A China-led crackdown on online fraud rescued thousands from Myanmar this month. But this massive business of grift keeps growing.
Hannah Beech reported from Mae Sot, Thailand, where she has documented the growth of the cyberfraud industry over the past five years.
There are usually no international flights out of the airport in Mae Sot, a town on Thailand’s border with Myanmar. But in recent days, hundreds of people here boarded direct flights back home to China. They had been rescued from Myanmar, where they were ensnared in a 21st-century scourge — online scam mills that have used forced labor to bilk tens of billions of dollars out of victims worldwide.
The chartered flights were part of a multinational effort that followed the trafficking last month of a Chinese actor to work in a fraud center, which scared off Chinese tourists from visiting Thailand. The rescue missions, coordinated by officials in Thailand, Myanmar and China, were pitched as a body blow to this industry of grift.
But even as the planes headed north, construction workers in these scam centers — modern tower blocks within sight of the Thai side of the frontier — continued to weld and hammer into the night, brazenly building new warehouses dedicated to crime. Fraudsters confined to rooms with barred windows kept cajoling money out of lonely hearts and eager investors in the United States, China and beyond.
Following a military coup in Myanmar in 2021 and an ensuing civil war, the country’s border with Thailand has exploded into one of the most lawless and lucrative places on earth. Chinese criminal syndicates have moved in, making deals with rival factions to turn rainforests into high-rise settlements dedicated to online fraud.
With the Thai government failing to intervene forcefully, Chinese gangsters and militia commanders from Myanmar have smuggled tens of thousands of people across the riverine frontier to labor in these hubs of criminality, according to the United Nations. Thailand has also supplied the electricity and internet for the fraud centers, and served as a conduit for construction materials, instruments of torture and even the odd Lamborghini.
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