“Trapped in Myanmar’s cyber-scam factories: Victims recount life inside a scam factory in Laukkai before the city's fall brought the scheme crashing down" 29 July 2024

The scam industry has boomed across Southeast Asia since the COVID-19 pandemic; by the end of 2023, syndicates in the region were using online fraud schemes to rob people around the world of some $64bn annually...

criminal networks originating in China relied on hundreds of thousands of people from more than 60 countries to run their operations, typically holding them in “prisonlike conditions” and sometimes using physical abuse and torture to keep them in line...

Myanmar, where the rule of law has collapsed since the February 2021 military coup, has emerged as a major centre for criminality.

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... workers around him were beaten and tortured...

While many people are trafficked into online fraud by friends or acquaintances, others are lured by fraudulent job advertisements. “People would take any job that would accept them, without fact-checking,”... in a country where millions of students boycotted classes after the coup and formal jobs evaporated, many young people were tempted...

Brang, from Kachin State, also fell foul of the traffickers...Only when he tried to quit, and his bosses told him that they had paid for him under a two-year contract, did he realise his friend had profited from the arrangement...By then, however, he was trapped. “I worked like a robot from 8am to 2am without rest. I wasn’t even allowed to leave the building,”...

“The whole of Laukkai was like their [Chinese gangs] city or territory,” he said. “The Myanmar military and militia controlled Laukkai, but they didn’t seem to have that much authority, because the Chinese bosses had enormous amounts of money.”