Trapped in Myanmar’s cyber-scam factories

In 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. Instead, he was trafficked into a cyber-scamming business run by Chinese criminal networks.

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.

Myanmar, where the rule of law has collapsed since the February 2021 military coup, has emerged as a major centre for criminality.

Like thousands of other workers in Laukkai, La Awng was held captive in a high-rise building and forced to defraud people in foreign countries using a scheme known as pig butchering. Named for the way scammers “fatten up” targets before their “slaughter”, it involves striking up online romances to lure people into fake cryptocurrency investment schemes.

La Awng described a ruthless process: “After building trust and getting all the information we need, we introduce cryptocurrency,” he said. “If we find out that the customer has never been scammed, we scam them. If they have been scammed before, we scam them again because we want to squeeze out everything the customer has. We have to follow orders.”

As workers around him were beaten and tortured, La Awng kept his head down and did as he was told, and in this way, managed to rise up in the industry while avoiding vicious punishment. Still, he told Al Jazeera two and a half years later that he felt trapped. “I took a wrong step when the coup happened,” he said. “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. La Awng and others interviewed have been given pseudonyms because of the risk of reprisals from the syndicates, the military, or armed groups.

A university student before the pandemic, La Awng joined mass education boycotts after the coup. Ten months later, when a friend mentioned that a casino in Laukkai was offering 7,500 Chinese yuan ($1,035) a month – more than most minimum-wage workers in Myanmar earn in a year – La Awng decided to give it a try.

He paid a job agent 750,000 kyats ($360) and joined a friend for the 530km (329-mile) car journey to the city. Dropped off on the outskirts of Laukkai, they were escorted inside by a militia the next day and dropped off at a newly built high-rise.

“When we saw it, we thought, ‘This isn’t a casino; maybe they will make us work as carpenters,’” said La Awng. But when training began a day later, he and his friends realised they were caught up in something far more sinister.

Each assigned a computer, they had to strike up conversations with men and women in foreign countries using fake profiles on applications including Instagram, Facebook, and Tinder, or use virtual WhatsApp numbers to send messages at random. “We start by saying things like, ‘Oh, I sent a message to the wrong number. Sorry,’” said La Awng.

During 15 days of training, the company fired people they considered underperformers, but La Awng and his friends passed the selection. They began working 12 hours a day or sometimes more in order to meet scamming targets set by their bosses.

While many people are trafficked into online fraud by friends or acquaintances, others are lured by fraudulent job advertisements. “People would take any job that would accept them, without fact-checking,” said an anti-trafficking specialist with a nonprofit based in northern Myanmar who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of her work. “We advise people not to take jobs advertised on Facebook that look too good to be true.”

But in a country where millions of students boycotted classes after the coup and formal jobs evaporated, many young people were tempted.

Htun, a former English tutor from Myanmar’s central Sagaing region, responded to an advertisement calling for customer service workers in Laukkai in February 2022.

During an online interview, an agent told him that the job involved talking to foreigners on the phone and that because he had some English and computer skills, he would be paid a starting salary of 1.5 million kyats ($715) a month. “The main thing is money,” said Htun. “I was persuaded by that amount.”

It was only after he had signed a one-year contract that he realised what he was expected to do. Assigned to be an English scammer, he used fictitious profiles on Instagram to strike up romantic connections with people overseas and move the conversation to WhatsApp before transferring the case to another worker.

Although he was unhappy, his bosses demanded two months’ compensation to allow him to quit – an impossible amount given that they also deducted money from his wages if he did not meet their daily scamming targets. With the building surrounded by armed guards, escape also felt impossible. So he toiled from early morning to midnight, seven days a week. “I wanted to go home, but I faced so much pressure,” he said.

Brang, from Kachin State, also fell foul of the traffickers. A university student before the pandemic, he joined nonviolent protests after the coup and travelled to Laukkai in October of 2021 at the invitation of a friend.

He arrived to learn that his friend had set him up with a scamming company but reluctantly accepted.

Only when he tried to quit, and his bosses told him that they had paid for him under a two-year contract, did he realise his friend had profited from the arrangement.

“I accepted this job because I felt bad freeloading at my friend's house, but it turned out, I was sold,” said Brang. “I felt betrayed and stabbed in the back.”

By then, however, he was trapped. “I worked like a robot from 8am to 2am without rest. I wasn’t even allowed to leave the building,” he said.

Seated at a long table, he had to search for wealthy-looking women in their 30s and 40s on the Chinese social media and messaging application WeChat, comment on their posts using a translation application, and send them private message requests.

For each woman who accepted, Brang got 300 yuan ($42), and a bonus if the contact led to a scam. But if he did not net at least 10 women a day, he was “punished”.

Most days, only three or four women accepted Brang’s requests, and his bosses beat him in front of the other workers, who were forced to watch in silence as he was thrashed on the bottom. “It was harrowing. I ached when I sat down,” he said.

Brang estimates that he was beaten on 10 to 15 occasions before his company decided he would be more useful to them in a different role. Forced to wear the uniform of a military-affiliated militia, he became a bodyguard for the company’s bosses.

The job offered Brang a sense of the scale of Laukkai’s cyber-scamming industry, as well as the power of the Chinese gangs running it. “The whole of Laukkai was like their city or territory,” he said. “The Myanmar military and militia controlled Laukkai, but they didn’t seem to have that much authority, because the Chinese bosses had enormous amounts of money.”

Although he was no longer beaten, Brang seethed with resentment. Not only did he have to protect the same bosses who were holding him captive, but he was also working for a group associated with the military.

The last straw came when he was forced to beat another worker. Soon after, he requested a leave of absence from his boss, concocting a story that he needed to go home for his mother’s funeral. “I even cried in front of him so that he would let me go,” said Brang.

Months after returning home, he fled to Malaysia, where he joined an undocumented workforce from Myanmar that has swelled since the pandemic. He now fears being caught up in an immigration raid, while he is also struggling to cope with memories of his trafficking. “I’m still traumatised by what I’ve been through,” he said.

Back in Laukkai, La Awng attempted to turn a bad situation in his favour when his company gave him the chance to leave at the end of his six-month contract. Most of his friends went home, but La Awng took a job with another scamming company, where he hoped to work his way up. “I wanted to be resilient,” he said.

With his fluency in English and Chinese, he was soon promoted to the position of trainer and translator, as he also began working the end stages of the scams.

First, he would move the conversation to WhatsApp, where end-to-end encryption meant the messages could not be traced by a third party or shut down by scam-detecting artificial intelligence. Then, he would introduce the investment opportunity and send the victim a link to a fake cryptocurrency trading platform. While the targets would initially think they were profiting, the system quickly turned against them. “We help them trade, but everything is fake,” said La Awng. “Except for the first time, you will never win.”

As each target panicked, he convinced them to invest more and more to recoup their losses. “We make them sell everything they possess until they go into bankruptcy,” he said.

Although La Awng was able to earn what he described as a comfortable income from this work, he wrestled with the burden of betraying the people he scammed. “I cry with them, but I cannot show my emotions to my bosses,” he said.

Were he to do so, or to deviate from the rules in any way, the consequences were clear. "We hear all the groaning and torture on a daily basis and sometimes, it even feels strange if we don’t hear it,” he said. Once, his bosses made a public display of cutting off a worker’s ear after he tried to escape, according to La Awng.

He and another worker interviewed separately by Shwe Phee Myay, a Shan State-based media outlet which collaborated with Al Jazeera for this report, said scamming bosses also kept cages with animals, including lions, tigers, bears and large birds, and threatened to lock workers in these cages if they disobeyed. Both sources also believed that some workers at their companies had been killed, and their bodies quickly burned to destroy the evidence.

Al Jazeera was unable to verify their claims, but regardless of whether the punishments actually happened, the psychological effect of scamming under the constant threat of violence was clear. “I had dreams for my future, but because of working here, I feel like all my dreams have gone,” said La Awng. “Even If I manage to get out of this industry, I think the trauma will still haunt me.”

Shwe Phee Myay, a Shan State-based media outlet, contributed to this report.

This article was supported by the Pulitzer Center and is part of a series of articles about human trafficking in a booming cyber-scamming industry in Myanmar following the 2021 military coup.