Trapped in Myanmar’s cyber-scam mills
Al JazeeraIn October of 2021, La Awng travelled from his native Kachin State in Myanmar to Laukkai, the capital of the country’s autonomous Kokang region near the border with China, planning to work in a casino. The scam industry has boomed across Southeast Asia since the COVID-19 pandemic; by the end of 2023, syndicates in the region were using online fraud schemes to rob people around the world of some $64bn annually, according to a report published in May by the United States Institute of Peace. The think tank found that criminal networks originating in China relied on hundreds of thousands of people from more than 60 countries to run their operations, typically holding them in “prisonlike conditions” and sometimes using physical abuse and torture to keep them in line. “I am stuck deeper and deeper.” This story, the first in a two-part series, looks at the conditions inside Laukkai, one of Southeast Asia’s largest cyber-scamming hubs, before its fall to a coalition of ethnic armed organisations in January.
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