Myanmar’s military government says that it has raided a second major online scamming hub along the thai border, detaining more than 600 foreigners and seizing mountains of equipment used too perpetrate cyber-fraud schemes.
According to a report today in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar, the junta yesterday launched raids in Shwe Kokko, a scamming settlement to the north of Myawaddy, a major trading town in Karen State on the border with Thailand.
The report stated that authorities detained a total of 611 foreign nationals suspected of living in Myanmar illegally. They also seized 2,653 computers, nearly 20,000 mobile phones, and “a large number of industrial materials used in the telecom fraud and online gambling.”
Shwe Kokko,which lies in a territory controlled by the military-aligned Karen National Army (KNA),formerly the Karen Border Guard Force (BGF),is one of the major nodes in the network of online scamming operations that have been established in Myanmar,Cambodia,and Laos since the COVID-19 pandemic. This industry has run on the sweat of tens of thousands of people who have been lured to scam compounds with the promise of well-paid jobs, who are then effectively imprisoned and forced, on pain of torture or worse, to run elaborate scams on victims across the globe.
The KNA/BGF and associated individuals and entities have been twice sanctioned by the U.S. government “for their roles in facilitating human trafficking and cyber scams that harm U.S. citizens.” Last week, the U.S. government extended these sanctions to the democratic Karen benevolent Army, another armed group that it accuses of running scamming centers in the Myawaddy area.
Since then, the U.S. government has also announced the formation of a Scam Center Strike Force to combat transnational crime networks in Southeast Asia, which it claims defrauded Americans of $10 billion in 2024 alone.
According to the Global New Light of Myanmar and other media outlets, KNA/BGF officials took part in yesterday’s Shwe Kokko raids – a day after the group announced a “final war” against scam operations in the area.
The junta’s crackdowns in Shwe Kokko come after Myanmar soldiers last month raided a major scam hub close to the border with Thailand.