Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
30-07-2024
NAYPYIDAW: In October of 2021, La Awng travelled from his native Kachin State in Myanmar to Laukkai, the capital of the country’s autonomous Kokang region near the border with China, planning to work in a casino. Instead, he was trafficked into a cyber-scamming business run by Chinese criminal networks.
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, according to a report published in May by the United States Institute of Peace.
The think tank found that 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. 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.
La Awng described a ruthless process: “After building trust and getting all the information we need, we introduce cryptocurrency,” he said. “If we find out that the customer has never been scammed, we scam them. If they have been scammed before, we scam them again because we want to squeeze out everything the customer has. We have to follow orders.”
As workers around him were beaten and tortured, La Awng kept his head down and did as he was told, and in this way, managed to rise up in the industry while avoiding vicious punishment. Still, he told Al Jazeera two and a half years later that he felt trapped. “I took a wrong step when the coup happened,” he said. “I am stuck deeper and deeper.”
This story, the first in a two-part series, looks at the conditions inside Laukkai, one of Southeast Asia’s largest cyber-scamming hubs, before its fall to a coalition of ethnic armed organizations in January. La Awng and others interviewed have been given pseudonyms because of the risk of reprisals from the syndicates, the military, or armed groups.
A university student before the pandemic, La Awng joined mass education boycotts after the coup. Ten months later, when a friend mentioned that a casino in Laukkai was offering 7,500 Chinese yuan ($1,035) a month more than most minimum-wage workers in Myanmar earn in a year La Awng decided to give it a try.
He paid a job agent 750,000 kyats ($360) and joined a friend for the 530km (329-mile) car journey to the city. Dropped off on the outskirts of Laukkai, they were escorted inside by a militia the next day and dropped off at a newly built high-rise.
“When we saw it, we thought, ‘This isn’t a casino; maybe they will make us work as carpenters,’” said La Awng but when training began a day later, he and his friends realized they were caught up in something far more sinister.
Each assigned a computer, they had to strike up conversations with men and women in foreign countries using fake profiles on applications including Instagram, Facebook, and Tinder, or use virtual WhatsApp numbers to send messages at random. During 15 days of training, the company fired people they considered underperformers, but La Awng and his friends passed the selection. They began working 12 hours a day or sometimes more in order to meet scamming targets set by their bosses. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
