The ad promised $4,500 a month. Rachel Yoong, a 30-year-old real estate agent in Kuala Lumpur, was earning about a seventh of that, and a casino in Yangon wanted staff. She applied from her phone, sat two interviews with polished recruiters, and by July 2022 she was on a plane to Myanmar.
Three days into her stay at a hotel, a car came to collect her. “But when I got inside there were two big, tough guys with guns,” she later told TIME. “That’s the moment I knew I was in trouble.”
Eighteen hours north
There was no casino. She says she was driven for over 18 hours along 700 miles of mountain road to Kokang, a lawless stretch of northern Myanmar on the Chinese border. In the town of Laukkai she was locked inside what she describes as a 10-story concrete prison with about 200 other trafficking victims from China, Taiwan, Malaysia and elsewhere in Asia.
They slept eight to a cell. For 17 hours a day they posed online as attractive women, using photos lifted from social media, and worked mostly American targets for money. The quota was $1,000 every three days. Miss it and the punishment was a beating or an electric shock. “I saw three people die,” Yoong said. “One coworker jumped from the roof; two others were pushed.”
She held out briefly, was beaten twice, then decided that doing the work well was the only way to stay alive. She was good at it. Within months she was clearing more than $30,000 a month for her boss, and one American client “invested” $200,000 with her in December 2022.
Sold, raided, recaptured
Laukkai, she concluded, was hopeless; local authorities were in league with the traffickers. After nine months she talked her boss into selling her to a rival gang in Mong La, where a coworker said escape would be easier. The price was 300,000 rmb, or $40,000.
In September, Chinese police raided that compound too. Chinese nationals went home. Yoong begged for the same help and was told no. “Because I’m Malaysian,” she said, “they did nothing.”
The gang moved about 100 captives into timber shacks in the jungle. Yoong found roughly 60 who were willing to run. With only about 20 guards, carrying wooden batons instead of guns, the numbers looked possible. At a set time they shouted “Police are here! Run! Run!” and bolted. Around 50 got out. Yoong, weak and slow, was caught.
When the bosses demanded the ringleader, a coworker from Sichuan province claimed it was him. He was beaten for a week. “My friend got very badly beaten for a week because the company made a huge loss,” Yoong said.
Out through Laos
Her way out came from a local who hauled away the camp’s rubbish. Yoong persuaded the local to fetch police, who arrested everyone. The Malaysian Embassy in Yangon told her it could not help. She was later moved into a third scam operation in the Golden Triangle Economic Zone in Laos, where security was loose enough for her to reach the Malaysian Embassy in Vientiane. Eight days later she was rescued. After a month of paperwork she flew back to Kuala Lumpur in January.
“I still can’t believe I’m alive and back in my own country,” she said. Her advice is simple: don’t trust a high-paying job abroad, whoever recommends it.
The scale behind one story
Yoong’s case is one of many. TIME cited a study putting the output of roughly 1,000 scam prisons at $75 billion over four years, and the FBI’s figure for Americans alone in 2022 was $2.6 billion, more than double the year before. Under pressure from Beijing, Myanmar had by then handed 31,000 captured scam suspects back to China, on Nov. 21, TIME reported.
The pressure from Beijing kept building. In September 2025 a court in Wenzhou sentenced 11 members of the Ming crime family, which ran compounds in Kokang, to death over a criminal enterprise worth a billion dollars and the deaths of 10 people who disobeyed or tried to escape. CNN reported that Chinese authorities say more than 53,000 suspects, trafficked victims among them, have been sent back to China from northern Myanmar, and that the United States Institute of Peace estimates regional crime groups take more than $43 billion a year from scam victims in Southeast Asia.
Sources
- Poppies to Pig-Butchering: Inside the Golden Triangle's Criminal Reboot (TIME, Charlie Campbell)
- Scam kingpins who ran billion-dollar criminal empire sentenced to death in China (CNN, Helen Regan)
