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Title: Myanmar's 'Cyber-Slavery Compounds' May Hold 100,000 Trafficked People

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/13/19522...

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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