The major breaking news out of the Mekong subregion in recent weeks is the supposed release and pending repatriation of nearly 10,000 foreign nationals from scam compounds around Myawaddy, a town in southeastern Myanmar that sits on the border with Thailand. In the first batch of 260 repatriations, a stunning 258 were classified as victims of trafficking by the Thai government. Assuming this is a representative sample, repatriation of the full reported population would amount to the single largest rescue of human trafficking victims in history.
Beyond the massive potential cessation of human suffering promised by this (as yet theoretical) release, this population represents perhaps the most valuable opportunity to-date for intelligence gathering about what The Economist recently described as “the world’s most dangerous criminal industry.”
However, an array of factors is confounding the likelihood of a positive outcome. Taken together, these illuminate some of the key reasons why disrupting the scamming industry has proven so difficult, and also why doing so is of central importance for regional stability and national interests the world over.
Amongst these factors, it first is worth noting that this “rescue” bears all the markers of a strategic move by the Karen Border Guard Force (BGF) and Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) – the two, closely related, militia groups which control the territory where the compounds exist – not to eradicate transnational cybercrime from their territory but to protect its sustainable presence there. The purported “blitz raids” directly follow rising pressure from China. This pressure has been both direct (visits to Myawaddy by senior Chinese officials) and indirect via Chinese pressure on Thailand (to finally shutter electricity and telecoms access, to issue warrants for the arrest of key militia leaders, etc).
The releases thus far and promises of more to come can be seen as a direct result of this pressure. Yet, it is also important to note that, even at such a scale, this release does not signal reform but is more likely to serve as a pressure relief mechanism for the militia groups. Credible estimates suggest that the broader area controlled by these two groups may host over 100,000 scam workers. Given the profit margins, losing 10,000 coerced workers won’t destabilize the industry. On the other hand, it very well could cause a market shift. According to recent analysis published by USIP’s Jason Tower, Chinese pressure on the industry has consistently resulted in increased targeting of Western populations by the syndicates.
The recent “crackdowns” have certainly captured international attention and a chorus of voices are now praising the actions of the BGF/DKBA and/or parroting their propaganda. Yet, nothing about the actions thus far signal anything but an attempt to ameliorate acute Chinese pressure and protect the long-run sustainability of an industry (worth potentially billions of dollars) from mounting external pressure.
Additionally, by rapidly overwhelming Thailand with the promise of supposed repatriations, BGF and DKBA leadership have now seized control of the narrative. With Thai resources stretched thin and poorly resourced source countries unable to pick up the bill, the broader release of the reported 8,000+ potential remaining victims of trafficking (and material witnesses to globally reaching cybercrime) now hangs in the balance.
Yet, what if the necessary funds materialize and the whole population is released? Then what? While a few NGOs operating in Tak province are mobilizing to respond to the potential onslaught of repatriations, there is no real infrastructure to speak of for properly handling such an unprecedented flow of returnees. The Tak provincial government has had a complex and problematic role in this issue from the beginning, allowing people and infrastructure to move freely into these known criminal hotspots and denying for years that the vast majority of the people rescued from the compounds were victims, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Thai national-level law enforcement and NGOs will carry a disproportionate load of any response. While this community is capable, in the best case scenario, of gathering information to determine trafficking victim status, it lacks the capacity, the bandwidth, or the incentives to systematically gather the kinds of rich evidence needed by global law enforcement actors aiming to disrupt the industrial scale financial crimes emanating from Myawaddy’s compounds.
Regionally based international law enforcement agencies from Western countries, for their part, seem either ignorant of or ambivalent to the potential treasure trove of information poised to pour across the Thai-Myanmar border. Conversely, Chinese law enforcement authorities appear deeply aware of the stakes. In parallel with the formal processes for repatriation, China has already funded the black bag deportation of over 1,000 of its nationals back to the mainland. If precedent holds, no victim screening will be conducted for these individuals and little to no information about them will be shared with the broader international community.
In sum, as the release/repatriation dynamics unfold, a significant vacuum of support (and thereby influence) is being revealed. Thailand will not be able to foot the bill for this massive, unprecedented flow of victims of trafficking. The response from its traditional Western partners appears likely to be concentrated to a small handful of NGOs – many of whom now face dire funding constraints in light of the U.S. foreign assistance freeze.
Given the strategic importance of this issue to Thailand, this is a vacuum that will be filled and China appears very ready to do so. Yet, providing the funding and technical support to handle this flow of victims will not come without strings from Beijing.
While in many ways geopolitically conflicted and, from a human rights perspective, problematic, Thailand remains reasonably aligned with a rules-based international order. This is evident in its military neutrality, U.N./ASEAN voting habits on issues of geopolitical importance in the region, and posture (at least until yesterday) towards myriad Chinese state-affiliated rights abuses.
These neutral stances seem less likely to hold the more Thailand needs to depend on China to pursue its own aims. This week’s caving by the Thai government to Chinese demands to deport 48 Uyghurs is early evidence of the coming shift. More broadly, the encroachment of China’s Global Security Initiative model of regional security is already apparent in Thailand’s response to the scam compounds that have sprung up along its borders with Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Barring a significant course correction, this trend is likely to accelerate.
For these reasons amongst others, the frustrating and problematic responses emerging from this potential moment of hope suggest more questions than answers as the world struggles to grapple with this potent and rapidly growing criminal and political phenomenon.
Chief among them, will the BGF/DKBA’s strategic maneuver be sufficient to help its leaders avoid formal censure in Thailand while simultaneously carrying on their criminal-abusive enterprises? Will the chaos from this moment be sufficient to catalyze a more robust and sustained Thai government response? Will the U.S. and its allies awaken to the significant national security threats posed by this crime and the ways in which its geopolitical adversaries are leveraging it to their advantage? Perhaps most importantly from a human perspective, what further leverage might be wielded on behalf of, not merely the few hundred confirmed rescues to-date, but the hundreds of thousands more across the region?
While the world awaits answers to these questions and others, this situation poses another bleak strategic dilemma: how, given the dire constraints faced in Myawaddy, might progress be made in the even more confounding cases where this malign industry has taken root across the region?
Make no mistake: While the Myanmar scamdemic commands the lion share of international attention and available resources, the situation in Cambodia is far more intractable. While the DKBA and their ilk can duck and weave, the contingent relationships of a militia group will always be easier to counter and apply pressure to than those of an established sovereign state. While to Thailand’s west, it is forced to deal with a failed state and a power vacuum filled by criminal militias, to its east, it faces a far more sinister and capable criminal adversary (or, in diplomatic parlance, “partner”). In short, all the evidence suggests that Cambodia’s single most lucrative industry (and the state-party’s core patrimonial resource) is a trafficking-cybercrime ring protected by a sovereign shield. The costs of applying unilateral pressure in such a case are just much higher and less likely to yield meaningful results.
The events of this week offer an instructive contrast. When Thailand cut off telecoms access to Myawaddy and waved the mere potential of arrest warrants, the BGF/DKBA immediately launched a “blitz raid,” claiming to rescue 10,000 trafficked foreign nationals, and then led a circus of international media to show off their good work to the world. When Thailand cut off cross-border telecoms access to the town of Poipet, a known scamming hub in western Cambodia, it got a worn out statement of protest from the Cambodian government and ardent state-backed attestations (against all evidence to the contrary) that nothing illegal was happening in all those casinos with bars over the windows.
And tellingly, Cambodia’s response didn’t stop with claims of self-victimhood and denial. The government took immediate retaliatory action to protect its top domestic industry. Within days, Starlink executives were in Phnom Penh and state-run propaganda news outlets were trumpeting (notably without any verification from Starlink) that Cambodia was to be a new “priority country” in the region, thereby signaling a decreasing reliance on Thai telecoms services. Starlink has long been banned in Cambodia as the regime has tried to tamp down alternate communications access for dissident groups. With credible opposition now crushed, the incentives have changed for the regime. Establishing reliable connectivity for borderland cybercrime is suddenly a national security priority for the criminal Kingdom.
The point here is simply that a similar level of pressure which has caused the BGF and DKBA to contort in recent weeks has been applied to Cambodia for nearly three years. The only result, per one of my colleagues at The Diplomat, is a “perpetual cycle of denial, obfuscation, and repression.” In other words, the sovereign backing Cambodia’s scam industry enjoys affords it an exceptional ability to adapt to pressure where it has arisen. This is absolutely not to say international pressure cannot disrupt the Cambodian scam economy, but it will take a degree of sophistication, determination, and multilateral coordination which has, as yet, not been forthcoming.
To a world which now reels from the downstream impacts of this criminal epidemic, it matters little whether the host is a criminally dependent militia group or a more durable (but equally criminalized) state-party. Forced transnational cybercrime is a proven, highly lucrative business model, and it is here to stay. That status quo isn’t going to shift until governments around the world begin to recognize that combating it is core to their individual and collective national interests.