Author: Cookie
Original Title: India, the Outsourcing Factory of the Crypto World
On December 27, 2025, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced on Twitter that the Hyderabad police in India had arrested a former Coinbase customer service employee and were continuing to pursue more individuals involved in the case.
This is related to a data breach case with estimated losses of up to $400 million. On June 2 of last year, according to a Reuters report, six informed sources revealed to Reuters that Coinbase had known as early as January of last year about a user data breach at TaskUs, the company handling its customer service outsourcing. An employee at the customer service center set up by TaskUs in Indore, India, was found using their personal phone to take pictures of their work computer and was suspected of selling Coinbase data to hackers along with an accomplice. The hackers used this information to impersonate Coinbase employees, defraud victims of their cryptocurrency, and demand a $20 million ransom for the user data.
However, after such a serious security incident, although Coinbase has made progress in apprehending those involved, there has been no clear public information indicating that they will shift to hiring employees from other countries and regions or from the United States. This trend has sparked much dissatisfaction on X, with many believing that outsourcing services from India are unreliable and that Coinbase lacks a serious attitude toward user data security.
Although TaskUs is not an Indian company, the problem did indeed occur at TaskUs' Indian branch. And companies suffering losses due to Indian outsourcing staff actively engaging in malicious activities for profit are not limited to Coinbase.
One of the most famous "insider" cases in the e-commerce field involved Amazon outsourcing its "Seller Support" and "Anti-Fraud Review" services to third-party service providers in Hyderabad and Bangalore, India. Some Indian outsourcing employees were bribed by third-party sellers through channels like Telegram, receiving cash rewards ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for each negative review deleted, suspended account reinstated, or internal sales data of competitors leaked. The monthly salary of these outsourcing employees was only about $300 - $500.
Microsoft also outsourced its basic technical support services to third-party providers in India. Similarly, outsourcing employees, dissatisfied with their meager salaries, sold information to fraud gangs and even actively guided customers to click on phishing websites or purchase fake services during work hours.
The model of entrusting external service providers with customer service, customer support, auditing, and other business processes is called "BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)." To reduce costs, improve efficiency, and focus on core business, these highly repetitive, non-creative business processes are handed over to third parties.
Despite so many problems, India remains the king of the global outsourcing industry. A research report from Astute Analytica shows that in 2024, the size of India's BPO market was approximately $50 billion and is expected to reach $139.35 billion by 2033. For business processes resolved by voice, Indians handle 35% of the entire industry. For non-voice (email, online chat, etc.) business processes, Indians handle 45% of the entire industry.
The massive scale comes with chaos caused by structural problems. It can solve problems but also creates them. Indian outsourcing—what is the real situation inside?
Cheap is Really Fragrant, Simply Irresistible
Everyone says that one of the advantages of Indian outsourcing is definitely "cheap." This is correct, and it even explains why Coinbase suffered a data breach with losses of up to $400 million.
When TaskUs finally discovered the data breach, the mastermind Ashita Mishra's phone contained data for over 10,000 Coinbase users. This employee and other accomplices could receive a reward of $200 for each photo they took of user account data. Ashita Mishra sometimes took up to 200 photos a day.
According to data from 6figr.com, the salary TaskUs offers for customer support positions is an annual 330,000 - 400,000 rupees, equivalent to approximately $3,700 - $4,440 USD. Calculated as a daily wage, the daily salary is no more than $15.
This means that Ashita Mishra's daily "photo-taking" income could be more than 2,600 times her daily salary. This is why the hackers chose to bribe TaskUs' outsourcing employees and why the bribery was successful.
In comparison, the expected salary level Coinbase offers on web3.career for a "Customer Support Agent" position is $69,000 - $77,000.
The huge salary gap between "full-time employees" and "outsourced staff," coupled with the lack of stricter controls on data access permissions for outsourced employees, is the reason for Coinbase's data security incident.
As long as the labor costs saved by outsourcing are greater than the money paid for accident compensation, these companies will continue. We cannot simply say they are persistently short-sighted, choosing to sacrifice long-term interests. After the incidents, these companies have taken measures to prevent similar accidents from happening again. For example, the direct hiring of Indian customer service positions by Coinbase we saw earlier was a change from outsourcing to direct hiring after the incident. Amazon's seller support centers now implement extreme physical controls; employees must hand in their phones and smartwatches before entering the office area, and paper and pens are strictly prohibited on desks.
"Cheap" is certainly a huge advantage, but if we switch our perspective to these ordinary outsourcing employees doing the specific execution, "cheap" actually stems from the fact that outsourcing itself is a form of labor arbitrage. The process of transferring work or production to locations with lower labor costs for arbitrage inherently involves layers of "subcontracting." An outsourcing contract from a large enterprise can sometimes be subcontracted 2-4 more times, with commissions, management fees, and profits deducted each time.
Although there is no public data to tell us exactly how much Coinbase paid TaskUs, resulting in TaskUs' Indian employees receiving a daily salary of only about $15. However, according to a research report on the outsourcing market by Astute Analytica last year, in Tier 1 cities in India, the monthly salary offered for each position is approximately 15,000 - 20,000 rupees (about $165 - $220 USD), and it's lower in Tier 2 cities, 8,000 - 12,000 rupees (about $88 - $132 USD). What is the billing standard given by the outsourcing company as a service provider? $12 to $15 per hour for voice processes, and $18 to $22 per hour for non-voice processes.
This is roughly equivalent to the outsourcing company paying you, the outsourced worker, the value of just 1 day's salary for working 24 hours a day non-stop for a full month. Because this job is so grueling, employee turnover is extremely high, with a rate of up to 30%, and this is an optimized level down from 50%.
You might think, it's just answering phones and being a客服, what higher salary could you want? In reality, the global outsourcing that India undertakes poses another level of考验 for customer service. In 2024, the United States contributed 55 - 60% of the revenue to India's outsourcing industry. Considering the approximately 12-hour time difference between India and the US, it basically means working in an environment and life schedule that never sees daylight, stationed in front of the phone or computer screen. As an Indian客服, communicating with users from Europe and America requires not only mastering business knowledge but also minimizing one's accent for the other party to understand, and being familiar with the other party's dialects, word usage habits, and culture to communicate more efficiently.
Cheap is indeed irresistibly fragrant, but it is also built on the sweat and blood of the底层 Indians.
The Counterattack of "Cheap Labor": The Path of Indian Outsourcing
In the early 1990s, the average salary in India was less than 1/10th of that in the United States. Not only that, India had a large workforce with higher education who could work in English. American managers discovered that instead of finding expensive programmers locally, it was better to send tasks to India, where there were almost no obstacles in document exchange and phone conferences.
Not only was there no "language barrier" in communication, but the approximately 12-hour time difference between India and the US also meant that when US company finished work and passed the task to India, Indian employees started working; by the next day when the US started work, the task was already completed. This "sun-never-sets" development model greatly shortened project cycles.
How does that sound? Quite like the爽感 of those idle mobile games with "offline auto-leveling," right? This is also known as the "time zone dividend."
As the saying goes, "right time, right place, right people." The emergence of the "Y2K" crisis around the turn of the century over 20 years ago became the "right time" for India's IT industry. Faced with the massive and tedious information and data storage problems caused by "Y2K," European and American companies, due to IT talent shortages and high labor costs, turned to subcontracting their company's data processing work to Indian companies with cost and language advantages. Indian companies, in the process of solving "Y2K" for European and American companies, accumulated experience and customer channels, thus making a name for themselves and putting the industry on the fast track.
To shed the label of "cheap labor," Indians also thought of a universally applicable good solution—certification. In the late 1990s, nearly 75% of the companies globally that obtained CMM Level 5 (the highest level of software capability maturity) certification were Indian companies. With certificates in hand, it meant an image of specialization and process orientation was established. Indians realized this nearly 30 years ago.
As they progressed, the Indian government also found this to be a good industry. The IT industry doesn't require physical bridge or road construction; with internet cables and talent in place, it can snowball. Therefore, India established a large number of Software Technology Parks (STPI) very early on, providing satellite links (solving India's poor infrastructure and power/network outage problems at the time) and tax exemptions. India's top universities also continued to cultivate excellent talent for the industry.
Thus, India gradually摸索出了 the complete formula for conquering the global outsourcing market—cheap English-speaking talent + seizing historical opportunities (Y2K) + certification to establish professional process assurance + government support + continuous talent cultivation. With this formula, they succeeded.
But now, this formula is also beginning to分化.
High-End "Offshore Outsourcing," Low-End "Struggling"
Indians, of course, are not content with only doing low-end outsourcing of repetitive work; they are still developing. In recent years, more and more well-known companies have established GCCs (Global Capability Centers) in India. Currently, India has over 1,900 GCCs, with about 35% of Fortune 500 companies having this kind of "wholly-owned direct" technology and R&D base in India.
These companies include giants from various industries, such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Wells Fargo in finance; Microsoft, Amazon, Google in technology; Walmart, Target in retail.
These GCCs no longer handle repetitive work like customer service or basic code maintenance but are directly subordinate to the parent company, responsible for global, core business. The R&D and innovation activities of Indian GCCs can already contribute over even 50% of the industry's revenue, and about 45% of Indian GCCs have begun managing end-to-end global product lifecycles, from conceptual design to final release, all completed in India. This means Indians are not only cheap and fragrant but also确实有东西 (really have something).
GCCs are like these global leading companies leaving their home countries and conducting "offshore outsourcing" in India.
It's hard to imagine that even Japanese companies have significantly begun to flee their home country to build GCCs in India over the past year. Honda and Hitachi expanded their R&D scale in India in 2025. Their reason was that digital transformation in Japan is too slow, there is a talent gap, and in India, they can obtain the most cutting-edge AI and Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) technology at 1/3 of the cost in Japan.
In India, if you want to recruit 500 engineers mastering specific cloud technologies within a month, the recruitment market in Bangalore or Hyderabad can respond quickly. India currently possesses about 20% of the world's digital skills talent. In generative AI, cybersecurity, and cloud architecture, the scale of its talent pool is难以比拟 (hard to match) by other regions (such as Eastern Europe or Latin America).
And Indian university graduates also love going to these GCCs—no need to leave their hometowns, yet enjoying the same福利待遇 (benefits and treatment) and career development paths as employees at the headquarters of these global large enterprises. The flywheel is running again.
As for repetitive, non-creative outsourcing work like customer service and auditing, although there are some competitors like Vietnam and the Philippines that can challenge India starting from "cheap," the most threatening opponent for India is still the rapidly evolving AI technology.
Conclusion
Therefore, Coinbase's attitude is not strange; it's a pragmatic business decision, but the occurrence of the accident also exposed major loopholes in previous internal management.
Loopholes? No problem. I, Coinbase, will arrest who needs arresting, fix what needs fixing, and then we continue with business as usual.
The reason why Indian outsourcing can "defeat the world无敌手 (be unmatched)" is also very clear by now—places cheaper than it don't have as much talent, places with better English than it aren't as cheap, places cheaper than it don't have as much talent...
But this advantage that satisfies large companies and allows them to chat and laugh freely, is it not also the fatigue and心酸 (heartache) of the employees?
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