Hundreds of scam centre workers, including Chinese nationals, were released from Myanmar last month, crossing the Moei River into Thailand on a barge. Many had been held in slave-like conditions and subjected to brutality and torture for failing to meet quotas, after being lured to Thailand on the pretext of good employment.
On February 25 Thai officials warned of an impending wave of more than 7,000 scam centre workers ready for repatriation from Myanmar – a massive logistical challenge.
Thailand appears to be taking its toughest measures to date to combat the criminal operations that are entrenched along its borders and have exploited the worsening chaos and lawlessness in Myanmar. Chinese-run criminal organisations, also operating in Laos and Cambodia, are believed to generate revenues of tens of billions of dollars annually using hundreds of thousands of workers recruited from more than 60 countries to scam victims globally, according to the United States Institute of Peace.
The crackdown started in earnest on February 5, when Thai authorities ordered cutoffs of electricity and telecoms to five locations across the border in Myanmar, and prohibited crossborder exports of 11 products seen as essential to scam operations including fuel, new mobile phones, batteries, inverters, generators, solar panels, mobile devices, cables, hardware, software and engine oil.
Mae Sot looks on the outside like a typical Thai provincial city, but many parts look and feel like Myanmar, with a large Myanmar population of several ethnicities – not only the Karen who live on the other side of the border – and at least as many Myanmar goods as Thai goods for sale in its markets.
But neither Myanmar traders nor shoppers in Mae Sot’s central market seemed that impressed by Thailand’s new measures.
“It doesn’t make any difference to us. Cutting off electricity to crack down on the scam centres is only good for making news,” said Daw Mary, a 43-year-old vendor from Myawaddy, surrounded by buckets of pungent fish paste, dried lentils, chillies and sacks of dried fish. She moves across the border often and, like many Myanmar nationals without legal migration status in Thailand, she didn’t want to use her real name.
“We haven’t had access to electricity for over two years now,” she said.
Large sections of Myawaddy, particularly outside the town centre, have had no formal electricity since a power substation was damaged during conflict in December 2023. They have had to rely on solar panels or generators since then. But the scam centres and other residents in the central area close to the river border had been receiving electricity from Thailand until February 5.
Sitting against the wall of a shop in Mae Sot, Myanmar construction worker Freddy, 35, said the crackdown brought so much police pressure on undocumented migrants like him that he has been afraid to go out to work. He now leaves his house only to pick up his son from the school bus.
While police harassment has long been a part of undocumented Myanmar migrant life in Thailand – usually resolved by either a one-time bribe or regular monthly “fees” of 300-500 baht (about US$9-15) – Myanmar migrants in Mae Sot report a spike in police pressure resulting from the crackdown.
Ko Phoe Thagyan, secretary of the Overseas Irrawaddy Association, a Mae Sot-based NGO supporting Myanmar migrants, said the Myanmar junta was trying to leverage its cooperation with Thailand in order to increase its ability to collect taxes from Myanmar workers in Thailand – as well as monitor and collect information on opposition supporters. There were 2.3 million Myanmar registered in Thailand in 2024, while the International Organization for Migration estimates the number of those unregistered to be even higher.
But in practice, the Thai government is not always a willing partner for the junta.
“The [junta] is pressuring the Thai government, but they [the Thais] are staying neutral. The arrests and bribery [of undocumented migrants] is being done by the local authorities. The Thais know who the revolutionaries are but they don’t look for them or crack down on their activities,” Phoe Thagyan said.
Locals say the ban on fuel exports from Thailand is having the biggest impact, causing fuel shortages and higher prices in Myawaddy Township and sometimes bigger queues at petrol stations in Mae Sot, packed with people buying fuel to use in Myanmar. Border crossings and trade have fallen because of the shortages.
“My customers are staying at home,” said Ms Suwaree Rungsaereechai, a Thai businesswoman who owns a home office furnishings store in downtown Mae Sot that caters to many crossborder shoppers. She estimated her sales have fallen by a quarter since February 5.
Suwaree said she didn’t know whether the decline was because of the lack of fuel for shoppers to travel from Myawaddy or whether there was simply less demand from Myanmar since the scam centres appeared to be shutting down.
“I don’t know who my customers are, but they are not buying like they used to,” she said.
Scam operations with deep roots
Myanmar is a prime location for scam operations because of the lawless vacuum and the ease of doing criminal business with warlords. But sophisticated high-tech global business operations in undeveloped territories mean dependence on the infrastructure of a more developed state like Thailand.
Today’s scam centres have their roots in the first unregulated casinos and online gambling from the 1990s, which developed rapidly in the 2000s. After Chinese criminal syndicates made major investments in offshore casinos in the Mekong region in the 2010s, travel and business restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic forced the groups to innovate new streams of revenue using their existing infrastructure and skills.
“Pig butchering” scams turned out to be among the most lucrative. Victims are groomed via “wrong number” text messages or online dating sites for supposedly serendipitous connections by scammers who may invest months in developing trust. After introducing targets to fraudulent crypto schemes, they are encouraged to make incremental investments until they feel comfortable enough to deposit everything. The scammers then disappear – “butchering the pig” – often taking their life savings.
Thailand is not a known base for scam operations but it has played an essential enabling role, providing the necessary crossborder connections to electricity, financial and telecom networks. Thai citizens have also been victims of the scammers and sometimes used as fronts to open Thai bank accounts and register Thai SIM cards.
The abduction of Wang Xing, a 22-year-old Chinese actor who was found in Myanmar by authorities on January 7, had a major public impact in China. He said he travelled to Thailand on the offer of an acting role, and through deception and violence, was forced to work in a scam centre across the border in Myanmar scamming Chinese victims.
Thailand’s response came, in part, because of the Chinese social media storm surrounding the actor’s disappearance. Visits to Thailand by Chinese tourists fell by 15 percent in the week following his release, according to the marketing agency China Trading Desk quoted in CNBC. Chinese made up the largest group of foreign tourists to Thailand last year – 6.7 million out of a total 35.5 million visitors.
Fears of Chinese tourists for their safety in Thailand are not new, even though there have been no reports of foreigners randomly abducted in Thailand to work in scam centres. The 2023 Chinese film No More Bets told the story of the horrors faced by a computer programmer and fashion model trafficked via Thailand to a scam centre in an unnamed Southeast Asian country that resembles aspects of both Myanmar and Cambodia.
Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra tried to repair the damage on January 22 by releasing an AI-generated video of herself speaking Chinese and assuring Chinese tourists that “we will enforce laws more strictly and effectively to prevent illegal border crossings, while also developing systems to provide comprehensive support for tourists to avoid any unfortunate incidents”.
On February 6, the day after the cutoffs to Myawaddy, she made her first visit to China as prime minister and promised her hosts to crack down on the scam centres.
“Thailand is willing to strengthen law enforcement cooperation with China and other neighbouring countries and take resolute and effective measures to combat cross-border crimes such as online gambling and fraud,” she said.
Turning off the switch
Minister of Interior Anutin Charnvirakul said annual revenue from electricity sold in those five affected areas was about 600 million baht ($17.8 million). He cited a clause that allowed Thailand to cancel the contracts on national security grounds. Minister of Defence Phumtham Wechayachai later said that scams damaged Thailand by 80 million baht a day.
But according to Dr Sann Aung of the New Myanmar Foundation, an NGO based in Mae Sot supporting human rights and human rights defenders, economic arguments should matter less than the extremely brutal and exploitative nature of the scamming industry.
“The baseline is that we cannot accept any business model based on violating human rights and exploitation in Burma or anywhere in the world. If you profit from the tears of others, it is not a business. It is just a theft-driven criminal organisation,” he told Frontier.
Thailand made an earlier attempt to cut off power to scam centres in Myawaddy in 2023 when a contract with Myanmar authorities expired. But it didn’t last long.
Professor Pinkaew Laungaramsri of Chiang Mai University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology said the pressure failed because the scam operations were prepared with backup power, Thai institutions failed to coordinate, and there was insufficient political will to maintain the restrictions with resistance from various “interest groups”.
Pinkaew found that a “complex network” had pushed back, including Chinese criminal syndicates, legitimate businesses on both sides of the border, Thai and Karen electricity brokers, the Kayin State Border Guard Force and even Thai authorities.
“The BGF and certain Thai authorities had financial incentives to restore power quickly since it directly impacted their income from these illicit operations,” she told Frontier. She has been calling for cutoffs since before the recent crackdown.
She said the scam centres have also capitalised on “the sophisticated patron-client dynamic” that has evolved over the decades between the Thai authorities and the armed groups across the border.
“This relationship serves multiple purposes: intelligence sharing about security threats and border movements, facilitation of cross-border trade, both legal and illegal, economic benefits through informal taxation and protection fees, buffer zone management against potential threats, control of refugee flows and humanitarian access, etc. This interdependence has created a stable but problematic system where both sides rely on each other for various forms of support.”
On January 28, the Thai cabinet approved an executive decree creating liability for Thai banks and telecom companies for Thai victims’ losses to scams, and provides for compensation without the need for court orders. It is expected to come into effect soon.
Thai opposition parliamentarian Rangsiman Rome told Frontier in a recent interview that Thailand’s measures had not gone far enough.
“If we want to make sure that scamming operations cannot work again, we have to focus on the structure of organised crime. We have to arrest the key organised crime figures. I have to say that Thailand is not doing well in this regard,” he said.