single government portal accessible via mobile phone, it would be easier for workers to scan a QR code or enter a reference number to instantly check if an opportunity is legitimate.
Currently, the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET) handles training, the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare sets policy, the Police tackle cybercrime, and the Bangladesh Bank regulates financial services — but these agencies do not always work together seamlessly.
No Bangladeshi worker should ever again lose their life savings to a digital scam. No dream of a better life should end in exploitation and debt.
[DS]
Suggested Reading:
.jpg){kind=link}