Myanmar's 'Cyber-Slavery Compounds' May Hold 100,000 Trafficked People (theguardian.com) 35
It was "little more than empty fields" five years ago — but it's now "a vast, heavily guarded complex stretching for 210 hectares (520 acres)," reports the Guardian, "the frontline of a multibillion-dollar criminal fraud industry fuelled by human trafficking and brutal violence."
Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run complex online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits. There have been some attempts to crack down on the centres and rescue the workers, who can be subjected to torture and trapped inside. But drone images and new research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveal that the number of such centres operating along the Thai-Myanmar border has more than doubled since Myanmar's military seized power in 2021, with construction continuing to this day.
Data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi), a defence thinktank in Canberra, shows that the number of Myanmar scam centres on the Thai border has increased from 11 to 27, and they have expanded in size by an average of 5.5 hectares a month. Drone images and photographs of KK Park and other Myanmar scam centres, Tai Chang and Shwe Kokko, taken by the Guardian in August show new features and active building work... Myanmar's military junta has allowed the spread of scam centres inside the country as these criminal enterprises have become an essential part of the country's conflict economy since the coup, helping it rise to the top of the global list of countries harbouring organised crime. According to Aspi's analysis, Myanmar's military, which has lost huge swathes of territory since the coup and is struggling to retain its grip on power, cannot take meaningful measures against the scam compounds without endangering its precarious relations with the crucial armed militias who are profiting from them.
While 7,000 people were freed from the compounds earlier this year, "Thai police estimated earlier this year that as many as 100,000 people were held inside Myanmar scam centres," the article notes.
Elsewhere the Guardian reports that "The centres are run by Chinese criminal gangs," and describes people who unwittingly came to Thailand for customer service jobs, only to be trafficked to Myanmar's guarded "cyberslavery compounds" and "forced to send thousands of messages from fake social-media profiles, posing as a rich American investor to swindle US real estate agents into cryptocurrency scams." Since 2020, south-east Asia's cyber-slavery industry has entrapped hundreds of thousands of people and forced them to perform "pig butchering" — the brutal term for building trust with a fraud target before scamming them. At first, the industry mostly captured Chinese and Taiwanese people, then it moved on to south-east Asians and Indians — and now Africans.
Criminal syndicates have been shifting towards scamming victims in the US and Europe after Chinese efforts to prevent its citizens being targeted, experts told the Guardian. That has led some trafficking networks to seek recruits with English-language and tech skills — including east Africans, thousands of whom are now estimated to be trapped inside south-east Asian compounds, says Benedikt Hofmann, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's representative for south-east Asia and the Pacific.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.
Data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi), a defence thinktank in Canberra, shows that the number of Myanmar scam centres on the Thai border has increased from 11 to 27, and they have expanded in size by an average of 5.5 hectares a month. Drone images and photographs of KK Park and other Myanmar scam centres, Tai Chang and Shwe Kokko, taken by the Guardian in August show new features and active building work... Myanmar's military junta has allowed the spread of scam centres inside the country as these criminal enterprises have become an essential part of the country's conflict economy since the coup, helping it rise to the top of the global list of countries harbouring organised crime. According to Aspi's analysis, Myanmar's military, which has lost huge swathes of territory since the coup and is struggling to retain its grip on power, cannot take meaningful measures against the scam compounds without endangering its precarious relations with the crucial armed militias who are profiting from them.
While 7,000 people were freed from the compounds earlier this year, "Thai police estimated earlier this year that as many as 100,000 people were held inside Myanmar scam centres," the article notes.
Elsewhere the Guardian reports that "The centres are run by Chinese criminal gangs," and describes people who unwittingly came to Thailand for customer service jobs, only to be trafficked to Myanmar's guarded "cyberslavery compounds" and "forced to send thousands of messages from fake social-media profiles, posing as a rich American investor to swindle US real estate agents into cryptocurrency scams." Since 2020, south-east Asia's cyber-slavery industry has entrapped hundreds of thousands of people and forced them to perform "pig butchering" — the brutal term for building trust with a fraud target before scamming them. At first, the industry mostly captured Chinese and Taiwanese people, then it moved on to south-east Asians and Indians — and now Africans.
Criminal syndicates have been shifting towards scamming victims in the US and Europe after Chinese efforts to prevent its citizens being targeted, experts told the Guardian. That has led some trafficking networks to seek recruits with English-language and tech skills — including east Africans, thousands of whom are now estimated to be trapped inside south-east Asian compounds, says Benedikt Hofmann, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's representative for south-east Asia and the Pacific.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.
Scams are now fully corporate (Score:2)
Interesting that scams have attracted big money to institutionalize the greed.
Instead of small time mom and pop scammers (who reaped the benefits) we now have an entire infrastructure of prison like cities exploiting the poor and reaping the profits.
It seems to me this is the same model of all modern corporations. Exploit workers and grab profits.
Re: (Score:2)
Off topic as always. If you'd rtfa you'd see that most of these scam shops target wealthy professionals (in the cited example, real estate agents).
Re: Scams are now fully corporate (Score:2)
Cryptocurrency is the crime enabler (Score:4, Interesting)
Without it, "pig butchering [wikipedia.org]" is much harder to pull off from other countries.
See: The Number Go Up! [wikipedia.org]
Crypto is for criminals.
So shut them off? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Trump somehow cared about this, he'd just secondary sanctions anyone caught providing them, shit would flow uphill and they would stop getting internet and phone services.
The west has the power to stop this tomorrow, but the only person willing to use that power doesn't care and everyone else is paralysed by multilateralism.
Re: (Score:2)
No, I blame western politicians for not using the power they have, even when they should.
They need to be a little neo-colonial and free 100k slaves. This isn't like smuggling, there's only a handful of companies providing these slaveholders their network services and they are easily pressured.
Re: (Score:2)
Myanmar is already under sanctions since the military coup of 2021 (US and EU). Secondary sanctions are not so effective here, we are talking about criminal gangs. Also they need nearly nothing to operate, only second hand mobile phones and a basic warehouse. What you'd need is a military operation (a war). There are many reasons not to do that.
Re:So shut them off? (Score:4, Insightful)
They need internet and phone services ... quite easily traced to their service providers because of the sheer volume of scams each day. There's a handful of those providers, completely dependent on foreign interconnect. With the possible exception of China, the companies involved will instantly fold to secondary sanctions. Even China might decide that just because of the slavers are Chinese they are not worth protecting.
Re: (Score:2)
Even China might decide that just because of the slavers are Chinese they are not worth protecting.
China has long decided that they are a net positive for them [uscc.gov]. Only when a Chinese actor [cnn.com] was duped into traveling to Myanmar and was "recruited" by the scammers did Peking step in. And only after the actor's friends raised a stink within China - regular Chinese victims are less lucky. Mind you, ransom for the release of trapped people [humanrightsresearch.org] has become a lucrative side business for the people running the scam centers. And freed ex-scammers have become a problem [apnews.com] for Myanmar and Thailand, so they are less motivated
Re: (Score:2)
There are diplomatic and economic costs to becoming more blatantly evil.
They aren't quite ready to stop squeezing industry out of the west, they want to continue neo-mercantilism for a while yet.
Re: (Score:2)
What you'd need is a military operation (a war). There are many reasons not to do that.
And many to do. It'd be analogous to how, at one point, the British Empire was convinced by Christian militants [wikipedia.org] to put its Navy in the service of ending chattel slavery, and then went and did exactly that. [wikipedia.org]
Too bad they don't make Christian militants like they used to.
Re: (Score:2)
There would need to be an accounting of whose citizens are locked up in these compounds. Seems like quite a lot of different nationalities are represented in this case.
Re: (Score:2)
Just send in Trumps ICE agents and "free" the slaves.
These operations are not "a basic warehouse". They are large compounds with housing, offices and electricity, Internet and phone services. They are very vulnerable to police raids if anyone really cared.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm curious, when in the last two decades have you seen sanctions actually work? Russia is the most-sanctioned country on the planet, with over 30,000 different sanctions applied by over two dozen countries. Their economy is doing better than ours, and in fact better than most of the countries sanctioning them.
Re: (Score:2)
I would challenge the assertion that the Russian economy is doing better than the US economy.
This is a year old, but is the highest signal-to-noise ratio you will find on the topic:
The Russian Economy at War (2024) - Sanctions, growth, inflation & mounting risks [youtube.com]
And an update last month:
Russia's Cooling War Economy - Deficits, Sabotage, U.S. Threats & The Ukraine War [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Just one aspect.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/... [wikimedia.org]
Their debt/earnings ratio is *much* better than our own, their unemployment rate, personal savings, even those amorphous aspects such as 'personal happiness' and public opinion of their government.
Re: (Score:1)
Your a complete idiot. There is a reason we call you a rsilvergun sub.
These prisons are ran by the Chinese government they are exactly like the ones in mainland China holding the Christian & Muslim slave labor camps that make the clothes and electronics you buy every year.
Do you really want Trump to "do something" about that? What is he going to do have the Air Force drop bunker buster bombs on the camps?
There would be only one outcome to that.
Re: (Score:2)
The inability to meaningfully pressure China because of the self inflicted wound of complete economic dependence (thanks to Kissinger&Clinton) does not necessarily apply to Myanmar.
China might covertly aid them, but if the west imposes secondary sanctions on companies providing them internet and phone services, China would have to get into the open to continue doing that. They are just as likely to cut them loose instead. Even if they don't, there is value in driving it into the open. Wakes up some peop
Re: (Score:2)
The west has the power to stop this tomorrow, but the only person willing to use that power doesn't care and everyone else is paralysed by multilateralism.
Thailand has done that in February [reuters.com] but they switched to generators and Starlink. At the core is the lawlessness due to the civil war in Myanmar and CCP tolerance as long as the scammers (who learned their trade by scamming Chinese) will be a net positive for China [uscc.gov]. Some of the key people [wikipedia.org] are regarded as heroes within China, so the West is rather powerless unless we cut off the whole of Southeast Asia from the Internet. It's not only the TACO guy in DC.
Re: (Score:3)
Starlink could do some trivial traffic analysis and be 99% certain what's scam traffic.
Ya, but ... (Score:3)
Bet they don't have cool names like Alligator Alcatraz [wikipedia.org] and the Speedway Slammer [dhs.gov]. /s
Wow! (Score:2)
Okay Burmese (Score:1)
They are chinese backed Crime cities (Score:1)