Myanmar military shuts down a major cybercrime center, detains over 2k people

https://apnews.com/article/scam-centers-cybercrime-myanmar-a2c9fda85187121e51bd0efdf29c81da

by bikenaga • 9 months ago

183 57 9 months ago

This is a great interactive article about what it's like to be kidnapped and forced to work in these scam centers on the Myanmar border, lured by promise of jobs people are trapped, passports confiscated, phones stolen, 16-hour workdays spent defrauding victims online, cultivating fake relationships and pressuring them into investment or romance scams:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...

EvanAnderson2• 9 months ago

I got a lot less snarky in my responses to scam text messages when I learned about the forced labor aspect. I just block the sender and go on, versus trying to bait them and waste their time.

For awhile I was asking "Is there someone I can contact for you?", but then I got worried that would get somebody a beating.

Mistletoe• 9 months ago

“I love you” works well, because even if they are a piece of shit now, they need to hear it. No one is born bad. I’ve actually gotten them to break character with stuff like that sometimes.

viraptor2• 9 months ago

versus trying to bait them and waste their time.

At least that prevents someone else getting scammed sooner.

kuangtsao2• 9 months ago

I used to work in this industry. It pretty much all started with this group of 'Fujian bosses' who set up these 'scam parks.' They were trying to wash money back to China and came up with all sorts of ways to do it, usually by pretending to be online gambling companies.

The people actually doing the scams are on the Thai border, in Myanmar, and Cambodia. The IT and tech staff... well, some are in the parks, but a lot of them are in Taiwan. (I've also heard some are in Japan, singapore, malaysia and the UK).

The money gets laundered through all kinds of channels into different tax havens. It might pass through Taiwan—'cause, you know, China can't touch it there and the money looks clean—and then it goes on to China or Singapore... basically, right into those bosses' pockets.

Inside those parks, there's literally no law. I'm talking beatings, slavery, human trafficking, forcing people into prostitution, and death... that's just everyday stuff there.

As for me, I was working in Taiwan, so the worst thing that happened to me was just not getting the high pay they promised. Other than that, I was fine. This is all stuff I either heard from other people in the business or saw firsthand.

ValentineC• 9 months ago

The money gets laundered through all kinds of channels into different tax havens. It might pass through Taiwan—'cause, you know, China can't touch it there and the money looks clean—and then it goes on to China or Singapore... basically, right into those bosses' pockets.

Singapore cracked down on a huge part of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Singapore_money_launderin...

Funny how the banks let these money launderers go on with their activities for years, most likely because they paid the banks their share of fees and commissions.

davidjytang• 9 months ago

They were trying to wash money back to China

Surely you meant they were trying to wash money out of China.

dougb5• 9 months ago

I also recommend the Scam Factory podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2cfjCS28vx1MVoukNjpINt

mizzao• 9 months ago

This has been going on for a while and they didn't do anything about it. What changed?

gsanghera• 9 months ago

They probably became aware of the size of the pie, and decided to go for it themselves.. I know different country, but similar operation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/bitcoin-doj-chen-zhi-pig-but...

vismit2000• 9 months ago

http://archive.is/WS34i

mouse_• 9 months ago

What's Grandma supposed to do with all those Google Play gift cards now?

Hackbraten• 9 months ago

Do NOT redeem!

sysguest3• 9 months ago

idk maybe google is somewhat responsible here?

either their fraud-detection isn't working, or they're turning blind-eye here for profit?

Nextgrid3• 9 months ago

It's not actually the scammers that are redeeming the gift cards - instead they are in turn reselling the codes on marketplaces (to legitimate customers) for a small loss as a way of laundering them.

From Google's perspective - someone bought a gift card in the US, and redeemed it somewhere else in the US, aka the expected behavior of legitimate gift card usage.

lysace3• 9 months ago

I heard that both sides of the ongoing civil war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_civil_war_(2021%E2%80%...) work with these criminal organizations to secure foreign revenue for weapons purchases - but that it is primarily a junta-driven thing.

And that the people running them come from PRC Chinese organized crime (triads).

programmertote• 9 months ago

Wish I could give your comment 10 more upvotes for visibility.

This is Myanmar military trying to do field work for China. China is the one who allowed these militias to thrive in the border areas and they have been arming them for decades. This particular operation happens in Myawaddy, which is in lower eastern part of Myanmar close to Thailand, but not in northeastern Myanmar closer to China, because Myanmar military dare only touch the militia there. It helps that the accused collaborators of these scam centers in the lower east part of Myanmar are Kayin ethnic militia, who--unlike Wa or Kokang--aren't as Chinese, and thus, China doesn't care. Also, China is now 100% backing the military regime (which staged a coup around 2021) in Myanmar, so this is like shooting two birds with one stone (i.e., get rid of scam centers for China, while helping Myanmar's brutal military to remove an income source of one of the non-ethnically Chinese militia).

The military dares not assault the northeastern militias like Wa [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Wa_State_Army ], Kokang militia [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_National_Democratic_Al... ] because these guys are truly backed (and enabled) by China. There was a raid by Myanmar military in northeastern part (close to China) about a year ago [ https://www.rfa.org/english/myanmar/2024/11/20/shan-state-wa... ] and that was backed by China. Otherwise, Myanmar military dares not do that.

Basically, China is getting what it sowed and now that its citizens are being impacted, it's asking its lapdog, Burmese military, to do the clean-up for them selectively.

maxglute3• 9 months ago

now that its citizens are being impacted

PRC citizens were always impacted, these scam centers literally started (by twnese org crime) to target mainland retirees.

PRC would love for Junta to dismantle Kokang / northern scam centers but Junta couldn't because domestic factional power issues vs Northern states. The TLDR is scam centers are protected by pro Junta Kokang faction (BGF), so PRC got tired of Junta waffling and decided to support anti Junta three brotherhood alliance (aka rebels) who went HAM on the scam centers while PRC did military exercises to tell juntas to fuck off and understand PRC willing to patronize other internal players if junta doesn't play ball. Last year's 1027 operation only happened because PRC lost patience with Juntas and now Juntas more keen to help PRC deal vs scam centers (well at least performatively since they still need it for funding) because they know if they did nothing PRC will shop around and empower other players during civil war.

maxglute3• 9 months ago

PRC Chinese organized crime (triads)

Well it's a sinosphere (insert one china joke) organized crime thing.

TLDR Taiwanese organized pioneered telco fraud 20 years ago, started third country scam call centers, primarily targetting tech illiterate PRC retirees. PRC/HK org crime saw how profitable, scaled up, ande more sophisticated (pig butcher + crypto to evade capital controls), targetted global Chinese diasphora. PRC cracks down domestically. They move to Myanmar / south eat asia, partner with local armed groups. Taiwanese call centers still around, but they're squeezed to other part of big butcher scacm chain, i.e. trafficking people. Anyway, every once in awhile their activities piss enough neighbours off especially PRC off that actual state power like junta has to intervenene.

lysace3• 9 months ago

Of course 90% of your previous comments are explicitly related to the PRC. Apologies for only reviewing 100 of them.

sbarre• 9 months ago

Seems like we're hearing a lot about this lately, it must have gotten real bad if there's suddenly all this movement to crack down on it.

fbu• 9 months ago

Maybe some governments are sponsoring these activities near the border of a political rival. Like they did during the golden triangle era...

yieldcrv• 9 months ago

Article is from the 20th so you're probably hearing about the same specific action

verdverm• 9 months ago

There were related articles on the kidnapping / hostage like experience of some expats a few months back iirc

trallnag• 9 months ago

Probably the Belarusian woman who ended up kidnapped, murdered, and dismembered in Myanmar.

cruelness523• 9 months ago

As early as a few years ago, these people were engaged in fraudulent activities in Southeast Asia. Most of them were Chinese, but the Chinese government was too soft and did not take effective measures against the fraud. As a result, for a long time, these people did not receive the approval of the dispute until a Korean appeared.

junaru• 9 months ago

Source please on the Chinese and Korean claims.

yorwba• 9 months ago

In 2021, the Chinese government went so far as to require all citizens in northern Myanmar to return to their hometowns in a attempt to combat the scams. It can hardly be called soft. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3141474/beij...

nextworddev• 9 months ago

Wasn’t that it was soft, it was actually actively assisting the ops

throw4r5u5ree• 9 months ago

Maybe some corrupt low-level official, but the national government was definitely trying to crack down.

m101• 9 months ago

"It [starlink] does not have licensed operations in Myanmar, but at least hundreds of terminals have been smuggled into the Southeast Asian nation."

So how do starlinks work in Myanmar if it's not licensed?

kmeisthax• 9 months ago

My assumption is that either the terminals don't check, or the organized criminals paid a guy to hack the terminals to think they're in (insert licensed East Asian country here); and SpaceX specifically didn't adjust their constellation orbits to avoid Myanmar so that you can get a signal with a terminal that doesn't care about radio emissions law.

crishoj2• 9 months ago

That is a good question. https://starlink.com/map shows neither Myanmar, Thailand or Laos having coverage.

Perhaps they were using the "roam" version (https://starlink.com/roam), which seems to work pretty much anywhere.

waitforjames• 9 months ago

I manage a maritime starlink installation. The geofence rules are very odd. Starlink is not licensed in either Cambodia or Thailand. When my ship was in Cambodia starlink automatically disconnected, but when we sailed into Thailand it came back online - despite both countries not having starlink available.

crishoj2• 9 months ago

SpaceX acknowledged the use that has apparently moved to cut service for some scam camps: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpd2e5541d1o

radicaldreamer• 9 months ago

The vast majority of these are going to turn into AI bots shortly if they aren’t going strong already. The human (slave) in the loop will be there for big fish or to finish the job.

xandrius2• 9 months ago

This sounds like an absolutely great win for humans then. Go AI!

melbourne_mat• 9 months ago

Shutdown because they either stopped paying their dues or didn't agree to the recent increase

milkshakes• 9 months ago

they kidnapped the wrong person

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Wang_Xing

incrudible• 9 months ago

This facility was in the news recently.

https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/southeast-asia/myanmar-be...

agmyintmyatoo• 9 months ago

The culprit organization works closely with the junta, and they became active after the coup. (https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/myanmars-crisis-the-world/tho...)

Myanmar military shuts down a major cybercrime center, detains over 2k people

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