Some 7,000 victims were rescued from scam compounds in Myanmar
25/4/2025 6:29
In
February, Thai and Myanmar authorities worked together to turn
off electricity and the internet in an unprecedented operation
to free thousands of trafficking victims forced to work in
cyber-scam centers in Myanmar.
It succeeded, and some 7,000 people from 29 countries were
released.
But trafficking experts question how significant the
blackouts were, and will be, if satellite internet technology
such as Starlink, China's SpaceSail or the French-German
Eutelsat becomes abundant in the region.
Owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk's Space X, Starlink
provides high-speed internet via portable packs.
Registered Starlink users simply plug in the device, which
is slim enough to carry in a backpack, and point it towards the
sky to access a stable internet connection. Service plans begin
at £50 ($65) per month.
“We're starting to see Starlink signals pop up more and more
in the areas where these compounds are,” said Andrew Wasuwongse,
country director of International Justice Mission Thailand, an
anti-trafficking non-profit organization.
More than 80 Starlink devices were seized by authorities in
Myanmar and Thailand last year, according to the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime.
Countries have differing restrictions on the devices that
make their legality ambiguous. In Thailand and Myanmar, they are
considered illegal and not licensed by authorities.
Starlink states on its website that users cannot engage its
services for “fraudulent or illegal” activities. It did not
reply to a request for comment.
Aware of the devices' use in propping up illegal
operations, Thai authorities attempt to seize them, but an ASEAN
trade agreement allowing goods to be imported into Thailand and
taken into another Southeast Asian country without inspection
makes it difficult.
“We know that they import a lot of Starlink devices through
Thailand,” said Siriwish Kasemsap, director of the Bureau of
Human Trafficking Crime in Thailand’s Ministry of Justice.
Yet their clandestine presence has also proven useful amid
the recent earthquake in Myanmar, providing connectivity to help
support relief efforts amid wider blackouts.
Many of the scam centers also rely on illegal Thai internet
connections, Wasuwongse said, and freed workers reported that as
a result, the internet shutdown during the rescue operation did
very little.
The arrest warrants and threats of raids had more of an
impact in the release of what he described as a “drop in a
bucket” of victims, he said.
BOGUS SCHEMES
The United Nations estimates hundreds of thousands of people
are trapped in scam farms run by criminal networks in places
like Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.
Sara, who did not want to use her full name, is one such
worker, lured to Bangkok from South Africa with the promise of a
tech job, only to be trafficked into Myanmar.
There, she said she spent nine months coercing strangers
online, 21 hours a day, to invest in bogus schemes or she risked
being sent to the “prison.”
“It's an underground place that is dark, where they will
hang you upside down and torture you, electrocute you and beat
you up for three days, or they would lock you in a room alone,
with no human contact, with no water, with no food for three
days,” she said.
Sara was released when she convinced her captors her mother
was sick, and she managed to claw together close to $100,000 as
ransom. She is still paying off debts to friends and family who
lent her money.
Palit, a 42-year-old Thai national, escaped a similar
compound in 2023 after six months of being forced to engage in
fake online relationships that would coerce people into giving
significant amounts of money.
He lived with 11 men in a small room with one bathroom that
only had dirty water. Many got sick, he said, but there was no
medicine nor opportunities to rest.
“If we couldn't work and if we did not listen to commands,
we would get abused like hit, shot and punishments,” he
said.
While Palit was rescued and returned to Thailand, thousands
of victims remain stuck, propping up an operation that lines the
pockets of criminal syndicates.
THAI LEVERAGE
Internet access is vital to their operation, and criminal
gangs, largely from China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, invest
in ensuring connections via unconventional means, experts said.
Despite the gangs' canny access to the internet, wider
shutdowns are not useless, said Rebecca Miller, Southeast Asia
and Pacific regional coordinator of human trafficking and
migrant smuggling at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
This operation, the largest of its kind, was symbolic,
“showing that Thailand is taking this issue seriously and
there's multiple levers that they wanted to pull," she said.
The strong government reaction was long overdue, said Phil
Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates.
With a porous border, Thailand is a key transit point for
people and products, from internet devices to drugs, and has the
power to make it difficult to operate the centers, he said.
“Thailand has a great deal of leverage over the Border Guard
Forces who have been the key local protectors of the scam
centers, so this is more about Bangkok getting serious about
going after the scam centers than anything the Myanmar
government has done,” Robertson said.
The Thai government has said it plans to strengthen border
controls, so people like Sara cannot be easily transported.
When she was in Myanmar, Sara said she mistakenly thought
she was still in Thailand, given there had been no border
checks.
"I couldn't have imagined that I was in a different
country,” she said.
The multiple jurisdictions, where the syndicates conduct
money laundering, trafficking, assault and cybercrime, make
investigations difficult, but this first joint operation could
create positive momentum, Wasuwongse said.
Otherwise, the released victims may simply be replaced by
others, he said.
UNODC is already seeing the targeted compounds move south of
Myawaddy, a town across a narrow river from Thailand along the
mountainous Three Pagodas Pass, “almost like a 'whack-a-mole'
effect,” said Miller.
“You take action in one spot, and then suddenly the problem
shifts somewhere else," she said. "This definitely is not the
end of it all.”
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