India, the Outsourcing Factory of the Crypto World

On December 27, 2025, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced via a tweet that 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 reaching 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, its customer service outsourcing provider. An employee at the company's customer service center in Indore, India, was found using their personal mobile phone to photograph their work computer and was suspected of selling Coinbase user 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 from Coinbase for the user data.

However, after such a severe security incident, while Coinbase has made progress in pursuing those involved, there has been no clear public information indicating they will shift to hiring employees from other countries and regions, or from within the United States. This trend has sparked considerable dissatisfaction on X, with many believing that outsourcing services from India are unreliable and that Coinbase lacks a serious attitude towards user data security.

Although TaskUs is not an Indian company, the problem indeed occurred at its Indian subsidiary. And Coinbase is not the only company to suffer losses due to malicious actions by Indian outsourcing employees seeking profit.

One of the most famous "insider" cases in the e-commerce field involves Amazon outsourcing its "Seller Support" and "Anti-Fraud Review" operations to third-party service providers located in Hyderabad and Bangalore, India. Some Indian outsourcing employees were contacted and bribed by third-party sellers through channels like Telegram. For each negative review deleted, suspended account reinstated, or internal sales data of competitors leaked, employees could receive cash rewards ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The monthly salary for 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 rings and even actively guided customers to click on phishing websites or purchase fake services during work hours.

The model of entrusting business processes like customer service, customer support, and review to external service providers, as seen above, is called "BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)." To reduce costs, improve efficiency, and focus on core business, these highly repetitive, non-creative enterprise processes are handed over to third parties.

Despite so many issues, 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 already approximately $50 billion and is projected to reach $139.35 billion by 2033. For voice-based business processes, India handles 35% of the entire industry. For non-voice (email, online chat, etc.) business processes, India handles 45% of the entire industry.

Its massive scale brings chaos due to structural issues. It can solve problems, yet itself can also create problems. Indian outsourcing—what is the real situation inside?

Cheap is Irresistibly Good

Everyone says one of the advantages of Indian outsourcing is definitely "cheap." This is not wrong; in fact, it explains why Coinbase suffered a data breach with losses 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 $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 330,000 - 400,000 INR per year, which converts to approximately $3,700 – $4,440 USD. Calculated as a daily wage, the salary is no more than $15 per day.

In other words, Ashita Mishra's daily "photography" income could be over 2,600 times her daily salary. This is why hackers chose to bribe TaskUs's outsourcing employees and why the bribery succeeded.

In contrast, the expected salary range Coinbase lists on web3.career for a "Customer Support Agent" position is $69,000 – $77,000 USD.

There is such a huge salary gap between "full-time employees" and "outsourced staff," yet there were no stricter controls on data access permissions for outsourced employees. This is the reason for Coinbase's data security incident.

As long as the labor cost savings from outsourcing are greater than the compensation paid for incidents, these companies will continue. We can't say they are consistently 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 directly hired Indian customer service positions at Coinbase we saw earlier were changed from outsourcing to direct hiring after the incident. Amazon's current seller support centers implement extreme physical controls; employees must hand over their mobile 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 shift our perspective to these ordinary, hands-on outsourcing employees, "cheap" actually stems from outsourcing itself being a labor arbitrage industry. The process of transferring work or production to locations with lower labor costs for arbitrage inherently struggles to escape 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 at each layer.

While there is no public data to show exactly how much Coinbase paid TaskUs, resulting in TaskUs's Indian employees earning less than $15 a day, a research report on the outsourcing market by Astute Analytica last year showed that in Tier 1 cities in India, the monthly salary offered per position is about 15,000 - 20,000 INR (approx. $165 - $220 USD). In Tier 2 cities, it's lower, 8,000 - 12,000 INR (approx. $88 - $132 USD). What about the billing standard the outsourcing company, as the service provider, charges? $12 to $15 per hour for voice processes, $18 to $22 per hour for non-voice processes.

This is roughly equivalent to you working non-stop, 24 hours a day, for a full month, and the outsourcing company only paying you, the outsourced worker, a salary worth one day's pay. Because the job is so grueling, employee turnover is extremely high, with a churn rate of 30%, which is actually an optimized level down from 50%.

You might think, it's just answering calls and being a customer service agent, how high a salary do you expect? In reality, the global outsourcing that India handles poses a whole other level of challenge for customer service. In 2024, the United States contributed 55-60% of the revenue to India's outsourcing industry. Considering the roughly 12-hour time difference between India and the US, it essentially means being stuck in front of a phone or computer screen, leading to a work environment and lifestyle with no daylight. As an Indian customer service agent communicating with users from Europe and America, what's required is not just proficiency in business knowledge but also minimizing one's accent for better understanding and familiarizing oneself with the other party's dialects, vocabulary habits, and culture for more efficient communication.

Cheap is indeed irresistibly good, but it is also built upon the hard work and sweat of ordinary Indians at the bottom.

The Counterattack of "Cheap Labor": The Journey of Indian Outsourcing

In the early 1990s, India's average salary was less than 1/10th of that in the United States. Moreover, India possessed a vast pool of highly educated labor capable of working in English. This led American managers to realize that instead of finding expensive programmers locally, it was better to send tasks to India, where there were almost no barriers in document exchange and teleconferences.

Not only was there no "language barrier" in communication, but India also has about a 12-hour time difference with the US. US companies could send tasks to India at the end of their workday, and Indian employees would start working; by the next US workday, the tasks were completed. This "sun-never-sets" development model greatly shortened project cycles.

How does that sound? Quite like the satisfying feeling of "offline auto-leveling" in idle mobile games? This is also known as the "time zone dividend."

As the saying goes, "the right timing, geographical convenience, and human harmony." At the turn of the century over 20 years ago, the emergence of the "Y2K" crisis became the "right timing" for India's IT industry. Faced with the massive and tedious information and data storage problems caused by Y2K, European and American enterprises, due to IT talent shortages and high labor costs, turned to subcontracting their company's data processing work to Indian firms with cost and language advantages. Indian companies, in the process of solving Y2K for Western firms, accumulated experience and client channels, building their reputation from then on and propelling the industry onto a fast track.

To shed the "cheap labor" label, Indians also thought of a universally applicable good method—certification. In the late 1990s, nearly 75% of the companies globally that achieved CMM Level 5 (the highest level of software capability maturity) certification were Indian companies. With certificates in hand, it meant an image of professionalism and process standardization was established. Indians realized this nearly 30 years ago.

As things progressed, the Indian government also realized this was a good industry. The IT industry doesn't require physical infrastructure like building bridges and roads; with internet lines and talent in place, it can snowball. Therefore, India established a large number of Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) very early on, providing satellite links (solving India's poor infrastructure issues like power and internet outages at the time) and tax exemptions. India's top universities also continuously cultivate excellent talent relevant to the industry.

Thus, India gradually developed a 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 show differentiation.

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 enterprises have established GCCs (Global Capability Centers) in India. Currently, India already has over 1,900 GCCs, with about 35% of Fortune 500 companies having this kind of "wholly-owned direct operation" technology and R&D base in India.

These enterprises include giants from various industries, such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Wells Fargo in finance; Microsoft, Amazon, Google in tech; Walmart, Target in retail.

These GCCs no longer handle repetitive tasks like customer service or basic code maintenance. Instead, they are directly affiliated with the parent company, responsible for global, core business functions. The R&D and innovation activities of Indian GCCs can already contribute over 50% of industry 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. In other words, Indians are not only cheap and good, but they also have substance.

GCCs are like these global leading companies conducting a form of "offshore outsourcing" by moving away from their home countries to India.

It's hard to imagine that even Japanese companies have significantly started fleeing 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 stated reason is that Japan's domestic digital transformation is too slow, with a talent gap, while in India, they can obtain cutting-edge AI and Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) technology at one-third of the cost in Japan.

In India, if you want to recruit 500 engineers proficient in specific cloud technologies within a month, the recruitment markets in Bangalore or Hyderabad can respond swiftly. India currently possesses about 20% of the global digital skills talent. In fields like generative AI, cybersecurity, and cloud architecture, its talent pool size is difficult for other regions (like Eastern Europe or Latin America) to match.

And Indian university graduates also love going to these GCCs—no need to leave their hometowns, yet enjoying the same benefits, treatment, and career development paths as employees at the headquarters of these global giants. The flywheel is spinning again.

As for repetitive, non-creative outsourcing work like customer service and review, although some competitors like Vietnam and the Philippines have emerged 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. However, the occurrence of the incident also exposed major loopholes in their previous internal management.

Loopholes? No problem. Coinbase will arrest who needs arresting, patch what needs patching, and then we'll continue business as usual.

And the reason why Indian outsourcing can "defeat all rivals" is also 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, isn't it also built upon the exhaustion and bitterness of the employees?