Are the Karen warlords in Myawaddy serious about shutting down the giant scam compounds that have grown up in their territories and power their economies? And do Thailand and the Myanmar junta—even under heavy pressure from China—have enough leverage to make sure that they do? In this interview with The Irrawaddy Burmese Edition’s Senior Editor Ye Ni, Jason Tower, a leading expert on the Myanmar-Thai borderlands in his capacity as Myanmar country director at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), speculates on what the future holds for efforts to suppress large-scale transnational crime in the region.
Ye Ni: Over these past few days, we’ve seen Karen armed groups taking direct action to crack down on Chinese crime syndicates within their territories and release victims of human trafficking. The Chinese assistant minister for public security, Liu Zhongyi, has visited Myawaddy to meet the scam center workers who were rescued by the Karen BGF. Are we witnessing a major shift?
Jason Tower: I think we are seeing some pretty big shifts. For a senior Chinese police official to be down in the Thai-Myanmar area, actually walking across the border and going in to assess the scam centers, is something that’s unprecedented. China has had some involvement last year in repatriating some of its nationals that got tied up in the scam centers. But this high level of action is something that is quite new.
The activity in the area has just gotten to a point where it’s completely out of control. The scam economy has grown to become the mainstay of the economy in the whole Thai-Myanmar borderlands. These mafia figures have gotten more and more powerful, more and more bold in terms of the different types of criminal activity, the extent to which they’re targeting new demographics with human trafficking. Things have gotten out of control to the point where this is having very direct impacts for Thailand’s national security and economy—and the reputation of the country. And I think it’s similar for China, where you see that these Chinese crime groups have really taken over territory.
They’ve become deeply embedded within the Myanmar military’s Border Guard Force (BGF), and they’re now able to target Chinese nationals with trafficking in ways that you haven’t really seen in the past.
In particular, it was the trafficking of Chinese actor Wang Xing, which involved a new form of human trafficking and a very customized approach. In the past, the approach was much more—you’d see posts for high-paying jobs circulating online. But this was a targeted approach that involved someone with many years of experience in the film industry going out there, targeted through his own personal network. A large number of Chinese professionals were then subsequently trafficked into Myawaddy.
But it also came at a very sensitive time for the Chinese police and courts, because just days before the news about Wang Xing came out, the Chinese courts announced that they were starting to hear the proceedings of the case related to the Kokang BGF criminal actors. These were members of the Ming clan, including Ming Guoping and others who were involved in the murder of Chinese nationals in October 2023.
The Chinese courts had just announced that they were starting to hear that case on Dec. 30 of last year, and CCTV, the official Chinese TV station, had actually put out a documentary showing how the Chinese police had achieved victory over the scam syndicates, highlighting that they had annihilated these criminal actors through cooperation with Myanmar.
Well, that documentary came out, and just a couple of days later it became very, very clear that these syndicates had not been annihilated. In fact, they’re as powerful as ever and engaged in all forms of new and even more malign crimes. I think this triggered a very strong response on the part of Thailand and China. And you’re starting to see now that there’s a massive amount of pressure that is coming on to those who are responsible for this. And the main responsibility goes to the Myanmar military’s BGF, the Karen BGF, who were the ones that brought all of these transnational criminal actors into the Myawaddy area going back to 2017.
The Thai government has cut off electricity, fuel, and internet in Myawaddy, Tachileik, and Shwe Kokko and KK Park along the border, and Thai border security has been tightened. The Thai government also took action against some senior police officials in Tak who let all this happen. Most recently, authorities there prepared an arrest warrants for Saw Chi Thu and other BGF commanders on human trafficking charges. Are you impressed with the Thais’ handling of the situation?
It seems there is very significant political will to address the issue. Compare it with what happened in 2024. At that time there was also an announcement of cuts to electricity, cuts to the internet, and that was followed through a little bit. But just weeks later, you saw that the criminal groups had once again brought in new sources of electricity, new sources of internet. They actually increased the number of telecommunications towers on the Myanmar side. More Mytel towers started to come in.
But basically, those moves last year were undermined by the BGF and the scam syndicates. There was also a lot of—I’d almost say—criminal whitewashing that was undertaken by the BGF last year. It put up signs claiming that it would move all of the online businesses out, but in fact, rather than pushing them out, they brought more in, with even the BGF leader himself holding a prayer service in August of last year to pray for the return of criminal kingpin She Zhijiang to Yatai, to the Shwe Kokko area. Rather than pushing out criminals, the border guard force actually asked for divine intervention to bring more criminals into the area.
There was really no intent on the part of the BGF to address these issues. And why would it? That’s the mainstay of their economy and their main source of revenue. I think this time it’s much more serious, particularly with the added security and the direct mobilization of resources coming in from Bangkok.
One thing to consider is that from 2017, when these crime groups started to come into the area, until present, the BGF and the Chinese mafia groups brought in massive amounts of security on the Myanmar side of the border. They built up their arms. They recruited many new military and paramilitary personnel into the area. They set up security around all the compounds, and they really took over the area. Whereas on the Thai side, things were more or less static. So there weren’t really adequate resources in place to ensure the security of the border, meaning that the criminal actors and the BGF and the other militia groups providing protection were able to take advantage of Thailand, to prey on Thailand in many different ways. And this created harm for many countries around the world.
This recent push does demonstrate that there’s a much higher level of political will. And of course, there’s a lot more action being taken by other international actors around these issues as well. There’s more attention—not only Chinese police officials running around down there, but also Thailand starting to call for the diplomatic community to come in to provide assistance to people from dozens of different countries who’ve all been trafficked into the areas around Myawaddy and Three Pagodas Pass and some of the other adjacent areas.
So it looks like a much more comprehensive move to crack down. You mentioned arrest warrants. I think that’s also a pretty bold move on the part of the Thai police, and it actually gives Thailand a significant amount of leverage over the BGF. At this moment, the reason you’re suddenly starting to see all these individuals released from the compounds relates very much to that push for arrest warrants.
What the BGF leaders are trying to do is to avoid those arrest warrants being executed, because if the arrests move forward, I think you’ll have a situation that parallels very much what happened with the Kokang BGF, which was involved in the exact same forms of crimes that the Karen BGF was involved in. The arrest warrants that were issued targeting 10 of those BGF elites back in late 2023 more or less led to the collapse of the scam empire on Kokang territory. And while four of those Kokang BGF leaders are still at large and seemingly still involved in online scamming, it did push that activity out of Kokang, which is now under the control of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA).
So the arrest warrants could end up being quite significant in terms of the ability to push for a much bolder, more systematic crackdown in this case.
Let’s talk about the China side. Does China also want to arrest the Karen BGF leaders? Since the military junta, which is already struggling with its own survival, is unlikely to make the arrest, could Thailand step in and do it instead?
I haven’t seen where the Chinese government has officially commented on the news that the Department of Special Investigations in Thailand is seeking these arrest warrants. That said, there’s been coverage of it in Chinese media, including the state press. Phoenix News, for example, had an article just days after the DSI made this announcement, which goes into quite some detail on the Karen BGF and its role in providing security to the criminal actors in Myawaddy. So the fact that this is getting coverage in Chinese state media does show some indication that perhaps China—at a minimum—is not hostile toward the idea of arrest warrants targeting these perpetrators.
Some other Chinese press coverage, again in state media, has even used some irony in talking about the moves by the Karen BGF and the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army to crack down. I noted that one of the headlines in Chinese state media talked about how the “security umbrella for the criminal groups was now trying to turn itself into an enforcer of the law.”
Going back to what happened in the case of Kokang, once those arrest warrants were issued, it became very difficult for the Myanmar military not to respond, and China put a lot of pressure on the Myanmar military to acquiesce and to hand over those BGF actors. Of course, at least one of the sons of each of those key Kokang clans was given a pass. They are still considered to be at large or, in the case of Bai Suocheng, he was never even targeted by the arrest warrants. So there were some who did manage to escape despite all the pressure from China.
Now hypothetically, if Thailand were to issue those arrest warrants, the Myanmar military could choose to ignore them. It could choose not to hand over those individuals. But those BGF leaders need access to the Thai border, and it would basically cut off their ability to go across the border. And I imagine at some point Interpol could become involved. It could be a new source of potential tensions between the Myanmar military and the Thai government.
So the arrest warrants, if issued, would have some implications for the relationship, certainly between these three parties. If Thailand were to announce the arrest warrants, the Chinese side would probably also exert some level of pressure on the Myanmar military to hand over those individuals.
That said, I think it is quite clear that China’s strategy changed between 2023 and 2024. In 2023, the Chinese strategy was very much to put a lot of pressure, to use much more of a stick strategy, in demanding that the Myanmar military take action to crack down on crime. Whereas in 2024, it shifted to using more of a carrot strategy, where the Chinese police sought access. They sought to deploy Chinese police on the ground in Myanmar. And they tried to give the Myanmar military a lot of legitimacy around cracking down on online scamming.
At the end of last year, when China started to hear those cases against the Ming clan, kingpins from the Myanmar military, and the Kokang BGF, it put out a very long 20-minute documentary where it basically gave a lot of credit to the Myanmar military for the release of all of those Chinese nationals and for taking down those Kokang scams. That’s actually quite interesting. I mean, nowhere in the documentary is the MNDAA given any credit for this, even though they were the main party that resulted in the eradication of those scam centers.
The strategy of the military junta this time is different again. It, too, is blocking supplies to Karen State and putting pressure on the Karen BGF. Does this indicate a coordinated effort between the junta and Thai government?
It’s clear that Thailand is very concerned about this and wants something to be done about it. China is doing something very similar. The Chinese police official, Liu Zhongyi, came to Thailand and also met with leaders of the Myanmar military regime. So there’s really pressure and interaction on both sides. I think the Myanmar military has learned some lessons from what played out in 2023. It doesn’t want to be seen as undermining the efforts of regional law enforcement to address some of these problems. Also, the Myanmar military has at least publicly tried to put some pressure on the Karen BGF. But the BGF has a lot of leverage over the Myanmar military, which has very, very minimal resources down in Myawaddy at this point.
In early 2024, the Myanmar military was handed a serious defeat in the Myawaddy area, where it was actually pushed out by an operation headed by the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). Subsequently, the Myanmar military mobilized a massive deployment of troops to the area to try to recover that base. To keep its own territory safe, the KNLA had to move out to redeploy its troops, and the Karen BGF took it over. And then the BGF actually helped the Myanmar military run the flag back up again, betraying the KNLA.
I think these dynamics show that it is very difficult for the Myanmar military to do anything, because it can’t fully control that BGF when it comes to addressing any issues. Even if China and Thailand go and tell the Myanmar military to do something about this, the junta is too weak to take on these mafia groups. Plus it also has a lot of economic interests. It knows that if the mafia groups fall, It’s likely that the BGF will fall, and if the BGF falls, then the junta really loses all access to that territory.
Now, the Myanmar military may be thinking that there might be a scenario whereby it could help the Chinese side or the Thai side to address these issues and regain some level of influence and access in the area. For example, it is now demanding that the BGF and the DKBA hand over any victims of human trafficking first to the Myanmar military. And then the junta would be the focal point for passing those individuals over to authorities on the Thai side of the border. This sort of shows how the Myanmar military might be trying to leverage all this chaos and all these problems to try and push itself back into the border area around Myawaddy. Those might be some of the calculations.
Saw Chit Thu said in statements that the Karen BGF were complying with the joint operation of Myanmar, Thailand and China, saying he would work to suppress those transnational crimes. Do we believe him?
Why should we ever have believed him? As I said, it was stated clearly on those public billboards last year that the problem was supposed to have been dealt with by Oct. 31. And that simply didn’t happen. Does Chit Thu really want to hand over all of the criminal kingpins? Does he really want to eradicate all of the scam centers that he’s played a role in building up since December 2016. That’s when the first of these criminal kingpins came into the Myanmar-Thai borderlands at the invitation of the Myanmar military’s BGF under Chit Thu.
And then many other very dangerous organized crime groups, largely from China, came one after another into those areas, building these massive scam centers. This is basically the economy as the BGF has built it—one massive illicit economy. What happens if that is fully eradicated? Basically, the Karen BGF would eradicate itself if it closed it all down.
I don’t really think things have gotten to a point yet where it’s systematic. You’re already seeing a strong indication coming out of the compounds—for example, there were some messages leaked from KK Park this morning, just some chat amongst some of the criminal groups—saying oh well, these inspections, they’re just inspections. They’re not really going to do anything extreme here, because the people who are doing the inspections are the general’s people, right? They’re the people that are linked to the BGF. They’re not going to do anything to systematically undermine the scam syndicates
I think that shows you that a lot of this is for show. There are so many people inside. The Chinese police official who visited the area said that there were 100,000 people in Myawaddy alone. In order for him to say that, and to say that in public, that must be their current understanding of the scale. So if the Karen BGF now stands over 1,000 or 2,000 of them, that’s far short of the 100,000 that Chinese police estimate.
I think the reality is that the realistic size of this, just along the Myanmar border, is in the range of maybe 150,000 people spread around all these different compounds, from the Three Pagodas Pass all the way up to Tachileik. Massive numbers of people! So the actions that we’ve seen taken thus far are not yet systematic.
I saw one report that the Thai government also invited the U.S. government to cooperate. How much of a threat do these crimes pose to the U.S.? And how concerned should the Trump administration be, and in what ways should it cooperate in addressing this issue?
This is increasingly an issue of concern for both the U.S. public and for law enforcement in the U.S.—and many other countries, for that matter. There are official reports from the FBI that put the losses to these types of online scams at above US$5 billion, with some estimates for all the unreported losses being in the tens of billions. That’s just for the U.S. alone. But then there’s other concerns: these are mainland Chinese crime groups that mainland China is cracking down on. And Beijing has a tendency to focus on cracking down on groups only insofar as they’re targeting China. But as China steps in more, China’s security influence overseas grows, which could be a worry for the U.S.
At the same time, the mafia groups might pivot to targeting the rest of the world—more Americans, more Europeans, more people from other countries. I think this is comparable in many ways with what’s going on with fentanyl. Because the Chinese side has a lot of intelligence on who these individuals are that are going after people in the U.S. and people in other countries with these scams. But it’s not actively sharing that intelligence, and it’s not actively taking steps to reduce losses for people from these other countries.
It is a pretty complicated problem. This is transnational crime, and dealing with transnational crime requires that law enforcement cooperates across borders. Thailand is looking for partnerships with a lot of countries to help address this problem because they need to think about how to repatriate people from 30 or 40 different countries. This is already evident with just these initial batches of people coming out. There are people from scores of countries around the world, and Thailand needs to mobilize the diplomatic community. It needs to reach out to countries that may not even have embassies here to work on the repatriation of these individuals that were trafficked and held inside the scam centers.
To address this in a more comprehensive way: this is something where you’re going to need countries from around the world coming together, sharing information, pooling resources, and preventing these criminal groups from simply relocating somewhere else. And I think that’s where there’s also a big risk right now.
The criminal actors are already pivoting to other locations. They’ve already built parallel infrastructures all across the region, extending into the Middle East, extending into Africa, that they can pivot to. So if there’s a crackdown in Myawaddy, they can move into Cambodia, they can move into other jurisdictions around the world. That pattern has played out time and time again.
Look at how we got to this present crisis. A lot of the scam syndicates that were up in Kokang under the protection of the Myanmar military’s BGF there pivoted down into the Myawaddy area when they were driven out by the MNDAA and Operation 1027.
I’d really like to highlight that even the Kokang BGF itself had set up a scam center in the Karen areas in partnership with the Karen BGF, so you had this Kokang compound that was right there on the Myanmar-Thai border, being operated directly by the Kokang BGF. So it was quite easy for it to pivot because it already had that infrastructure in multiple places.
This also highlights why you need to have multiple countries looking at how to more systematically come up with mechanisms to address these forms of transnational criminal activity.
We already knew that this problem existed in ASEAN countries, and although people from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia were deceived and trafficked, ASEAN does not seem to be actively trying to resolve this issue. As the current ASEAN chair, what should Malaysia do?
Quite a few ASEAN countries are undertaking their own very strong efforts to try to address these problems. The Philippines, for example, has over the past year made a big push to ban online gambling operations, which were used as a cover for a lot of the scam centers. They’ve systematically seized and eradicated several of these scam centers and are now really fighting on an ongoing basis.
A lot of the individuals in these scam centers who have now pivoted away from Shwe Kokko and who have become disaggregated are moving all across the country where they’re still engaging in online scamming. There were some reports from the Philippines in the range of maybe still 20,000-30,000, maybe more.
And then in other countries that are impacted more by the actual scamming—countries like Singapore and Malaysia that are impacted a lot more by their nationals losing money—are standing up, and their anti-scam centers try to keep their nationals safe. Singapore is another country that’s tried to take a lead in that regard, and has helped recover a lot of funds and prevented a lot of losses to Singaporeans from online scams. Efforts are going on on an individual basis across some countries.
But there are other countries in the region that are still in denial, or maybe their economies have even pivoted in such a way that the scam syndicates are so embedded there and that a scam economy or an illicit economy is emerging. The Myanmar military has very little interest for Myanmar to play a role at this present moment. And it’s hard enough for ASEAN to act more broadly around the Myanmar issue, much less on this issue. That’s going to be one big gap in terms of ASEAN’s ability to address this issue. Cambodia is another example.
There is a parallel between the efforts of ASEAN to respond to the crisis in Myanmar and the challenges that ASEAN faces responding to the crisis around online scamming. Some countries have more political will than others to respond, and there are differences in views on precisely how to go about responding. I will say that, as chair, Malaysia does seem to be taking this issue quite seriously. Malaysia has had a lot of concerns about scams targeting Malaysians, targeting people from other ASEAN countries. If it does, in its year as chair, try to make a big push to get ASEAN to do more on this issue, particularly in the space of information sharing, there’s likely to be a lot of like-mindedness within and across ASEAN countries in taking some of steps.
