The body drifted in the shallows of the Moei River, snagged against the bank. At first, the villager who found it thought it was a large trash bag. But as he stepped closer, the shape became clear—bloated, lifeless. It was sometime in mid-April when he and others realised what they were seeing.
“We found another man just 20 days ago,” a source said, recounting a more recent, but no less grim discovery from September. “He was dead in the water, facing down. He had white skin, a soldier-style haircut, and was overweight. We saw this with our own eyes.”
The corpse had floated into a stretch of river where local villagers fish and farm. The stench quickly became unbearable. Rather than report what they had seen—the authorities rarely respond, and few trust them anyway—they used long sticks to push the body further downstream, hoping it would disappear with the current.
Just upstream, the notorious KK Park scam compound looms over the river—an infamous site long linked to torture, killings, and disappearances. The body was just the latest to surface here.
“Not long ago, a dead body was found in the river here, just before Songkran,” said another person living near KK Park 1, referring to Thailand’s traditional New Year festival in April. “The police didn’t come, or the Thai military. As far as we know, no one investigated what we saw. I think it just kept drifting on. We didn’t want to see it. We were scared.”
Although violence in the compounds has been widely reported, details about killings remain rare. Unidentified bodies are regularly spotted on the Moei River, especially near the KK Park complex 1 and 2, yet very little is known about how these victims died, a joint investigation by Myanmar Now and Prachatai has revealed.
Many believe the victims are Chinese nationals being held inside the scam centres, located in Myawaddy Township, in eastern Myanmar’s Karen (Kayin) State. In a bid to escape, some reportedly slip into the river and push toward the Thai side, setting off alarms. Armed guards give chase and drag them back before they can reach safety. As the scam cities continue to expand, the banks of the Moei have become a dumping ground for the dead.
Over several months, trafficking survivors and a former compound guard told our reporters how victims were punished and killed, and how their bodies were disposed of. We corroborated these accounts with locals who saw corpses and anti-trafficking experts who confirmed ongoing disappearances. Several sources spoke anonymously out of fear of reprisals.
Very little of what happens in Myawaddy is ever officially documented. Residents are afraid to speak, saying that the authorities either look the other way or are complicit. This lack of records reflects the climate of fear on the ground and underscores just how lawless the situation has become.
KK Park 1, a massive complex of buildings sitting right on the Moei River, is a menacing sight. Men lean from barred windows, smoking between shifts. The building are tall and heavily fortified, with razor wire curling along their walls and cameras fixed on every angle. Their roofs are peppered with Starlink satellites, and somewhere inside, a generator drones steadily.
Those who live in its shadow say they know little about what happens there, but are aware of its reputation as a dangerous and deeply undesirable place to be.
“We know it’s like a casino place, for games and stuff. We don’t know much because we can’t see or go inside,” a local Myanmar woman said, before adding: “Sometimes when people run away, we hear the loud alarm. But they can’t swim away, so they get taken back.”
Another local villager said it has become almost routine for bodies to show up in the river.
“Three months ago we found three bodies in the same spot,” he said. “I have seen with my own eyes at least 7-8 bodies over the two years that I’ve worked in Mae Sot.”
In some cases, the corpses look like they had been executed, another source told Myanmar Now, explaining that their hands were bound behind their backs or handcuffed. Sometimes multiple corpses were tethered together with rope, he said.
Jacob Sims, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, and expert on fraud centres in Southeast Asia, explained that it’s not possible to determine exactly how many killings have occurred or how they are distributed among the compounds. But he confirmed that cases are frequent enough to indicate a broader pattern—one that has become a clear part of how this industry operates in the region.
While the primary perpetrators appear to be the criminal syndicates running the compounds, accounts also point to involvement from Myanmar-based militias. The Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) and the Karen Border Guard Force (BGF) have long provided protection to scam syndicates in exchange for payments and shared profits. Their forces guard compound perimeters, facilitate cross-border movement, and shield key syndicate figures from arrest.
“The dumping of bodies into rivers seems to be a sign of lack of regard for potential repercussions,” Sims said. “The killers are basically putting evidence in the public domain. In this practice—itself widespread in both Myawaddy and throughout Cambodia—we see a sense of profound criminal comfort which can only arise from impunity.”
‘No one could escape’
Mae Sot, a Thai town perched on the border with Myanmar, is a place known for its transience and tension. It is a corridor for refugees fleeing war, migrant workers crossing for low-wage jobs, and smugglers moving everything from rubies and guns to methamphetamine.
The streets are crowded with Burmese markets, NGOs, and safe houses, giving the town a restless, layered feel: part humanitarian hub, part black-market trading post. Long known as a base for exiled dissidents and journalists, Mae Sot is both a lifeline for those escaping Myanmar’s war and a frontline in the region’s darker economies.
In interviews with sources based or previously based in Mae Sot, our reporters learned of a series of killings that have taken place in the Chinese centres, specifically KK Park, since April of this year.
Samuel*, a former security guard who worked inside one of Myawaddy’s notorious scam compounds for years, says he witnessed systematic torture, killings, and collusion between local armed groups and Chinese bosses. Hired to enforce order, he became a firsthand witness to the brutality that kept thousands trapped inside.
“Once they entered, there was no way out. If they couldn’t meet quotas or find victims to scam, they were handed over to security. Then they were beaten with metal rods and tasers,” Samuel said.
“It was like a prison where no one could escape. Most of the operations were backed by the BGF. Security guards like me weren’t treated badly, but if the higher-ups ordered us to beat someone, we had to do it,” Samuel said.
“If we refused, they couldn’t trust us—but those willing to follow orders had to carry out the torture. They made us watch the victims being brutalised.”
He also outlines that there were strict quotas for how many people had to be scammed each day. If someone failed, they were first warned, then had their salary reduced, and if that didn’t work, they were beaten. Those who couldn’t handle the job often tried to run, but they always got caught. Runaways, he said, were thrown into small, dark rooms with no food or water; only those who agreed to keep working were given anything to eat or drink.
After they were released, many tried to escape again, but they were always apprehended and brought back, or simply killed on the spot, according to Samuel.
“The bosses brought the dead bodies and displayed them in front of the buildings as a lesson,” he said. “Everyone was forced to watch. ‘This is what happens if you run,’ they would say to the group of onlookers. Sometimes the bodies were put in coffins and buried, but more often, they were just thrown into the river.”
Another source with direct knowledge of the killings, speaking anonymously out of fear of reprisals, described several brutal incidents. In one case, a young man trapped in a Myawaddy scam compound called his mother in distress. The next day, his body was found on the Thai side of the Moei River. It was later reportedly retrieved by Chinese nationals who warned her not to involve authorities and to cremate him immediately.
“Even if we can prove just one case, it could expose a much larger operation,” said the source, who has been involved in efforts to investigate the killings.
But proving who is behind these murders has been extremely difficult, given the lack of forensic evidence and the fleeting nature of much of the witness testimony. Neither law enforcement nor anti-trafficking groups have had much luck in bringing the culprits to justice.
According to Judah Tana, the project director of Global Advance Projects, a frontline anti-trafficking group, the abuses inflicted on captive workers to deter them from attempting to escape have grown increasingly extreme.
“It just grew over time. It became more sadistic, it became more humiliating. And it was filmed in order to be shared, with these mob bosses saying, ‘This is what I’ve done,’” Tana said. “And then that moved into murders, of course, where they filmed them, you know, literally boiling someone for about seven minutes in a shower until they died.”
Tana explained that while killings inside the compounds are not an everyday occurrence, they happen often enough to create a constant sense of fear. Even if the murders are not frequent, he emphasised that their regularity is enough to leave a lingering threat hanging over everyone inside.
“If you’re a team of 13 people and your target is to make $400,000 or something amongst your group, you just take one of those persons out, you murder them, and then you turn back to them and say: ‘You’re next if you don’t work.’”
Myanmar’s ‘Sin City’
The KK Park areas and Shwe Kokko, the town in Myawaddy Township created by the Karen BGF, have become infamous for human trafficking, forced labour, and online financial scams. The Karen BGF and DKBA leaders have long been suspected of providing protection for these operations.
In January, as the situation along the border began to attract an uncomfortable amount of international attention, the BGF and other ethnic armed groups held an emergency meeting with Chinese nationals doing business in their territory, seeking assurances that they were not involved in running scam centres or engaging in human trafficking. Months later, they launched sweeping raids on scam compounds across Myawaddy, including the notorious Shwe Kokko and KK Park complexes.
But a resurgence of trafficking victims brought to Myawaddy and the expansion of construction linked to the gangs contradicts the BGF and the DKBA’s claims that they are trying to curb the crimes and abuses. Experts say there is no reason to believe that they are genuinely concerned at all about the criminal activity or human rights violations taking place inside the compounds.
When the crackdown was all over, some 5,000 to 6,000 people were released and allowed to return to their home countries. Hundreds of Chinese nationals accused of various crimes were arrested. But the crisis continues, experts say, with hundreds of thousands of people still enslaved across Southeast Asia, including at least 100,000 along the Thai-Myanmar border.
Our reporters were able to track down another compound built just this year. Located in Hpar Law Do, a village in Myawaddy Township, the site was heavily protected by armed troops in uniforms bearing the DKBA’s insignia. Locals said they had seen large numbers of young people, some as young as 13, at the complex.
Despite the crackdown, new compounds continue to quietly surface across the Myawaddy area. But it’s the KK Park zones, experts warn, that remain the most alarming: sites where some of the worst abuses are believed to persist.
“You’ve got the largest scam centre in the world right on this borderline, which started as KK Park and expanded until they got KK 1, 2, 3 and 4. Now we have KK 5 and KK 6,” Amy Miller, regional director of the anti-trafficking group Acts of Mercy, said.
“They come from such a draconian environment that lacks all humanity,” Miller added. “That’s what they [survivors] all say. They say they [Chinese syndicates] have no humanity. I hear it over and over again, just the way that they’ve been treated.”
Miller explained that traffickers don’t often intend to kill the people inside the compounds, since victims are viewed as sources of profit. Instead, intimidation and brutality are used to maintain control, and many of the deaths that occur are the result of severe beatings or torture rather than deliberate executions.
Yet she noted that while routine killings would undermine the business model, murders do still take place. Suicide is another tragic reality, particularly in Cambodia’s large Chinese-run compounds, where victims have been known to leap from buildings or hang themselves. Her team often receives suicide threats from those trapped inside and has encountered actual attempts, she said.
“There is so much psychological as well as physical torture,” she explained, adding that abuse is inflicted both as punishment and to motivate victims to work harder. “And then there’s just a sadistic element to it, in these lawless places where they can do whatever they want.”
Impunity and corruption
Associate Professor Tossapon Tassanapan and Lecturer Passakorn Yeenang from Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Law said jurisdiction gaps let many killings tied to scam compounds go unpunished.
“If the killing happens entirely in Myanmar, a corpse drifting across the Moei River is only evidence, not grounds for Thai prosecution,” Passakorn said. Thai law applies only if a Thai citizen is involved.
Tossapon noted the murders could qualify as crimes against humanity or transnational offences allowing universal jurisdiction—but only with UN documentation, which doesn’t exist yet. Thai Criminal Code Section 7 and the Anti-Trafficking Act could also apply in trafficking cases.
“When big cases emerge or the state is accused of negligence, the government must prove it isn’t complicit,” he added, noting Myanmar’s weak territorial control hampers investigations.
Both experts said corruption is the core barrier. “Transnational crime survives by tying itself to power,” Tossapon said. “Blacklist networks, screen travellers, and strictly monitor crossings to stop the bodies from washing ashore.”
KK Park 1 has been identified as a key site of violence over the past two years. Run by Chinese crime-linked investors, it operates with BGF and DKBA protection as a major scam hub.
And to the north, Shwe Kokko stands defiantly as a full-scale city. Many of the same allegations of fraud and violence have been reported here. Yatai International, the company behind its development, was founded by She Zhijiang, a Chinese businessman and former fugitive who was arrested by Thai authorities in 2022 and is currently being held in Bangkok’s Klong Prem Central Prison.
Saw Chit Thu, the leader of the Karen BGF, is also regarded as a key player. Accused of working with junta-linked groups and Chinese crime networks, he is said to be driven entirely by personal greed rather than by any desire to strengthen the armed group under his command.
The DKBA also profits from the scam trade by providing land and protection, expanding its role in Chinese operations with more troops and strict border controls.
Each body and survivor’s account reveals the larger system of violence. Thai military officials declined to comment, calling it a “national security” issue, and Mae Sot police also gave no response, despite agreeing to an interview that never took place.
Kannavee Suebsang, a Thai MP from the country’s Fair Party, acknowledged that torture and killings continue inside Myanmar’s scam compounds despite repeated crackdowns. Kannavee, who has coordinated rescues and gathered field evidence, said criminal networks have re-established operations at Shwe Kokko and KK Park, while new hubs are emerging at Payathonzu (Three Pagodas Pass) in southern Karen State.
“Everything has returned… perhaps even bigger,” he said from the Thai capital, citing the rescue of 16 Thai nationals on October 5, and a rise in Thai victims being trafficked through deception.
“When people don’t perform, they’re physically abused. We see five to ten new cases a day,” he said, showing reporters videos of assaults. In one DKBA-controlled compound, where 262 victims were rescued in February 2025, about 80 percent bore visible injuries.
“There are certainly fatalities under such conditions,” he said.
Kannavee urged Thailand to cooperate with international agencies such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Organization for Migration, and Interpol to strengthen cross-border investigations and improve victim protection. He also called for the proactive use of the National Screening Mechanism to identify trafficked persons and gather intelligence from survivors.
“The Thai government must make this issue a national priority,” he added. “Thailand has become both a transit point and a source in the regional scam and torture network. We must cut every link that allows these crimes to continue.”
Back in Mae Sot, Samuel searches for steadier, more honest work. The faces of those tortured, and those killed, still follow him, reminders of why he could not stay in that world. Yet it was desperation that led him there, and desperation will keep pulling others into the same traps unless something changes. Telling his story, he hopes, might help him reckon with the pain he’s witnessed. And the role he played in it.
“After working that long, I no longer felt right about the kind of work we were forced to do,” he said. “From the outside, people only saw the casino. But behind it, there was only darkness. A horrible place to work. So I left.”
