Cyber Crime Hothouses In Myanmar
Three years ago in 2021, a man named La Awng moved from his native Kachin State in Myanmar to Laukkai, the capital of the country’s autonomous Kokang region near the border with China, where he expected to take a new job working in a casino.
In fact, he was cruelly misled by his expected new employers and found that he had been trafficked into a cyber crime business which is run by a group of Chinese criminals.
Like thousands of other workers in Laukkai, La Awng was held captive in a high-rise building and forced to defraud people in foreign countries using a scheme known as pig butchering. Named for the way scammers “fatten up” targets before their “slaughter”, it involves striking up online romances to lure people into fake cryptocurrency investment schemes.
This online fraud industry has significantly increased across Southeast Asia since the COVID-19 pandemic and by the end of 2023, crime syndicates in the region were using online fraud schemes to steal from people around the world of some $64bn annually, according to a report published by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Myanmar, where the rule of law has collapsed since the February 2021 military coup, has emerged as a major centre for this kind of criminality
USIP has found that criminal networks originating in China are exploiting hundreds of thousands of people from more than 60 countries to run their cimila operations, typically holding them in “prisonlike conditions” and sometimes using physical abuse and torture to keep them at work.
Suppressing the criminal networks investigated by USIP will take a large-scale response that addresses their causes, effects, power, reach, and methods in a country-by-country approach to defeat by the criminal groups ability to move across borders and dodge law enforcement.
AlJazeera | AlJazeera | USIP | Deutsche Welle | The Record | The Overspill
Image: Ideogram
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