Southeast Asia's latest scam center crackdown, explained

By AFP February 27, 2025 | 08:10 pm PT

Multinational victims of scam centers, who were trafficked into working in Myanmar and were sent to Thailand on Feb. 12 amid a mounting crackdown on scam centers operating along a porous border, queue to get food at a shelter inside the 310th Military District (Fort Wachiraprakan), as they wait for their embassies to pick them up, in Tak province, Thailand Feb. 19, 2025. Photo by Reuters

China, Thailand and Myanmar last week ramped up efforts to curb cyber scam compounds on the Thai-Myanmar border, working to free the foreign workers inside.

AFP takes a look at why the crackdown is happening now and the broader implications for relations between the three countries.

Why a crackdown now?

Cyberscam centers -- hubs for online fraud including investment and romance scams -- have afflicted Southeast Asia for several years, evolving from casinos in the Golden Triangle area on the Thai-Myanmar-Laos border.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the casinos shifted their operations online, becoming increasingly hi-tech and lucrative -- an industry analysts say is now worth billions of dollars.

After a major crackdown in 2022 on cyber scam centers in Cambodia's port city of Sihanoukville, swathes more sprouted on the Myanmar-China border until a rebel offensive cleared them out in late 2023.

In the lawless border towns and hinterlands of Myanmar -- which has been in the throes of a civil war since a 2021 coup -- the scam centers have been able to operate largely unmolested.

Their criminal bosses lure people with promises of high-paying jobs but then force them to defraud people from around the world or face severe punishment and abuse.

The United Nations estimates that as many as 120,000 people -- many of them Chinese men -- may be working in Myanmar scam centers.

Fears were reignited in January when small-time Chinese actor Wang Xing was allegedly trafficked into a scam center on the Thai-Myanmar border, prompting Chinese netizens to warn against travel to "dangerous" Thailand.

In response, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra visited Beijing in early February and cut cross-border electricity supplies to five Myanmar regions.

The visit by a Chinese public security minister to the Mae Sot-Myawaddy border area two weeks later culminated in the repatriation via Thailand of around 600 Chinese nationals thought to be working in scam compounds.

Will this crackdown work?

The three countries last week agreed to carve out a plan for further repatriations, as Myanmar border militias look after thousands of newly released workers.

But this is not the first crackdown on illicit cyber scam compounds in the region and may not be the last.

"The scam centers will relocate as they have in the past and may not even have to do that," said Greening, adding that a few "fairly inconsequential" scam bosses will be offered up as "sacrifice" while the real bosses will get away.

In an attempt to choke the scam operations, Thailand has cut off internet, electricity and fuel supplies to towns on the Myanmar side of the border believed to house them.

Tower said that while this crackdown was "more significant and intense" than those in 2022 and 2023, the scam centers would either move or find new sources of internet connection and fuel.