Student freed from Myanmar call center details ordeal
The student traveled to Thailand in June 2025 in search of work.
Volunteer Svetlana Sherstoboeva, who helped free 21-year-old Madina from Yekaterinburg from captivity, described what the student endured in Myanmar. The girl went abroad for work and fell into a fraudulent call center, where she was illegally detained and forced to work. This lasted from June 2025.
The freed student is now in a migration center awaiting her flight home.
«Madina arrived in Thailand on the invitation of an «employer,» after which she was forcibly taken by boat to Myanmar and forced to work in a call center,» Svetlana Sherstoboeva said. «She saw so much that it makes your hair stand on end. For the last three months, since Belarusian Vera Kravtsova died and the repressions began, there was cold water for washing, she had only rice and water to eat, she was beaten,» Sherstoboeva recounted.
Now the freed student has been sent to a migration center in the city of Myawaddy. Madina was bought a plane ticket to Russia, and tomorrow she will return to Yekaterinburg.
Madina«s family lives in a Ural village about 100 kilometers from Yekaterinburg. The girl»s father died in 2018, her mother was left with four children. Madina has an older sister and two younger brothers.
In a number of Southeast Asian countries, an international criminal network operates that recruits Russians and citizens from CIS countries under the pretext of employment in Thailand. Some, after an «online interview,» were invited to Bangkok, people were bought plane tickets without a visa, bypassing official border control points.
The student did not tell her loved ones about what happened to her in Myanmar. Read what her mother told about Madina.
We also told the story of another Russian woman freed from a labor camp in Myanmar. The girl fell for an offer of easy money in Thailand and ended up in one of the so-called call centers.
