Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams | Hacker News Reader

Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

bbc.co.uk

217 pointsinm94 comments

I am from Myanmar and Shwe KoKo is the biggest scam hub of the world . Not just online scam they are operating all kind of illegal activities.Myanmar Junta is also part of that and china bordering Laukkai. Laukkai is now liberated and scammers arrested as revolution forces won. Shwe KoKo is last one to be eliminated .

They advertise recruitment ads of 8000$ a month for working in IT so many youth went there , and forced to end up as sex slaves , scammers , sex cammers . Who refuse to work and try run away are organ harvested or trafficked to china. They are very dark crime gang not limited to - Human Trafficking. - Organ Harvesting. - Dark Web activities. - Drug and Women abuses.

The BGF Militia of Saw Chit Thu is working with scammers they have arm forces of 8000 handing that.

In April 2023, Joint Revolution forces led by KTLA Lion Battalion : Saw Eh Say Wah launched an offensive against the Kayin State BGF in Shwe Kokko l . They almost captured Shwe KoKo and BGF (Saw Chit Thu) ran away to Thailand. But during the fight one sact of KNU (biggest rebel forces in Karen area who suppose to be helping KTLA ,but leaders also owns shares in Shwe KoKo ) betrayed KTLA forces and backstabbed Saw Eh Say Wah and KTLA Revolution forces. He barely escaped and estimated 200 of KTLA perished.

Now China is pushing Thailand to shut down Shwe KoKo and elecriticy is now cut off. They are moving operartion more inside of Myanmar.

> The BGF Militia of Saw Chit Thu

They used to be militants against the Central Government right? Didn't they split off from the KNU originally?

> They are moving operartion more inside of Myanmar

As in deeper within periphery regions or actually within the "core" like Yangon/Bago/Irrawaddy/Magwe?

On that note, has a similar rise in transnational organized crime started in those regions as well?

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I really hope the situation gets better in Myanmar. From the outside, it looked like there was some hope barely decade ago that stuff might get better

Only way to get better for us is to get rid of junta. Now they are kidnapping both boy and girls above age of 18 to use as Cannon fodder at Frontline and also increased in missing children and body of kids end up with organ missing even inside Yangon. Girls are getting Human trafficked by both military and scam gangs too. I had managed to move most of my employees outside of Myanmar but still our future aren't safe.

Latest news I heard is scam gangs are moving inner karen are, around phayar thone su.

Sad that what's going on in Myanmar isn't more widely reported in international news.

I'm sure Meta has a lot of algorithm tweaks to derank any mention of negative events in Myanmar.

Most people don't dare to speak out much on Facebook theses days due to junta spy reporting and people end up getting capture, and bodies sent back next morning to family.

It was prominent in the news at the start, but at this point it is government forces vs a myriad of various groups (unified and not) and it makes for a muddy story to tell. There aren't many regional powers who are all for any given side and another power(s) all in for another side. So it boils down to a local civil war story. Those stories just don't generate a lot of news.

Whole situation is very sad. Seeing a nation fall into chaos like that. So many people's lives destroyed through no fault of their own.

we are at the breaking point. Junta had almost lost all the important economic areas, jade and copper mines , gem mines, recently the whole Rakhine and soon Irrawaddy . There are various group but we all have a common goal , to get rid of Junta and Myanmar PDF have common destination , to get back Peace and Democracy.

If China didn't get involved in stopping TNLA + MNDAA , Junta strong hold of Pyin Oo Lwin and Even Mandalay would have fallen since December. Now China forced a peace agreement at MNDAA at gunpoint so that strongest force had been halted - we don't like china playing on us , and we are neglected by UN and western powers alike - its all expected we don't have resources that is interesting for the west and its all on our own.

Another reason main stream media stopped reporting on how people started the revolutions with flintlocks are overcoming and winning over well trained , well equipped military , just with our own funding , our own intelligence and our own might, Inventing 3D printed guns , building own fix winged drones and missiles against world 35th rated army. They don't want to report that peasants can win over Tyrants. They don't want to report that Davids with slingshots can defeat a Goliath. If that is well spread and well known , power that be would be very hard to control the populace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kGr2F3o0rI

The Philippines (under Duterte) said to Chinese criminals: Feel free to base your operations here and rip off your fellow Chinese, but don't rip off us Filipinos.

Then these POGO centres started scamming locals and Chinese alike, and staffed themselves with scam victims, using blackmail and torture to force them to work there and commit fraud.

Then one victim escaped:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68562643

And then the whole world unraveled for local town mayor and Chinese spy, Alice Guo (that's not even her real name)

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/04/asia/philippines-alice-gu...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mnyrm8739o

Philippines is corrupt to the core as well, from courts to police to civilians. So the real reason why POGOs were thrown out of the country was that the didn't pay off the right people. Nothing gets done in Philippines without bribes.

I live here my whole life for over 40 years, anecdotal I know, but I have only encountered one corrupt scenario in my lifetime. Nothing gets done is just too dramatic.

Correct, I should have specified it applies to more significant events. Simple paperwork is typically not an issue. Lived there for 10 years and was amazed at how even relatively small cases aren't handled honestly. For example when my vehicle was hit, the police registers the crash and and the driver afterwards flees, the courts determined that they cannot say who was driving. Absurd in any civilised country as then the vehicle owner is responsible or at least interviewed. This is my personal experience, one of quite a few, not hearsay.

I also had friends dealing with legal for multinationals, for things to work you needed to know the right people or pay the right people. Otherwise your licenses and approvals would mysteriously simply never be processed.

> So the real reason why POGOs were thrown out of the country was that the didn't pay off the right people

They did pay the right people. It's just that the "right people" lost the presidency in 2022.

Like any other nation, the right people changes every election. Especially in nations with poor leadership.

I guess Asia is lucky that the gangs haven’t learned that you have to pay everyone in power, and everyone who could come to power. As soon as your gangs and mafias learn that, you’ll be as hosed as we are in the US. And your gangs and mafias will all of a sudden become “corporations”.

It's not just some scams. It's the darkest thing ever in the whole human history.

After China banned using of death row organs around 2014, the world's largest organ black market has moved to southeast Asia. There are estimated more than 100k victims (mostly Chinese) annually. Some of them may be released, if their families can afford the ransom. The remaining victims are treated like livestock. They are forced into doing scams to lure more people. Their blood is drawn monthly or even weekly for sales. They'll be tortured to death, if they try to run away. And finally, their organs will be harvested and sold, which most likely will also be the end of their lives.

United States once proposed to classify these organizations as terrorist organizations at UN but was denied by China.

Are you sure you didn't just describe RimWorld?

Someone doing that in real life is truly disturbing

Remember that the universally recognized setting for a grim cyberpunk dystopia is not a theoretical prediction but a memory of an actual city just north of Hong Kong that was demolished 30 years ago

Which city? Are you talking about Kowloon Walled city?

I am. The memory of it somehow became the universally-accepted built environment of the future.

It wasn't that bad. I wandered in a bit. Crowded but none of the evil stuff mentioned above.

I tend to think of cyberpunk as more Blade Runner which is kind of spread out with room for flying cars.

Cyberpunk has always been, "What if what happens to those people happened to us?" "Us" being the relatively affluent and stable first world, "those people" being the put-upon urban poor and working class (which I usually summarize as "black Americans" for American readers - to shake them out of their myopia regarding the social and racial politics of the genre - but, as you point out, should include people in Asia and elsewhere).

Its power has never been in its predictive ability, because so much of what defines cyberpunk is already happening. Instead, the consideration of, "That horrible thing can happen to me, too," opens the intellectual doorway (or third eye) to questions of self, cognizance, experience. The computers are just a light show, or a lens.

Great points

If you're talking about Kowloon Walled City, I found Gibson's essay "Disneyland with the death penalty" (and the fact that the essay blew up like it did) pretty revealing about how the actual preferences in (western) SciFi are.

In the essay, Kowloon is not the dystopia - that is Singapore - it is the utopia:

https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2021/06/27/c...

Gibson writes about Singapore's artificial "squeaky-clean authoritarian", style with almost physical revulsion, while Kowloon comes off as the plucky antihero that is overtly kind of a dick but that we all are secretly rooting for.

I also don't think that Singapore would really qualify as an utopia. The death penalty is real and the democracy there seems to exist mostly on paper. But at least the state actively tries to solve problems in society and improve the standard of living for everyone.

In contrast, Kowloon was a place literally built and run by the mafia, and by all records must have been hell to actually live in (as opposed to read stories about it).

I feel a lot of cyberpunk comes over like this: Pretending to be a cautionary tale on the surface but at the same time, presenting it with such a kind of longing, wistful outlook that it's pretty clear the authors would love to be in that place in some way.

Makes me kind of understand how we got to the "at last, we built the Torment Nexus" territory in the end.

It is getting darker than what OP said. I would say 10x more. There are many kids getting kidnapped and bodies turn up in rivers with organ missing on daily basis. Missing person cases sky rocketing all over social media , last month is worse.

Please don't take this as a criticism but do you have a source documenting what you're describing? I'd really like to read up on it.

https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-cambodia-illegal-organ-...

https://hir.harvard.edu/for-sale-the-pervasive-organ-trade-i...

https://amp.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/32...

I bet crime by Chinese against Chinese in other countries is not very reported because local gov won't waste resources on non locals and because CCP won't want it in the news to protect their image

And a bonus for the dead comment saying "the idea China would allow it's own citizens be cut up for organs is racist as fuck"

https://thediplomat.com/2024/08/first-known-survivor-of-chin...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-the-fac...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6854896

https://www.news.com.au/world/asia/barbaric-torture-brainwas...

Welcome to the world

I guess a better question is, when donation rates in Asia are so low, where are transplanted organs coming from?

Somebody already linked to a variety of research on this topic, it is the consensus that organ procurement in China is exploitative, even if people don’t know the exact details.

Should surgeons even perform transplants in Asia? Many interesting questions.

I'm sorry but those links seem to talk about dozens, or hundreds, of paid or somewhat coerced donors. OP is talking about hundreds of thousands of people being perpetually harvested in captivity. I'm not say he's lying or exaggerating, but I would appreciate a much, much, much better source to support those claims.

I’d like one source please

The Chinese investment into strategic spots around the South China Sea & Gulf of Thailand is really interesting to witness.

I was at Sihanoukville (Cambodia) around 5 years ago and was surprised to find what was seemingly a Chinese city. There was a lot of dust, construction, and the city seemed like it was being raised out of the ground really quickly. Massive Chinese casinos and hotels were around and locals reported some casinos didn't even let them in. There were some whispers about shady stuff too.

I suppose if I were to go there today I'd find there are no more dirt roads and that the city is "fully built" given the rate at which these things happen. Would be cool to see.

Are they still planning the high speed rail that they were planning ten years ago?

90% of the businesses are Chinese owned and the city is a hub for crime and gambling

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/03/31/t...

NYT article on the topic:

>7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...

Twitter/X thread: https://x.com/QianIsabelle/status/1736391727387177267

Interesting timing to post this, as the US stops funding efforts against human trafficking here [1].

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/usaid-collapse-is-helping-crimin...

It depends on who US AID is sending Aids to. If they are sent to Junta , those goes into buying bombs to kill civilians. Miltiary Junta are part of the scam gangs. If it i send to KNU , it is the same , they will goes into pockets. KNU and Junta both of them have shares. Only way if they want to stop those shwe koko is by sending arms to Revolutin forces which never had happened. And US aids in Myanmar along with several NGO are as corrupted as hell. I once developed an APP for USAids and charge really cheap , but then they ask me to sign an invoice with 20x amount - which is going to charge back to US Tax Payers money.

I've spent a good amount of time in Myanmar.

In practice, the US prioritizes "stability" over everything. The situation became very bad in the last 4 years. Definitely a good amount of this funding was diverted to corrupt people over there.

People in Myanmar (and many other parts of the world) love talking to our embassies and "NGOs" and ripping them off, while doing their actual deals with China.

You should watch Mike Okay's video on YouTube, he visited this place very recently and it's was super surreal to watch.

I think you mean this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx1SIEwwZrU

Aren't these spots popular for running pig butchering scams? I don't know why BBC article didn't explicitly say this.

TIL something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam (I knew about the concept, just hadn't encountered the name.)

Well, they do say it, however they use a lot more words to do it:

> We were able to speak to a young woman who had been working in one of the scam centres a couple of weeks before our visit. She had not enjoyed it and been allowed to leave.

Her job, she said, was as part of the modelling team, made up mostly of attractive young women, who contact potential victims and try to build an intimate online relationship with them.

"The target is the elderly," she said. "You start a conversation like 'oh you look just like one of my friends'. Once you make friends you encourage them by sending pictures of yourself, sometimes wearing your night clothes."

Then, she explains, the conversation moves to get-rich-quick schemes, such as crypto investments, with the women claiming that's how they made a lot of money.

"When they feel close to you, you pass them on to the chatting section," she says. "The chatting people will continue messaging with the client, persuading them to buy shares in the crypto company."

Pig butchering among many other variations, like sextortion, fake FBI agent, advance fee fraud, fake real estate rental fraud, there's a whole myriad in their playbook.

Most people aren't familiar with the term, so it'll just be confusing. They do describe such a scam.

I can't remember if it was specifically about Shwe Kokko but Search Engine did an episode about a city with compounds like these.

https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/whos-behind-these-scammy-text-...

>The latter are also known as "pig butchering" scams, named after the farming practice of fattening pigs before slaughtering them.

I thought they were talking about Las Vegas until I read the article. I wonder if that was the intention when they titled the article.

Yep. I fell for clickbait, again.

I think you might be imposing an America-centric view on the BBC. I doubt that was the intention.

That’s fair, which is why I questioned whether that was the case rather than outright making the claim. You’re probably right.

It does describe Las Vegas perfectly, and I sincerely doubt your first thought after reading that headline was "its a British publication, so of course they mean that city in Myanmar."

I did, because I also followed the Chinese actor kidnapping story from the Thai publications and know about the magical place across the river and it's history. South East Asia is historically fascinating. It's worth reading Burman diaries to put later writings of Orwell into some context.

I am not British, I am French, and when I think about a city with casinos, that's definitely Las Vegas, and I think that it would be even more true for the British, who have more ties to the US than the French.

And yes, more Las Vegas than Monaco, even though it is a 2 hour drive from where I live. Monaco is not famous for casinos (plural), it is famous for one particular casino, that is the Monte-Carlo casino.

And if they specified Asia, Macao would have popped up in my mind. As for the "fraud" part, casinos and fraud go well together, at least in popular culture. Which is a bit ironic considering that apparently, the scam businesses took over as casinos closed down during the COVID-19 pandemic.

> And if they specified Asia, Macao would have popped up in my mind

The Xi Admin cracked down on Macau around the 2016-18 period as part of the larger crackdown.

It was during this time that most of the gambling (in reality money laundering) operations moved abroad to Phillipines, Cambodia, Myanmar, etc.

Koh Kong also comes to mind.

Las Vegas is not the only city with casinos.

No, but it's probably the most famous (at worst, second behind Monte Carlo).

Monte Carlo isn't a city. It's a casino named after the Monaco neighbourhood where it's located:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_Casino

It's the same kind of administrative division as Monaco City. It's where the Grand Prix is announced as being held. Las Vegas is also legally a subset of the metropolitan area that it's part of. Americans do call the thing that Las Vegas is a "city" and do not call the thing that Monte Carlo is a "city", but this seems more like a translation artifact than any real difference.

Monte Carlo has a population of 3,500 people and is entirely contiguous with the rest of Monaco-the-city. I'm not sure anyone would consider it a city in itself.

Shrug. Within a factor of 3 or so of the City of London. I'm sure there are other examples. Administrative districts are weird.

Las Vegas is an insignificant mote of dust compared to Macau when it comes to Casinos and gambling.

wow you're not kidding! looked this up and revenues are somewhere like 10x-20x of macau compared to vegas. That's pretty nuts, didn't realize there was that big of a gap

I thought it was common knowledge that Asians love to gamble?

AIUI gambling is still pretty much entirely illegal in mainland China, so it pretty much has a captive market of 1.5bn people. Vegas has a much smaller _obligate_ market; gambling's far more (legally) available in the US than in China.

Like, if you like on the American east coast, and enjoy gambling, Vegas may be a place that you'd like to go, but you have other closer options.

Vegas was much bigger before Indian casinos and others too off. It used to be Atlantic City and Vegas, and the name lives on even if the reality has changed.

Vegas has definitely pivoted more into showbiz and entertainment.

Macao has not only China but is a quick flight for most of the world's population, particularly NE and SE Asia, and most importantly most people are not residents of Macao. In East Asia, where gambling is allowed it's usually not permitted for the residents of the country (e.g. Singapore)

???

singaporeans are definitely not "not permitted" to gamble.

i suspect you mean the thing with the casinos. singaporeans can enter, though they have to pay an extra fee. and besides the casinos, singaporeans also bet on 4d, toto and football in betting shops all over the island.

No, Macau is. It's Western media bias that we talk about LV way more than Macau. (Also, LV still has the English-language entertainment acts, conventions, conferences.)

But for gambling revenue, Las Vegas was passed out by Macau back in 2007 already: https://www.reuters.com/article/macau-revenues/the-worlds-ca...

Macau in 2007 was way more about money laundering than Las Vegas. Do you have more recent numbers? After Xi’s crackdown, I’d expect their gambling revenue to go down by a lot.

Article [0] and graph [1] FT citing Bloomberg, UNLV says Macau gambling revenues outstrip LV every year 2007-2020 except 2009 (recession); even with the huge Covid drop in 2020.

And [2] second graph says "Macau [Gross gaming revenue ($bn)] has regained lead from Las Vegas as world’s top gaming hub" in 2023; LV was briefly > Macau for the three years 2020-2022. (Also shows visitor arrivals from mainland China recovered since 1/2023).

Yes, even post-Chinese crackdowns (2012- ongoing, and also in 2021) on corruption.

[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/417f2513-37b2-4900-ac36-4729df36a...

[1]: graph 3 from that FT article https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

[]: FT 3/2024 "Macau roars back as gamblers return to ‘Las Vegas of the east’" https://www.ft.com/content/918d868a-e862-45e0-9072-e79461159...

Nice to know, thanks for delivering the refs. It lost to LV during COVID, but bounced back afterwards, which makes sense.

I've never been to Macau before although I've been to HK a few times. The only time I've seen a Chinese casino was in Manilla (near T3 of the airport), and I'm almost positive that one at least, was related to money laundering.

It describes, to a greater or lesser extent, a lot of places, but this one is certainly a particularly extreme example.

Interesting, my first thought was Macao

>Jonathan Head

>South East Asia correspondent

>Reporting from Shwe Kokko, Myanmar

Before the article even started.

For those who don't know -- Boca Raton, Florida is well known in the US as a major center of scams and borderline-scams like MLMs. Utah has a history of being a home for this stuff too, as well as a lot of quack supplement companies and self-help nonsense.

Just pointing this out so we don't think this doesn't exist here.

Why Boca Raton in particular?

There are a lot of wealthy retirees in South Florida who make great marks. Beyond that it’s probably to some extent driven by talent agglomeration effects; if you’re someone who makes their money promoting scammy penny stocks, you might want to learn from other people who promote scammy penny stocks, so if they’re in Boca, you’ll go to Boca. Coincidentally(?) Boca Raton was founded by the Mizner brothers, Addison and Wilson; Wilson Mizner was himself a notorious con man.

You also might be in the category of "those who don't know". The scammers here are absolutely nothing even remotely comparable to MLMs. Most MLMs are questionable, but AFAIK Herbalife isn't kidnapping people in Canada to keep as sales-slaves in Florida, and MLMs might try to ruin you financially if you attempt to leave, but they usually don't torture you to death. See the case of a Chinese celebrity kidnapped in Thailand and brought to Myanmar, who managed to get rescued largely due to being famous enough: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd606l1407no

Yes, there likely are things like that which do happen in the US, but it's the exception and not what Boca Raton is built on. The only group holding hundreds of thousands of people against their will to do unpaid labor here is the prison system.

You know those quasi-libertarian dreams of independent privately-owned city-states? Yeah, doesn't seem like such a good idea now, does it?

(I'm kind of surprised none of those crypto-libertarian groups have tried Myanmar, actually; it is, at least at the moment, particularly vulnerable to this sort of thing.)

Does anybody dream of living in one or just dreams of owning the one? I fail to see the upside of living in somebody's pocket soviet union when places like Singapure actually exist.

Singapore certainly isn't for me, but I don't think you can call it unpopular by any means.

I wouldn't call it libertarian either.

Some weirder libertarians do indeed seem to dream of living in one.

> I fail to see the upside of living in somebody's pocket soviet union

The sort of extreme libertarians who are keen on this sort of thing don't acknowledge that it would be like that, though; in their worldview, without a government, (only, effectively, an _owner_), all would be well. Now, this may sound suspiciously like warlordism or feudalism to some of us, but we're not the ones who want to live in these sorts of places.

Singapore's completely different; it's rather authoritarian, but is generally a functioning state with strict regulation.

Libertarians would answer that in a True Libertarian World, gambling would be legal everywhere: so gamblers would have a rich choice between casino's and wouldn't have to resort to shady casino's with bad reputations, as they do now.

This isn't primarily gambling, though, it's _fraud_.

Just wait two weeks till CFPB is disbanded and all the crypto scam will be legal too.

Depending on a local warlord to protect your independent privately owned city-state (in exchange for a healthy cut out of your profits, of course) doesn't sound like something that is likely to work long term.

But at least one well known crypto-libertarian seems to be making some money out of it:

> With Thailand cutting off power and telecommunications, electricity comes from diesel generators, which are expensive to run. And communications go through Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system, which is also very costly.

Musk, the crypto libertarian who works for the US government?

I suspect that when he's done working for it, there won't be a (functioning) government anymore, so yes.

I am offended by the foul Musk as much as the next guy but if we are being fair wasn't the story always that the federal government was a disfunctional mess? Does anybody think our leadership over the last 50 years accomplished anything worth preserving? I was taught in civics nobody is really trustworthy to open a new constitutional convention and change things but if we never take any risks wont that be bad too?

Muskism dictates that you must decry the terrible state of whatever-it-is before destroying it (but skip over the part about what the replacement will be).

> Depending on a local warlord to protect your independent privately owned city-state (in exchange for a healthy cut out of your profits, of course) doesn't sound like something that is likely to work long term.

Well, you're going to need _something_ like that (I suppose there's also the Be Your Own Warlord option, but that's presumably even more expensive). Provided the warlord is getting paid, they seem less likely to ask questions of dodgy fake cities than an actual government is (for instance see Honduras, where the current government is trying to get rid of the weird libertarian fake-city authorised by the previous government).

Not enough law 'n order. If you had $10M in crypto they would torture you for the keys and then kill you. Almost as bad as Florida:

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/twelve-defendants-se...

Interesting article, but the blinking read watch button in the header made it unreadable for me. Maybe because I am on FF Focus on mobile.

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