KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Under pressure from China, Thailand has begun its most significant crackdown to date on the transnational crime groups that dominate the Myanmar-Thailand border region.
USIP’s Jason Tower explains what prompted the crackdown, how it will impact global efforts to curb transnational crime, what it says about China’s growing influence in the region, and how this all affects U.S. security interests.
The Thai crackdown includes cutting off electricity, internet, and shipments of oil and gas from Thailand into Myanmar, as well as military deployments to curb illegal border crossings that benefit crime groups.
And for the first time, Thai law enforcement has signaled that it may target Myanmar armed groups that have transformed the country’s western border into a hub for criminal activity. Those organizations include the Myanmar military’s Border Guard Force (BGF) and a criminal militia aligned with the military known as the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA).
In February, the Department of Special Investigation of the Royal Thai Police sought an arrest warrant for three BGF leaders including Chit Thu, who is personally responsible for bringing some of the region’s most notorious criminal figures to the Myanmar-Thailand border since 2016. Chit Thu now has deep business ties with Chinese gangs that run thousands of industrial-scale scam operations in BGF territory under his command. He also has significant influence across the region, which he is leveraging to avoid arrest.
Meanwhile, China has demanded that Thailand and Myanmar’s military regime give senior Chinese police officials access to the scam compounds in the border zone. In a sign of China’s growing police influence, China’s assistant minister of public security has become the first official of a third country allowed to cross the border between Thailand’s Mae Sot and Myanmar’s Myawaddy since Myanmar’s 2021 coup.
Thousands of people from almost 30 countries have been extracted from the scam centers with some handed over to Thai officials for likely repatriation. Most Chinese are transferred to Chinese police and loaded onto charter flights to the PRC.
This is, of course, not the first attempt at a crackdown in the area. In 2023 and again in 2024 Thailand said it had cut internet and phone connections to curb criminal activity. Both times crime groups managed to establish new connections from Thailand and arranged additional connectivity from Myanmar telecoms. Thai pressure on Chit Thu in 2024 led to a public pledge to eradicate the scam centers. That turned out to be just a publicity stunt.
Despite the current crackdown, online scamming continues inside the compounds. In one of the largest and most notorious scam cities, the Shwe Kokko Yatai New City, criminal syndicates have broadened online recruitment. Signaling a continued pivot away from China, they are particularly eager to find individuals with English proficiency to try to lure Americans and Indians. Online chat platforms from Yatai and elsewhere that facilitate illicit financial flows also remain active.
The situation remains uncertain for tens of thousands of victims trafficked into scam compounds and subjected to torture and abuse. Some, aware of the current crackdown, have tried to escape, which in at least one case resulted in a death. Others, mostly unwilling or poorly performing scammers, have been handed over to the BGF or the DKBA. Both organizations present themselves as part of the solution rather than the cause of the criminality that has overrun the Thailand-Myanmar border. The objective is clearly dissuading Thailand from issuing arrest warrants, its primary source of leverage. Meanwhile, Thailand is also struggling to facilitate the process of accepting and returning these individuals, with many countries lacking resources needed to support repatriation.
In late December, China initiated a massive public campaign to show how effective Chinese police were in attacking online scams and fraud. The effort was framed around the public trial of four Myanmar Border Guard Force leaders who previously controlled the Kokang territory on China’s border, which through 2023 harbored a large number of scam syndicates. On the day that Chinese prosecutors brought charges against the four, China’s CCTV ran a documentary highlighting how China’s police had “completely annihilated” the scam centers on the border and brought to justice individuals responsible for scamming Chinese nationals out of $1.43 billion dollars in more than 100 cities.
Days later, a tidal wave of social media posts and other reports discussed how a Chinese actor named Wang Xing was trafficked into the scam centers in Myawaddy through Thailand. The eruption made clear that counter to official narratives, the Chinese police had failed to keep the Chinese public safe. The trafficking of Wang Xing and at least four other Chinese film professionals underscored the growing sophistication of schemes to traffic victims to work in the scam centers. Criminal elements who infiltrated a professional network had led Wang Xing to believe he was going to Thailand for an acting opportunity. The traffickers didn’t realize that Wang Xing had connections to some of China’s most influential film stars. Within days of his disappearance, millions of Chinese took to social and mainstream media to demand that the government secure his release.
Thai authorities managed to swiftly rescue Wang Xing, but his kidnapping had triggered unprecedented collective action in China. More than 1,500 people organized online to demand assistance in rescuing relatives who had recently gone missing in Myanmar, even calling for funds to be raised to hire mercenaries to infiltrate the scam centers and return their loved ones. Normally the Chinese state does not permit such collective action, but in this case it got front page coverage in state media. Chinese censors further permitted wild narratives about safety issues in Thailand to circulate on social media, spurring mass cancellations of trips to the country by Chinese tourists.
Thai authorities immediately asked the Chinese government to reassure its citizens of Thailand’s safety. This gave the PRC significant leverage over Thailand. For the past several years, Chinese police have sought an on-ground security presence in Thailand, which Thai authorities have been reluctant to grant. With serious economic interests at stake for Thailand, China renewed its demands — this time for a Joint Law Enforcement Center in Thailand and for Chinese police officials to “lead” the crackdown on the scam syndicates on the Myanmar-Thailand border through cooperation with Myanmar.
USIP managed to get access to a database of Chinese missing in Myanmar and conducted a careful analysis of the data. Of 1,943 cases, 76 percent of those missing disappeared not in Thailand but in China’s border provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi. Yet these provinces have not suffered the reputational damage that Thailand did, demonstrating how China distracted the public from the dangerous situation along its own border.
Of course, Thailand’s failure to respond to the growing crisis on its periphery left it vulnerable to PRC pressure. China has good reason to seek security access into Myanmar through Thailand: Of more than 120,000 individuals under criminal syndicate control on that border, the majority are Chinese nationals deployed to scam Chinese.
International efforts to disrupt the online scam syndicates remain in their infancy. Most countries are just becoming aware of the scale of losses associated with these new forms of scams and their national security implications; others focus primarily on warning the public about scams or trying to take initial steps to address the human trafficking behind them. At the regional level, multilateral bodies have begun pushing for stronger measures to disrupt the syndicates but face serious resistance. This stems particularly from countries where the criminal actors are deeply embedded and criminal profits constitute a major part of the economy such as Myanmar and Cambodia.
Most countries are just becoming aware of the scale of losses associated with these new forms of scams and their national security implications.
While the current crackdown has captured international attention, there is no sign it will eradicate the criminal groups from the Myanmar-Thailand border or do more than scatter these elements elsewhere. Throughout 2024, scam syndicates built new hubs in Northern Shan state in locations such as Tangyan and Wanhai, and they have never been uprooted from large swaths of the territory controlled by the United Wa State Army (UWSA) on the China and Thailand borders. The syndicates have also expanded to the far south of Myawaddy in Three Pagodas Pass and Htee Knee and are now also present in Yangon and Mandalay.
As many as 200,000 individuals are under syndicate control across Myanmar. The reality is that enforcement efforts, including attempts to liberate people held involuntarily at scam centers, are blunted by reliance on the perpetrators — the Myanmar Army’s BGF and its ally the DKBA. During a brief visit into Myawaddy this month, China’s assistant minister of public security, Liu Zhongyi, had to depend on the BGF for his security, and China and Thailand are cooperating with the BGF and the DKBA to advance repatriation of their citizens. In turn, the BGF and DKBA have lucrative — and apparently secure — partnerships with well over 40 scam compound owners.
Unfortunately, China’s deep involvement in attempted suppression of the scam centers is likely to accelerate another trend — the shift away from targeting the PRC with scams and aiming instead at the rest of the world. With each Chinese push to crack down overseas, the syndicates pivot further away from activities in China to avoid detection. It is increasingly less costly, and more profitable to scam individuals from other countries.
The primary concern is that PRC police will gain a more permanent position in Thailand, possibly modeled on the “Joint Law Enforcement Coordination Office” China established in Cambodia. Given China’s close ties to Myanmar’s military regime and the dependence of anti-junta forces on a porous Thai border, the PRC might use its growing security influence to foster a joint crackdown on the Myanmar resistance. China has already indicated publicly its designs on the Mekong region more broadly in a white paper on its Global Security Initiative, in which the Mekong is cited as a “pilot zone.”
Recent events in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, where China has established a significant security presence over the past decade, also shed light on where these developments may be headed. In the GTSEZ since 2007, criminal actors built massive infrastructure to support money laundering operations and later for online gambling and scam syndicates. In 2024, China became more active in pushing crackdowns in Laos, leading to a weakening of the influence of the transnational criminal actors in the zone, and a rising presence of Chinese state actors.
At the end of 2024, major Chinese state-owned enterprises entered the zone, signing deals for huge tracts of land for new industrial cattle and agriculture projects. In the case of the Laos GTSEZ, Chinese business and security officials conspired with crime groups to consolidate the emergence of a large Special Economic Zone that has dramatically widened Chinese economic and security influence along the Mekong River. A similar pattern could play out in Myawaddy, particularly if the growing Chinese security presence there opens space for Chinese state business to take control of the vast infrastructure and land built up by the criminal groups over the past nine years.
The scam syndicates now present a direct threat to U.S. national security, stealing billions of dollars from people across America. California, New York, Texas and Florida are some of the hardest hit states in the United States. With tens of thousands of people filing complaints with the FBI, U.S. law enforcement is overwhelmed by these scams, and the harm is likely to increase as the PRC creates incentives for the syndicates to target Americans. The parallels to the fentanyl crisis are striking. China is creating incentives for criminal groups to target the U.S., and has massive amounts of intelligence from countless devices confiscated in crackdowns on its border and now in Myawaddy. These devices contain information U.S. law enforcement needs to bring the perpetrators to justice and to prevent future losses. The PRC does not share this information.
The harm is likely to increase as the PRC creates incentives for the syndicates to target Americans. The parallels to the fentanyl crisis are striking.
Finally, the Chinese police are increasingly active overseas. Their presence is most pronounced for now in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Eventually, however, they will leverage the presence of Chinese crime groups even in the Western Hemisphere to build overseas security influence. Already we are seeing disturbing signs that Chinese scam syndicates are moving into places like Mexico, and that China–linked transnational criminals involved in scam groups and related money laundering are now operating even on U.S. soil.