Willing participants: The young people of Myanmar joining scam syndicates by choice

Maung Myo, a manager at a small business, said he has grown used to hearing the same depressing news every time he returns to his home in Inntakaw, Bago Region, to visit his family.The news is nearly always what he expects: that young people in Inntakaw are heading to border areas to work for online scam operations. The amounts they send home each month are three to eight times the amount of his own monthly salary of 600,000 kyat (US $150).Wanting to better support his family, including parents whose health problems were increasing with age, Maung Myo asked for help from cousins connected to the industry before heading to Myawaddy Township, Karen (Kayin) State, a notorious hub for these operations on the Thailand-Myanmar border.While international job seekers are often lured to these globally notorious scam centres before being tortured or forced into defrauding victims, Myanmar nationals like Maung Myo said they were rarely or never subjected to such abuse in the workplace and were permitted to return home if they chose. “We Myanmar youths are entering the Kyar Phyant industry of our own accord,” he said.Even knowing that the work would involve criminal fraud, Maung Myo was initially confident that it would not be disrupted by arrests or raids, knowing that the junta-aligned Karen Border Guard Force (BGF) was protecting and providing security for the operations.He became one of the many Myanmar youths who willingly choose the online scam industry due to the scarcity of domestic jobs, the desire to avoid conscription into the military, and the allure of a high income.Taking criminal workAmong the five young people Myanmar Now interviewed in the Kyar Phyant industry, all said the promise of high earnings was part of what induced them to seek jobs in the criminal enterprises. The incomes, usually totalling millions of kyat (hundreds of dollars) per month, were a strong enough incentive to convince even parents that their university-bound or recently graduated children should seek these jobs.At 18, young Inntakaw resident Maung Linn already has two years’ experience in the scam industry.“When I started, I didn’t even know it was Kyar Phyant. I just saw people from my neighbourhood sending back lots of money, so I made the connection and went,” he said.“All it takes is seeing the money, and I stop caring about the fraud,” he added. “My mother is satisfied because I send money back and I’m not being tortured.”Inntakaw, a town of around 25,000 only 28 miles from Myanmar’s commercial capital, Yangon, is a heavily military settlement home to at least ten battalion bases. According to Maung Linn, even soldiers’ and other military personnel’s family members are working in the Myawaddy scam centres.In the past, Inntakaw residents commonly worked in restaurants or various kinds of trade, with many of the young working in garment factories. However, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain a family on the incomes most people can attain in those sectors. Even though they all know the online scam industry is a business that ruins lives and drains the assets of victims, Maung Linn said, people allow themselves to be drawn into the illegal industry, compelled by the prospective income.In Maung Linn and Maung Myo’s village in Inntakaw, it has become a truism that there’s a person from each household who has gone to work in the scam centres on the Thai border.When he started working in Shwe Kokko, Maung Myo says he was assigned to target elderly people in the U.S. As a newcomer, he earned a base salary between 15,000 and 30,000 Thai baht (US $480 to $960) with the chance to earn bonuses based on “hits”—that is, when he succeeded in defrauding a target into sending funds. Employees work eight-hour shifts synchronised to the daytime hours of their target country, with housing and meals provided. There are strict rules regarding mealtimes, smoking breaks, and restroom use, and violations result in fines, Maung Myo said.He also noted that the scam operations made use of AI technology. According to Maung Myo, what the Chinese scam bosses fear most are phone cameras. Employees must surrender their mobile phones during work hours, and closed-circuit television cameras are installed everywhere to ensure compliance.Foreign workers are often ensnared in the operations—which started out as casinos—by gambling debts or other desperate financial circumstances. Others are drawn to the fraud compounds as trafficked labour, lured by job advertisements or promises of lucrative salaries before being trapped there and forced to work for the fraud syndicates. Myanmar nationals who fail to meet their assigned quotas are fined, according to first-hand accounts from Maung Myo and two others, while foreigners including Chinese nationals suffer harsher, physical punishments: sometimes being forced to carry 20-litre water jugs or being confined in small cells and beaten or burned with scalding water. The Myanmar workers said they tried to administer first aid to the victims of these forms of torture when they could. According to Maung Myo, they sometimes stopped seeing some of the victims altogether, and rumours arose that they had been killed. The fraud perpetrated by the syndicates takes various forms: netting victims on social media, using romance or “sweetheart” scams to solicit money, or offering incentives to invest in fake companies.Scam bosses provide the phone numbers of potential victims. The first stage of Maung Myo’s job was always to establish contact and build trust before persuading his targets to transfer funds for an “investment.” Once the victim was hooked, the Chinese bosses took over to carry out the remaining stages, he said.Maung Myo recounted how a woman in her 20s from a village in Kawkareik Township, west of Myawaddy Township in Karen State, was able to defraud an elderly American retiree out of one million dollars by feigning a romantic relationship. The syndicate managed the technical side of the deception, Maung Myo said, while her role was simply to use her appearance and charm to lure him in.“Since she succeeded in the romance scam, she earned hundreds of millions of kyat in percentages,” he said with a wry smile. “In Kyar Phyant, women are often a step ahead of the men.” On January 30, 2024, Chinese police took custody of key online scam suspects and wanted fugitives at Naypyitaw Airport, including Bai Suocheng, chair of the Kokang Self-Administered Zone and a former Shan State member of parliament for the military's proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party (Photo: Xinhua) The lure of an illegal industryThe online scam industry, based primarily in Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, and Myanmar, has flourished since 2020. In Myawaddy, the Karen Border Guard Force (Karen BGF) controls Shwe Kokko—home to thousands of scam operations—and generates nearly US $200 million each year, according to from researchers at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), which also estimated in an April report this year said that the Myanmar military receives around 50 percent of the proceeds. After the capture of towns like Laukkai in 2023 and 2024 by anti-junta ethnic armed organisations forced scammers to flee the China-Myanmar border, scammers who relocated to Myawaddy were reportedly a factor in causing the fraud operations in Myawaddy to expand and grow even stronger. The massive labour force required for these sprawling fraud operations is easily sourced from surrounding areas. A report issued last month by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs underscored the mounting, overlapping crises facing Myanmar’s civilian populace, from ongoing civil war to flooding and the slow, inadequate recovery from a catastrophic earthquake last March. Amid these hardships—added to the earlier collapses of safety in everyday life caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and 2021 military coup—there has been no shortage of people seeking any available opportunity for an income. Job announcements for the scam centres appear frequently in Telegram groups, tagging locations in the familiar vicinity of Myawaddy, Shwe Kokko, and Me Htaw Tha Lay. 150 such postings appeared consecutively on one Telegram channel during 10 minutes of casual observation. A woman in her 20s, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, told Myanmar Now that she and her husband arrived in Shwe Kokko to take jobs as hotel staff with salaries of 900,000 kyat. “Ma Nge” and her husband were seeking new ways to make a living after their squat in Hlegu Township, Yangon, was demolished.Ma Nge became a fulltime cleaner for a scam syndicate, while her husband worked as a security guard. Their combined income ultimately rose to over two million kyat (US $500) per month. When asked if they had witnessed the torture of Chinese or other foreign nationals, they said they had but did not provide further details. US-based companies began severing the satellite internet connections that were enabling the Myawaddy scam operations in October, as reported in the international press. Myanmar junta authorities then hurriedly moved to perform their own publicised crackdown, destroying devices and buildings used in the expanding criminal industry. Ma Nge and her husband were left jobless again, she said. Regime-run newspapers reported on December 18 that 466 of just over 600 buildings in the town-sized KK Park complex in Myawaddy Township had been demolished. Images and clips circulated showing road rollers, purportedly in Shwe Kokko, being used to crush the computers that had been used for scamming.However, local news reports suggested that during this period, online scam operations have been relocating to other areas of the country where they can still enjoy the effective protection of local armed groups or other authorities. Many young people were hopeful that the industry would reemerge in new places and that job opportunities would open up again. Back in Inntakaw, Maung Myo was among the young people hoping for that outcome. Those who have come to rely on the online scam industry would likely not fare as well in the big cities, where the competition for such lucrative jobs is heavy. “They only came back because the situation got bad. If the jobs reopen, everyone will go back,” Maung Myo said. “And that includes me.” A view of Shwe Kokko in Karen (Kayin) State’s Myawaddy Township, which for years served as a sanctuary for online scam syndicates (Photo: Myanmar Now)

Willing participants: The young people of Myanmar joining scam syndicates by choice

A career in the criminal industry of online fraud—known locally as “Kyar Phyant”—has become an alluring option for many of Myanmar’s young people, who say they were not coerced into it but voluntarily sought it out for the potential income

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