The building did not look like a casino. La Awng noticed that the day after he arrived in Laukkai, the capital of Myanmar’s autonomous Kokang region near the Chinese border. “When we saw it, we thought, ‘This isn’t a casino; maybe they will make us work as carpenters,’” he told Al Jazeera. A day later, training began, and he understood he had been trafficked into a cyber-scam operation run by Chinese criminal networks.
La Awng is a pseudonym. Al Jazeera gave him and the others it interviewed false names because of the risk of reprisals from the syndicates, the military or armed groups.
The pitch
It was October 2021. La Awng, a university student before the pandemic, had joined mass education boycotts after the February coup. A friend mentioned that a casino in Laukkai was offering 7,500 Chinese yuan ($1,035) a month, more than most minimum-wage workers in Myanmar earn in a year. La Awng paid a job agent 750,000 kyats ($360) and made the 530km car journey with his friend. A militia escorted them inside the next day and left them at a newly built high-rise.
Others were drawn in by different offers. A man called Htun was told in an online interview that he would talk to foreigners on the phone for a starting salary of 1.5 million kyats ($715) a month. “The main thing is money,” he said. He signed a one-year contract and only then learned the work was romance fraud. Brang, also from Kachin State, travelled to Laukkai on a friend’s invitation, then found out the friend had sold him to a scam company. “It turned out, I was sold,” he said. “I felt betrayed and stabbed in the back.”
Inside the mill
Each recruit got a computer. They set up fake profiles on Instagram, Facebook and Tinder, or used virtual WhatsApp numbers to message strangers abroad. A typical opener: “Oh, I sent a message to the wrong number. Sorry.” The scheme is called pig butchering, after the way scammers fatten up targets before the slaughter. It begins with an online romance and ends in a fake cryptocurrency investment.
Training ran 15 days, and the company fired people it judged to be underperformers. Those who stayed worked 12 hours a day or longer to hit targets.
Quitting was close to impossible. Htun’s bosses demanded two months’ compensation to let him go, and they docked wages when he missed daily targets. Armed guards surrounded the building. Brang worked from 8am to 2am and was not allowed to leave. He had to find wealthy-looking women in their 30s and 40s on WeChat and send requests. He earned 300 yuan ($42) for each who accepted, but fewer than 10 a day meant a “punishment.” Most days only three or four said yes, and his bosses beat him in front of other workers. He estimates it happened 10 to 15 times.
La Awng kept his head down and rose through the ranks. After six months he was offered the chance to leave. Most of his friends went home; he joined another scam company. With his English and Chinese he became a trainer and translator and worked the final stages: moving victims to WhatsApp, where end-to-end encryption kept messages from third parties and scam-detecting AI, then sending a link to a fake trading platform. “We help them trade, but everything is fake,” he said. “Except for the first time, you will never win.” When victims panicked, he urged them to invest more. “We make them sell everything they possess until they go into bankruptcy.”
He said he felt the weight of it. “I cry with them, but I cannot show my emotions to my bosses.”
Violence and escape
“We hear all the groaning and torture on a daily basis and sometimes, it even feels strange if we don’t hear it,” La Awng said. He described bosses cutting off a worker’s ear in public after an escape attempt. He and another worker, interviewed separately by the Shan State outlet Shwe Phee Myay, said bosses kept cages with lions, tigers, bears and large birds and threatened to lock disobedient workers inside. Both believed some workers had been killed and their bodies burned. Al Jazeera could not verify the claims.
Brang was later made a bodyguard for the company’s bosses, in the uniform of a military-affiliated militia. The last straw came when he was forced to beat another worker. He invented a story about his mother’s funeral to get leave, crying in front of his boss. Months after getting home he fled to Malaysia, where he fears an immigration raid. “I’m still traumatised by what I’ve been through,” he said.
The United States Institute of Peace reported in May 2024 that by the end of 2023 syndicates in the region were using online fraud to take some $64bn a year from people around the world. The think tank said China-origin networks relied on hundreds of thousands of people from more than 60 countries, often held in “prisonlike conditions.”
La Awng told Al Jazeera two and a half years in that he felt trapped. “I took a wrong step when the coup happened,” he said. “I am stuck deeper and deeper.”
