Yesterday, the Thai army announced that it was coordinating an effort to repatriate around 260 people believed to have been victims of human trafficking, after their rescue from scam centers in Myanmar.
A report by the Associated Press quoted army sources as saying that those rescued were sent across the border from Myanmar’s Myawaddy district, a known hub of online scamming operations, to Thailand’s Tak province on Wednesday.
The group was made up of people from 20 nationalities, “with significant numbers from Ethiopia, Kenya, the Philippines, Malaysia, Pakistan, and China.” Among the group were also citizens of Indonesia, Nepal, Taiwan, Uganda, Laos, Brazil, Burundi, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Ghana, and India, the AP reported.
The release follows a series of Thai government efforts aimed at disrupting the scamming syndicates that have taken root in eastern Myanmar. These have become an increasing cancerous presence in the Mekong region since the COVID-19 pandemic, defrauding thousands of victims around the world while trafficking tens of thousands of people to work in the centers, drawing them in with promises of legitimate employment.
On February 5, the Thai government ordered the Provincial Electricity Authority to cut power to three areas where scamming gangs are known to operate: Myawaddy, Payathonzu, opposite Thailand’s Kanchanaburi province, and Tachileik, opposite Chiang Rai province. Bangkok has also cut internet access and blocked fuel shipments to the targeted areas. Thailand Department of Special Investigation has since requested arrest warrants for Col. Saw Chit Thu, Lt. Col. Mote Thone, and Maj. Tin Win, three leaders of the Karen Border Guard Force (BGF), the militia that controls much of Myawaddy, and which recent reports indicate is deeply involved with the scamming gangs that operate from their territory.
At the same time, the Royal Thai Police announced this week that it was setting up a committee to investigate alleged links between senior Thai police officers and criminal actors inside Myanmar. This came a day after five senior officers in Tak province, one of whom was described as “unusually wealthy,” were transferred out of their posts pending further investigations.
All of these measures follow the widely-publicized abduction of the Chinese actor Wang Xing, 22, who went missing on January 3 near the Thailand-Myanmar border. Wang was rescued on January 7 from a scam center in Shwe Kokko, a notorious scamming hub operating on BGF-controlled territory in Myawaddy. The case, which also attracted considerable attention in China, has prompted the Chinese government to increase its pressure on Bangkok to take more concerted action to combat scamming syndicates that have cropped up around its borders.
In response to the Thai measures, the BGF has denied any involvement in scam operations – “What exactly have I done to justify such an arrest?” BGF leader Saw Chit Thu told BBC Burmese this week. “Have I committed any acts of rebellion against Thailand?” – and announced plans to crack down on scamming operations.
On February 6, the day after Thailand cut power and internet services to Myawaddy, the BGF transferred 61 foreigners who were trafficked to scam compounds in Myawaddy across the border to Thailand. In comments to Radio Free Asia (RFA), Naing Maung Zaw, a spokesperson for the BGF, said this week that it planned to deport 8,000 scam center workers, most of them Chinese, from the areas under its control.
“We expect that there will be up to 8,000 people, maybe more,” the spokesperson told RFA on Wednesday. “We’ll send back as many as we have – we’ve already made a list – via Thailand or back into Myanmar. According to the figures, many of them came in with Thai visas, so we have to send them back to Thailand.”
It is unclear whether the BGF had any hand in the rescue of the 260-odd people who were returned to Thailand this week. According to the AP, the Thai media reported that the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army, an ethnic militia that controls some territories in Myawaddy, was responsible for “freeing the workers and taking them to the border.”
Given the BGF’s documented connections with the scam operations that it has permitted to be set up in the territories under its control, there are reasons to be skeptical about its promises of action. Indeed, the sheer annual turnover of the scamming syndicates, which has been estimated in the billions of dollars per year, gives them ample resources with which to purchase the acquiescence of local officials in parts of Myanmar and Thailand that have long been rife with corruption.
Over the past few years, these syndicates have shown a remarkable ability to shift locations in response to local crackdowns. When an ethnic armed group shut down the scamming operations in the Kokang region of northern Shan State, bordering China, many simply picked up and shifted south to the Myanmar-Thailand border. By all accounts, the cut-off of energy and internet services to Myawaddy has done little to sl0w down the fraud factories based there. “The cut-off has no impact on scam gangs,” one trader from Myawaddy town told The Irrawaddy this week. “They can afford solar panels and work day and night. It has only affected ordinary residents, patients, and transportation.”
The Thai government’s actions are welcome and long overdue, but after years of ineffectual crackdowns by the governments of the Mekong region, it is too soon to declare an end to the region’s scamming scourge.
