JAKARTA: More than 500 Indonesians freed from online scam centres in Myanmar will be repatriated via Thailand in the coming days, a senior Indonesian official told AFP on Tuesday.

Cyberscam operations, which have thrived in Myanmar’s lawless border areas for several years, lure foreign workers with promises of high-paying jobs but hold them hostage and force them to commit online fraud.

Around 7,000 workers from at least two dozen countries have been freed in recent weeks, the majority of them Chinese, but many have been languishing in squalid temporary holding camps on the border between Myanmar and Thailand.

Four hundred Indonesian nationals will return home on Tuesday and “around 161” are to come back on Wednesday, Judha Nugraha, the director of citizen protection at Indonesia’s foreign ministry, told AFP.

They would come back on three flights from Bangkok after crossing into Thailand from Myanmar, he said.

Indonesian authorities already repatriated 140 nationals from Myanmar via Thailand last month.

Authorities in Myanmar, under pressure from ally China, have cracked down on the scam compounds.

Thousands of Indonesians have been enticed abroad in recent years to other Southeast Asian countries for better-paying jobs, only to end up in the hands of transnational scam operators.

Between 2020 and September last year, Jakarta repatriated more than 4,700 Indonesians entangled in online scam operations from countries including Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, according to foreign ministry data.

The United Nations estimates that as many as 120,000 people — many of them Chinese men — may be working in Myanmar scam centres against their will.