Mizzima
Many of us are well acquainted with receiving unsolicited messages on Whatsapp or Telegram, sent from a stranger with an attractive profile picture and accompanied by a seemingly innocuous introduction. While the wary roll their eyes and delete the number, not everyone does. And while many may sympathize with the victims of these scammers, few understand that the people sending those unsolicited messages are themselves victims of nefarious yet sophisticated criminal enterprises.
Jason Tower of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) paints a far grimmer picture about who these scammers really are. He recently sat down for a podcast interview with Insight Myanmar to explain.
STRONG CREDENTIALS
Currently serving as the country director for the Burma program at USIP, Tower boasts a wealth of expertise spanning over two decades regarding conflict and security matters in China and Southeast Asia. Before joining USIP, his work focused on the repercussions of cross-border investments on conflict dynamics. Tower’s dedicated involvement in Burma has dealt with peace and security issues, and his overall research agenda is concentrated on exploring the intersection of crime and conflict in Southeast Asia.
Notable recent contributions include a comprehensive study of the influence of transnational criminal networks on conflict in Burma and regional security throughout Southeast Asia. Tower also authored a report examining criminal activities associated with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and conducted a review of the BRI’s impact on conflict. Beyond this research, Tower has authored over a dozen articles delving into the implications of the Myanmar coup, with a specific focus on its ramifications for regional security in Asia. Fluent in Mandarin as well, he is a Fulbright research student, a Fulbright-Hays scholar, and a Harvard-Yenching fellow.
DIRE TRADE
In this Insight Myanmar podcast, Tower describes how over half a million people languish in modern-day slavery in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines. Routinely beaten and electrocuted, they are also threatened with sale to drug traffickers, prostitution rings, and organ harvesters if they don’t
comply. In Myanmar alone, at least 120,000 captives are enslaved in overcrowded, prison-like compounds, fitted with torture chambers and surrounded by armed guards, and forced to participate in these criminal activities.
Their task: to scam thousands of dollars a day out of educated and well-off victims around the world, but most importantly in China.
And these scams are extremely sophisticated. Work spaces resemble modern IT company interiors, with access to the latest tech, in order to reach as many potential victims as possible. Scripts have been written and are to be meticulously adhered to. These are actually referred to as “pig butchering scams.” Each scammer has his or her role to play in fattening up the target, passing the victims—or “pigs”—along from person to person until they are ready to be “butchered”—that is, exploited for as much as possible.
EARNING BILLIONS
Tower estimates that the kingpins, who earn a whopping $100 billion annually, are now investing heavily in AI and fintech to better be able to fake conversations, voice, and video messages in real-time, and they are establishing legitimate-seeming fronts, including fraudulent crypto schemes.
But as horrific as the scam centers are, they are but a small part of a much larger and much more terrifying reality. The global abduction and human trafficking industry feeds victims into the centers, which are housed in Burmese cities, and which have literally been built around illicit activity. They were originally intended to host gambling and other vices mainly for wealthy Chinese customers outside Beijing’s jurisdiction. In Myanmar, these cities are built and owned by wealthy clans with private armies and connections to other illicit trades. Protection is further provided by the junta-aligned Border Guard Forces (BGF), thus part of the profits of this illicit trade are fed into military coffers to prop up their violent regime.
THE PIVOT
Following the border closures of COVID, and pressure from the Chinese government to clamp down on online gambling, revenue from those activities plummeted, leading to the highly successful pivot to large-scale human trafficking and scamming.
The relationship between the scam centers and the Myanmar military has become a thorn in Beijing’s side. Many have in fact posited that China may have tacitly signed off on Operation 1027 given the professed aim of the ethnic armed groups to liberate some of these centers, which house tens of thousands of enslaved Chinese nationals. For its part, the military junta has been loath to do anything about this terrible enterprise, given their own complicity.
The recent release of some 31,000 victims and their repatriation to China, along with the detention of key actors in the enterprises, is certainly good news. But this is overshadowed by the fact that at least 75% of Myanmar’s scam center victims remain in bondage, and that barely a month earlier, criminal security forces opened fire on scam victims attempting to flee, killing many.
GLOBAL CRISIS
“A lot of people may be thinking, ‘Well, how is this relevant? ’Well, what’s important to point to here is that we’re facing a global crisis around these pig butchering scams,” Tower says in closing. “Where these criminal syndicates are trafficking labor from around the world, really anyone at this point in time could now become a victim of trafficking, or be trafficked into a country like Myanmar, that’s something we really have never seen in history. Myanmar has never been before a destination country for human trafficking!”
He goes onto add: “The point here is, we’ve got a major global crisis on our hands that extends way beyond Myanmar, and many people in Myanmar are being victimized by this. This is sort of something that’s playing a role in violent conflict in Myanmar, but it’s also something that’s touching people and harming people all around the world!”
