More than two A dozen new suspected scam complexes have been built or significantly expanded in war-torn Myanmar over the past six months, according to satellite images and analysis of the area reviewed by WIRED. The apparent growth in criminal operations indicates how an alleged crackdown on the sites last year did little to stop
More than two A dozen new suspected scam complexes have been built or significantly expanded in war-torn Myanmar over the past six months, according to satellite images and analysis of the area reviewed by WIRED. The apparent growth in criminal operations indicates how an alleged crackdown on the sites last year did little to stop the highly lucrative scam industry.
At least 25 suspected scam sites have appeared in Myanmar’s Myawaddy region, near the country’s border with Thailand, since the beginning of the year, according to an analysis of satellite images by the International Justice Mission, an anti-human trafficking nonprofit. The images show how land was razed and swaths of forest razed, eventually replaced by dozens of buildings and the infrastructure needed to run fraudulent operations at scale.
“Some were skeptical that last year’s crackdown was genuine, and these images show that was correct,” says Eric Heintz, a global analyst at IJM, who focuses on the impact of fraudulent compounds and analyzed the suspicious sites. “While that offensive did disrupt operations, the scale of these new developments appears to be more than sufficient to absorb what was destroyed last year.”
Over the past decade, fraudulent compounds have appeared widely in Southeast Asian countries: Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. These sites, which are often operated by Chinese organized crime groups, are responsible for much of the global online scams and are involved in the theft of billions of dollars through complex cryptocurrency and romance scams targeting victims in the US and around the world.
Although overseen by crime bosses, many of the everyday scams – which involve cold-contacting thousands of potential victims on social media, gaining their trust over time, and collecting stolen money – are carried out by victims of human trafficking. People from more than 60 countries have been lured to the region with false promises of work and then forced to scam people 24/7. Many have their passports taken away, are beaten if they refuse to work, and have little chance of escape. Hundreds of thousands of trafficking victims have been tricked into the complexes in recent years.
Industrial-scale scam operations have become a global crisis, and last year a series of international sanctions were issued against those allegedly involved or linked to the operations in Myanmar and Cambodia. Starting in October, ahead of the country’s elections, Myanmar’s military junta raided some well-known compounds, making a spectacle of building explosions and vandalizing phones and computers used in scam operations.
However, those eye-catching efforts appear to have done little to stop large scam companies from operating and scamming new victims. Mechelle B. Moore, executive director of the nonprofit Global Alms Incorporated, which is based in Thailand near the border with Myanmar, says her group has identified at least a dozen new sites, and some groups have repopulated previously attacked areas. “There are some that have remained empty, but there was a lot of construction that was going on towards the end of last year that no one saw,” Moore says.
Some of the new and expanding compounds identified by Heintz, which were first observed by the Associated Press in June, appear to have been in the early stages at the time of the crackdown, but other work began around January, the researcher says. “The pace of construction is significant; some of them will go from empty fields to operational complexes in a couple of months,” says Heintz. (The Myanmar Embassy in London did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)
Satellite images seen by WIRED show how buildings have been created within the clearings, with around 24 buildings appearing at one site between January and April. Other satellite images show how large amounts of trees have been felled to make way for buildings, and roads and what could be houses are being built around the sites. Clusters of large buildings have appeared at many of the sites, likely housing victims of trafficking.
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