Myanmar military shuts down a major cybercrime center, detains over 2k people
apnews.com
apnews.com
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...
For awhile I was asking "Is there someone I can contact for you?", but then I got worried that would get somebody a beating.
At least that prevents someone else getting scammed sooner.
The people actually doing the scams are on the Thai border, in Myanmar, and Cambodia. The IT and tech staff... well, some are in the parks, but a lot of them are in Taiwan. (I've also heard some are in Japan, singapore, malaysia and the UK).
The money gets laundered through all kinds of channels into different tax havens. It might pass through Taiwan—'cause, you know, China can't touch it there and the money looks clean—and then it goes on to China or Singapore... basically, right into those bosses' pockets.
Inside those parks, there's literally no law. I'm talking beatings, slavery, human trafficking, forcing people into prostitution, and death... that's just everyday stuff there.
As for me, I was working in Taiwan, so the worst thing that happened to me was just not getting the high pay they promised. Other than that, I was fine. This is all stuff I either heard from other people in the business or saw firsthand.
Singapore cracked down on a huge part of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Singapore_money_launderin...
Funny how the banks let these money launderers go on with their activities for years, most likely because they paid the banks their share of fees and commissions.
Surely you meant they were trying to wash money out of China.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/bitcoin-doj-chen-zhi-pig-but...
And that the people running them come from PRC Chinese organized crime (triads).
This is Myanmar military trying to do field work for China. China is the one who allowed these militias to thrive in the border areas and they have been arming them for decades. This particular operation happens in Myawaddy, which is in lower eastern part of Myanmar close to Thailand, but not in northeastern Myanmar closer to China, because Myanmar military dare only touch the militia there. It helps that the accused collaborators of these scam centers in the lower east part of Myanmar are Kayin ethnic militia, who--unlike Wa or Kokang--aren't as Chinese, and thus, China doesn't care. Also, China is now 100% backing the military regime (which staged a coup around 2021) in Myanmar, so this is like shooting two birds with one stone (i.e., get rid of scam centers for China, while helping Myanmar's brutal military to remove an income source of one of the non-ethnically Chinese militia).
The military dares not assault the northeastern militias like Wa [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Wa_State_Army ], Kokang militia [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_National_Democratic_Al... ] because these guys are truly backed (and enabled) by China. There was a raid by Myanmar military in northeastern part (close to China) about a year ago [ https://www.rfa.org/english/myanmar/2024/11/20/shan-state-wa... ] and that was backed by China. Otherwise, Myanmar military dares not do that.
Basically, China is getting what it sowed and now that its citizens are being impacted, it's asking its lapdog, Burmese military, to do the clean-up for them selectively.
PRC citizens were always impacted, these scam centers literally started (by twnese org crime) to target mainland retirees.
PRC would love for Junta to dismantle Kokang / northern scam centers but Junta couldn't because domestic factional power issues vs Northern states. The TLDR is scam centers are protected by pro Junta Kokang faction (BGF), so PRC got tired of Junta waffling and decided to support anti Junta three brotherhood alliance (aka rebels) who went HAM on the scam centers while PRC did military exercises to tell juntas to fuck off and understand PRC willing to patronize other internal players if junta doesn't play ball. Last year's 1027 operation only happened because PRC lost patience with Juntas and now Juntas more keen to help PRC deal vs scam centers (well at least performatively since they still need it for funding) because they know if they did nothing PRC will shop around and empower other players during civil war.
Well it's a sinosphere (insert one china joke) organized crime thing.
TLDR Taiwanese organized pioneered telco fraud 20 years ago, started third country scam call centers, primarily targetting tech illiterate PRC retirees. PRC/HK org crime saw how profitable, scaled up, ande more sophisticated (pig butcher + crypto to evade capital controls), targetted global Chinese diasphora. PRC cracks down domestically. They move to Myanmar / south eat asia, partner with local armed groups. Taiwanese call centers still around, but they're squeezed to other part of big butcher scacm chain, i.e. trafficking people. Anyway, every once in awhile their activities piss enough neighbours off especially PRC off that actual state power like junta has to intervenene.
I believe you have a much more literal term for that.
So how do starlinks work in Myanmar if it's not licensed?
Perhaps they were using the "roam" version (https://starlink.com/roam), which seems to work pretty much anywhere.
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/southeast-asia/myanmar-be...
either their fraud-detection isn't working, or they're turning blind-eye here for profit?
From Google's perspective - someone bought a gift card in the US, and redeemed it somewhere else in the US, aka the expected behavior of legitimate gift card usage.
> From Google's perspective - someone bought a gift card in the US, and redeemed it somewhere else in the US
hmm really? is this coming from a google PR firm or what? if that's the google's "perspective", unfortunately that means google is really technically inept or morally corrupt enough to watch a lot of people, including Americans, go thru the torture and being incinerated.
if Google receives a lot of "I was scammed into this" from whoever bought the giftcard, doesn't google have the responsibility to ask the giftcard user where they got that redeem code from? At least warn them several times, and then cut those buyers too?
that's the worst justification of a big corp imaginable -- I mean, that alone justifies a congressional hearing, and could mount to a deluge of negative media press:
"how google has skin in the Cambodian scams"
Google doesn't sell the cards directly - at least not the ones purchased at the supermarket and used for scamming. There's a scummy industry of middlemen that handles this - that's why every store can sell basically every gift card; they don't have their PoS interact with every single vendor's API, they delegate to a middleman. So Google gets very limited data at purchase time, and is not technically the merchant selling the goods in this case.
> doesn't google have the responsibility to ask the giftcard user where they got that redeem code from
What will that change in practice? They have 2 options: either accept any answer, and nothing changes, or decline some answers, meaning either legitimate usage gets disrupted or the sites laundering the cards will just tell you the "right" answers to say.
> At least warn them several times, and then cut those buyers too?
Most buyers are one-time users; it's a relatively niche market. Mostly teens/etc who don't have their own payment card or are willing to go through the whole hassle for a small discount. As per the above, cutting people off would likely hinder legitimate usage.
Ideally the whole "gift card" industry just goes away as there's no good reason to have it when we already have the ultimate form of "gift card" in the form of money... but until then, even if Google were to step out of the game someone else will step in (the company issuing the cards isn't directly involved, their gift card is just used as a negotiable instrument in lieu of cash during the scam transaction, so any company's will do).
> has skin in the Cambodian scams
Cambodia/etc is pig butchering/fake investment scams. Gift cards and redeeming is exclusively Indians targeting the US market (in the UK they have money mules to launder actual bank transfers, so no need for gift cards).
well, even if they are, if google got scam-report, then isn't google obliged to start some investigation? are you ok with "well that's too bad you're scammed"?
> Gift cards and redeeming is exclusively Indians targeting the US market (in the UK they have money mules to launder actual bank transfers, so no need for gift cards).
well nope it's a thing everywhere -- even in some east-asian country, there's a public advertisement targeting convenient-store workers: "don't give google redeem code even if the person claims to work for the cvs chain"
AND...
> Google doesn't sell the cards directly - at least not the ones purchased at the supermarket and used for scamming.
wow... ok so where does that "redeem card" come from? are you saying stores can generate those redeem codes? ...something doesn't seem right here...?
> Ideally the whole "gift card" industry just goes away as there's no good reason to have it when we already have the ultimate form of "gift card" in the form of money... but until then, even if Google were to step out of the game someone else will step in (the company issuing the cards isn't directly involved, their gift card is just used as a negotiable instrument in lieu of cash during the scam transaction, so any company's will do).
wtf is this... are we talking about some random mom&pop store-issued giftcards? is Google a mom&pop store? is the "google doing a giftcard biz" so valuable enough to license them turning blind-eye?
> Cambodia/etc is pig butchering/fake investment scams
cambodian operation is massive enough that it INCLUDES google-giftcard scheme.
idk, all this adds up to one thing: google needs to replace whatever PR firm it's using