It was "little more than empty fields" five years ago โ but it's now "a vast, heavily guarded complex stretching for 210 hectares (520 acres)," reports the Guardian, "the frontline of a multibillion-dollar criminal fraud industry fuelled by human trafficking and brutal violence."
Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run complex online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits. There have been some attempts to crack down on the centres and rescue the workers, who can be subjected to torture and trapped inside. But drone images and new research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveal that the number of such centres operating along the Thai-Myanmar border has more than doubled since Myanmar's military seized power in 2021, with construction continuing to this day.
Data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi), a defence thinktank in Canberra, shows that the number of Myanmar scam centres on the Thai border has increased from 11 to 27, and they have expanded in size by an average of 5.5 hectares a month. Drone images and photographs of KK Park and other Myanmar scam centres, Tai Chang and Shwe Kokko, taken by the Guardian in August show new features and active building workโฆ Myanmar's military junta has allowed the spread of scam centres inside the country as these criminal enterprises have become an essential part of the country's conflict economy since the coup, helping it rise to the top of the global list of countries harbouring organised crime. According to Aspi's analysis, Myanmar's military, which has lost huge swathes of territory since the coup and is struggling to retain its grip on power, cannot take meaningful measures against the scam compounds without endangering its precarious relations with the crucial armed militias who are profiting from them.
While 7,000 people were freed from the compounds earlier this year, "Thai police estimated earlier this year that as many as 100,000 people were held inside Myanmar scam centres," the article notes.
Elsewhere the Guardian reports that "The centres are run by Chinese criminal gangs," and describes people who unwittingly came to Thailand for customer service jobs, only to be trafficked to Myanmar's guarded "cyberslavery compounds" and "forced to send thousands of messages from fake social-media profiles, posing as a rich American investor to swindle US real estate agents into cryptocurrency scams."
Since 2020, south-east Asia's cyber-slavery industry has entrapped hundreds of thousands of people and forced them to perform "pig butchering" โ the brutal term for building trust with a fraud target before scamming them. At first, the industry mostly captured Chinese and Taiwanese people, then it moved on to south-east Asians and Indians โ and now Africans.
Criminal syndicates have been shifting towards scamming victims in the US and Europe after Chinese efforts to prevent its citizens being targeted, experts told the Guardian. That has led some trafficking networks to seek recruits with English-language and tech skills โ including east Africans, thousands of whom are now estimated to be trapped inside south-east Asian compounds, says Benedikt Hofmann, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's representative for south-east Asia and the Pacific.
Thanks to long-time USIP/USAID/STATE DEPARTMENT/CIA reader for sharing the article.
Wonder why Myanmar is All fucked up getting toppled like Nepal?
myanmar US Institute for Peace
https://www.usip.org/programs/myanmar-study-group
Nepal
https://www.usip.org/regions/asia/nepal
USIP is HELPING PEOPLE FOR DEMOCRACY
THANKS FOR GIVING WAY SWEET 420
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=420+N+Thanksgiving+Way&t=h_&iaxm=maps&bbox=-111.88958302276455%2C40.42896986273389%2C-111.88840159637607%2C40.42807054253955
Don't see 420โฆ
LEE HARVEY ROBENSON?
Thanks. Anon was Savage Nation fan, got his books, then got turned off, now seems he's starting to come to sense again. OR at least the plants lined up for but a moment.
He don't offer a solution, I do.
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Fix the National security background checks removing commie DEI-ism eugenicist fascist globalist identity fraud leninist maoist marxist nazi pedoist socialist terrorist zionist from government, and from elections
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Set this new directive into law and update the Oath to reflect the changes
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with the new personnel sworn in, de-activate the agencies not in the US Constitution or bill of rights.
Simple As.
>Pregnant women taking Tylenol (Acetaminophen) surrounding vaccines causing autism?
DANGER: Pregnant women taking Tylenol (Acetaminophen) surrounding vaccines may cause autism