On a lawless tropical border, the global scam industry thrives

Mae Sot, Thailand — There are usually no international flights out of the airport in Mae Sot, a town on Thailand’s border with Myanmar. But in recent days, hundreds of people here boarded direct flights back home to China. They had been rescued from Myanmar, where they were ensnared in a 21st-century scourge — online scam mills that have used forced labor to bilk tens of billions of dollars out of victims worldwide.

The chartered flights were part of a multinational effort that followed the trafficking last month of a Chinese actor to work in a fraud center, which scared off Chinese tourists from visiting Thailand. The rescue missions, coordinated by officials in Thailand, Myanmar and China, were pitched as a body blow to this industry of grift.

But even as the planes headed north, construction workers in these scam centers — modern tower blocks within sight of the Thai side of the frontier — continued to weld and hammer into the night, brazenly building new warehouses dedicated to crime. Fraudsters confined to rooms with barred windows kept cajoling money out of lonely hearts and eager investors in the United States, China and beyond.

Following a military coup in Myanmar in 2021 and an ensuing civil war, the country’s border with Thailand has exploded into one of the most lawless and lucrative places on Earth. Chinese criminal syndicates have moved in, making deals with rival factions to turn rainforests into high-rise settlements dedicated to online fraud.

With the Thai government failing to forcefully intervene, Chinese gangsters and militia commanders from Myanmar have smuggled tens of thousands of people across the riverine frontier to labor in these hubs of criminality, according to the United Nations. Thailand has also supplied the electricity and internet for the fraud centers, and served as a conduit for construction materials, instruments of torture and even the odd Lamborghini.

The raids this month were the latest offensive against the scam centers and freed thousands of people who were scammed into becoming scammers themselves. Often lured by false promises of good-paying jobs in IT, engineering or customer service, citizens of at least 40 nations have been forced by Chinese criminals to engage in crypto-fraud, online dating deception, TikTok shopping swindles, WhatsApp real estate dodges, Instagram deepfakes and Facebook trickery.

Confined to these compounds, the scammers, many of whom are Chinese, have been beaten, subjected to electric shock and tied up for hours in a pose that mimics crucifixion, people who were witnesses to or victims of the abuse said. Another form of torture involves crawling on gravel, until knees and hands bleed.

Unfinished Business

Marking the successful rescue operations on Feb 21, Chinese, Thai and Myanmar officials held hands and celebrated what they called a unified vanquishing of transnational crime. A raid in Cambodia, another hotbed of cybercrime, freed others, too.

“Several scam sites have been eradicated and a large group of suspects arrested,” Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, said Friday, noting the “strong steps taken by Thailand and Myanmar to dismantle the scam gangs and protect the life and property of citizens from China and other countries.”

But such self-congratulation is premature, according to interviews with about two dozen people, some who have worked or are working in the scam centers and others who serve in national and militia bureaucracies that aid or profit from the cyberfraud industry.

Thousands of individuals who were supposedly rescued from the scam warehouses this month are still stranded between the hell of forced labor in Myanmar and the promise of freedom in Thailand. Tens of thousands more remain imprisoned in the fraud factories.

“Business is normal,” said Ma Mi, a Myanmar national who toils in one of the online crime hubs. She spoke by phone and said that, like many Myanmar citizens there, she was working voluntarily.

And none of the major players orchestrating this international criminal network, which spans dozens of countries and operates with a Chinese nerve center, have been taken down in the current campaign. The arrest in 2022 of a Chinese-born kingpin, who is now in a Thai prison fighting extradition to China, did not slow construction in the scam towns he is accused of having run.

“Addressing human trafficking and online scam operations requires more than reactive law enforcement measures,” wrote Saw Kapi, the founding director of the Salween Institute for Public Policy, which focuses on the region where the scam centers are proliferating, on Feb. 21. “It necessitates confronting the root causes — failure in governance, corruption, and the entanglement of organized crime with political and economic interests.”

On Saturday evening, as Thai police set up checkpoints near the border with Myanmar, one trafficker said that a group of Chinese scammers was moved from one large cybercrime compound to a smaller one, via Thailand, because roads in Myanmar do not yet connect the crime settlements. The scammers, the trafficker said, splashed across the river, which is low because it is the dry season.

Naw Pann, who has facilitated other nighttime border crossings and who is being identified by only part of her name for her safety, said that human trafficking from Thailand to Myanmar is continuing, despite the supposed crackdown. Because she does not speak Mandarin or other foreign languages, she said, she motions to the victims to keep quiet, raising her index finger to her mouth. Some of the people who have crossed in recent days, she said, have had wounds on their faces and bandages on their legs.

“I feel pity for them,” she said. “But I can’t do anything to help them.”

Ko Min, a member of an armed group in Myanmar that has a stake in one of the largest crime cities, said he witnessed four or five Chinese men beating and shocking with an electric prod another Chinese man curled into the fetal position on the floor. The room was filled with rows of workers sitting in front of desktop computers, he said. They knew not to look at him or at the abusers, he said.

“I’ll never forget the terror of the people in the room,” he said. “It was like watching an animal being tortured.”

A Visit to Beijing

In January, the open secret of scam centers on this stretch of border — highly visible, highly electrified — jolted the public consciousness with the disappearance of Wang Xing, a Chinese actor. Although he was quickly freed from a scam park in Myanmar, public outrage percolated in China, and Chinese tourists canceled holidays in Thailand.

This month, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra of Thailand visited Beijing, where she promised China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that her government was cracking down. Before her trip, Thailand announced that it had shut off electricity to the other side of the border, something it had done briefly in 2023 as well. China’s vice minister of public security came to inspect the border zone.

Leaders of ethnic minority militias in Myanmar that control areas near the Thai border and lease land to Chinese companies sought to deny culpability. These armed groups, some aligned with the junta and some fighting it, help provide the muscle that keeps fear thrumming in the fraud hubs, witnesses and trafficked employees said. The militias have also been implicated in other illicit trades, from drugs and gems to wildlife and timber.

Gen. Saw San Aung, the chief of staff of the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army, a rebel group, said that he only became aware of the scam centers operating in his territory after some troubling photographs circulated online this year. But he cautioned against believing all images of scam center workers who exhibit signs of physical abuse.

“They harmed themselves and accused their employers of torture,” Saw San Aung said. “If the employers had tortured them, it’s unclear how they managed to take and share photos of their injuries.”

Even if the militias knew that something nefarious was going on, said a spokesperson for another militia, they were coerced into staying silent by larger powers that profited from the criminal activity.

“We didn’t conduct these raids because of pressure from China,” said Lt. Col. Naing Maung Zaw of the Karen Border Guard Force, which holds more turf along the border. “We acted because reports mentioned that foreigners were being held against their will and abused.”

A Torture Chamber

Since Feb. 20, hundreds of Chinese released from the scam centers have been airlifted home; Chinese state media has labeled the first batch criminal suspects. Another 260 people, many African, made it to Thailand in mid-February and are awaiting repatriation. But just across the border in Myanmar, about 7,000 people who were taken from the crime compounds are now stuck in a purgatory, sheltering in hangars in militia territory and awaiting permission to enter Thailand, aid groups say.

“We’re looking at a humanitarian crisis, with people running out of food, diseases breaking out,” said Amy Miller, the Southeast Asia director of Acts of Mercy International, which helps trafficked individuals who were forced to work in the scam centers. “In one place, there are two toilets for 400 people.”

The Thai authorities have said that foreign embassies need to help with repatriation efforts. While most of the people stranded in Myanmar are Chinese, there are victims from 27 other countries, including Zimbabwe, Liberia and Malawi, Miller said. Many African nations do not have embassies in Thailand.

Fisher, a 27-year-old Ethiopian who is being identified by a nickname, was trafficked to a scam center in Myanmar’s borderlands. In a torture chamber, he was bound and beaten. Electric shocks made his body convulse.

In mid-February, Fisher was rescued and moved to Thailand.

“It was like a nightmare,” he said of his eight-month ordeal. “But I woke up, and it was real.”