This summer, I stood at the Thailand-Myanmar border, looking across the Moei River, at a new city in Myanmar recently constructed on land that just a few years ago was nothing but paddy fields, jungle, and tiny rural villages.
Straight in front of me was an archway with the words “China View” and an illustration of the Great Wall of China. And on the other side of the river in Myanmar was Shwe Kokko, a den of transnational organized crime, drugs, fraud, money laundering, and pornography. But one business has come to dominate this town and many others along the border: online scams, known as “pig butchering” in Chinese, where victims are fattened up by flattery and the promise of money or sex—before their pockets are emptied.
This summer, I stood at the Thailand-Myanmar border, looking across the Moei River, at a new city in Myanmar recently constructed on land that just a few years ago was nothing but paddy fields, jungle, and tiny rural villages.
Straight in front of me was an archway with the words “China View” and an illustration of the Great Wall of China. And on the other side of the river in Myanmar was Shwe Kokko, a den of transnational organized crime, drugs, fraud, money laundering, and pornography. But one business has come to dominate this town and many others along the border: online scams, known as “pig butchering” in Chinese, where victims are fattened up by flattery and the promise of money or sex—before their pockets are emptied.
I had read about Shwe Kokko and the rise of other scam centers across Southeast Asia but had assumed they would be more discreet. I have visited the Thailand-Myanmar border more than 30 times, but this was my first visit in almost a decade, and I was astonished that within a short drive from the main border town of Mae Sot lay this hub of scams where people all over the world, many elderly, are unwittingly fleeced of billions of dollars every year.
Last month, the U.S. Treasury Department reported that in 2024, “unsuspecting Americans lost over $10 billion” to such scams. If you receive an unsolicited online romantic approach from a beautiful woman or a request for friendship from someone you do not know, followed by an invitation to invest or a request for financial help, chances are they are actually coming from some guy at a computer in one of the tower blocks in Shwe Kokko just across the river from where I stood a few weeks ago. AI tools have made it even easier to imitate the language, and sometimes the appearance, of others. Many of the victims are elderly people, in need of human contact and often not as sharp as they once were.
But spare a thought for those working in the scam centers, too. Increasing evidence suggests that many have been trafficked there under false pretenses, responding to recruitment advertisements offering lucrative, attractive jobs in Thailand and then finding themselves loaded onto a boat across the river to work under duress, often in slavery-like conditions and under the constant menace of violence if they don’t deliver scam victims.
According to the Thai police, as many as 100,000 trafficked people from all over the world, including a small number of Westerners, may be working in scam centers against their will in Myanmar alone—and a recent report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) claims that more than twice that number have been forced into labor in such transnational crime operations throughout the region, especially in other repressive states like Cambodia and Vietnam. They are reportedly given targets to meet each day, and failure to achieve those targets—or attempts to escape—are met with brutal physical and psychological torture. As the U.S. Treasury Department said, “Southeast Asia’s cyber scam industry not only threatens the well-being and financial security of Americans, but also subjects thousands of people to modern slavery.”
So who controls these new cities of vice—of which, according to ASPI, there are as many as 27 in Myanmar alone—and what is China’s connection?
In Myanmar, they are run and operated by an alliance of Chinese organized crime syndicates and pro-junta armed groups, providing the military regime that seized power in a coup in 2021 with a lifeline of financing for allied militias that help sustain its civil war against Myanmar’s people and making Myanmar what ASPI calls “the epicentre of the cyber-scam industry.” Many of the scam centers are in compounds so large they can be identified on satellite imagery, and use an enormous amount of internet bandwidth, often powered by Starlink to evade Myanmar’s censorship of the internet.
If international policymakers focused on Ukraine and Gaza cannot pay attention to Myanmar’s human rights and humanitarian crisis, this new revelation alone ought to catch their eyes. Myanmar—ruled by one of the world’s most repressive and murderous regimes—ought to be on our agenda for moral reasons alone. But all too often it seems easy to ignore, because it is far away and seemingly strategically unimportant. The revelations about the extent of scam centers, making Myanmar a direct threat to the security and well-being of citizens across the globe, changes that.
Shwe Kokko was built as an enterprise by the Chinese gambling tycoon She Zhijiang, who claimed to have founded his company—China’s state-owned Jilin Yatai Group Company, Ltd.—on the instruction of the Chinese Ministry of State Security for espionage purposes. The Chinese state has since distanced itself from him, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Thailand, though he claimed they turned against him because he refused to give them control of his project. He accused Beijing of seeking to create a Chinese colony on the Thailand-Myanmar border, a claim China refutes.
She joined forces with Myanmar’s pro-junta warlord Saw Chit Thu, who heads the pro-junta Border Guard Force, to establish Shwe Kokko—and similar alliances have been replicated along the Thailand-Myanmar border. Similar centers of vice, scamming, and casino gambling existed along the China-Myanmar border, but China claims it has cracked down on these and wants to eliminate those on the Thai border, too.
The difference between the public statements of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its operatives and elements entangled with Chinese transnational organized crime is like night and day. To be sure, it’s often unclear what’s sanctioned by Beijing and what’s the result of China’s rampant corruption, especially within the Chinese military. China seems genuinely angry when it comes to the enslavement and scamming of Chinese citizens. Big-budget films like 2023’s No More Bets raised the profile of the issue, and cases like the kidnapping of Chinese actor Wang Xing get plenty of attention.
But the Chinese state is fooling itself if it thinks it can keep its hands clean here. Beijing’s political, diplomatic, economic, and military support for Myanmar’s genocidal regime is clear, and the junta’s dependency on these criminal syndicates is not in doubt. There may be a few degrees of separation, but ultimately Beijing is helping support, even if indirectly, these criminal syndicates. And as the U.S. Institute of Peace has set out in several reports, these criminal zones represent a growing threat to global security—one that even if Beijing doesn’t directly control, it’s willing to make use of.
For every elderly widow in Florida, Oregon, Maine, or Vermont robbed online; for every kid in Vancouver or Manitoba duped in cyberspace; for every retiree in Yorkshire or Cornwall scammed; as well as for every person trafficked from around the world into these slave labor hellholes, we all have a responsibility to call this out and demand action.
Last month, the United States sanctioned a number of those responsible for the scam centers, accusing them of stealing “billions of dollars” and “using forced labor and violence.” The U.S. action is welcome—although it stands in strong contrast to the recent lifting of U.S. sanctions on business leaders who finance and arm the illegal military junta. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, and others should follow with their own further sanctions on the scam center criminals.
It is for others to investigate the complex web of connections between the Myanmar junta, the pro-junta militia, Chinese-organized crime, and the role of Beijing. But China’s footprint in Myanmar is deep, it is profoundly dangerous, and it should be one reason why Myanmar should be much higher on our agendas than it has been. Myanmar is a killing field, but in a world of carnage that may not mean much. But as a cyber-scam field that hits our people, young and old, where they are most vulnerable, it matters.
