Want to break the scam centers? Follow the money

The Irrawaddy

Mae Sot International Airport is finally living up to its name. As planes from China and India have come to pick up their respective citizens who have been extracted from scam centers across the border in Myanmar and repatriate them, it’s no longer just a fancy name for a sleepy provincial airport. Not only Indians and Chinese but also thousands of English-speaking people from all over the world have been trafficked to areas controlled by ethnic Karen armies in Myanmar that, in turn, are collaborating with Chinese organized crime groups.

Thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent victims have been defrauded of their savings. Even the FBI has been to Mae Sot to look into the scams, and the outcome appears to be the formation of a Scam Center Strike Force to protect American citizens against what the U.S. attorney general describes as “Southeast Asian cryptocurrency-related fraud and scams.” The Myanmar regime has bombed several of those centers, and Thai authorities are cracking down on clandestine activities on their side of the border, arresting and deporting people involved with the scams.

However, a closer look at those scam centers and how they operate gives a far more complicated picture of what’s happening along Thailand’s traditionally volatile border with Myanmar. Detective Lester Freamon from The Wire once said: “You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you.” That could have been said when the attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 2005 indicted eight high-ranking leaders of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) for importing more than a ton of heroin into the United States. It is very likely that the heroin in question was manufactured in refineries in areas in northeastern Myanmar controlled by the Wa organization, but anyone familiar with the Golden Triangle drug trade would find it ludicrous to suggest that UWSA commander Bao Youxiang and his brothers—plus a few others also residing in the remote Wa Hills—would be able to direct and control the sale of heroin in the streets of New York.

What the UWSA did was provide internationally connected drug syndicates with protection at safe places inside its territory where the gangsters could refine raw opium into heroin, and, in return, the Wa collected fees for their services. Some Wa leaders also had investments in the laboratories, but their involvement stopped there. Yet no one at the time was willing to follow the money and ignored leads to where it was “gonna take you.”

The same overall picture can be seen in the scam centers. Shwe Kokko north of Myawaddy, the Myanmar border town opposite Mae Sot, is controlled by the Karen Border Guard Force (BGF; recently renamed Karen National Army or KNA) that operated under agreements reached with the Myanmar military. Prior to that, this force was part of the larger Karen National Liberation Army, the armed wing of Myanmar’s oldest ethnic resistance group, the Karen National Union. On May 5, 2025, the U.S. Treasury issued sanctions against its leader, Saw Chit Thu, and his two sons, citing their role in organizing scam centers, human trafficking and smuggling across the border. But, as a source close to the KNA leader told The Irrawaddy: “Saw Chit Thu wouldn’t even know how to use a computer or be aware what role cryptocurrencies play in international financial systems. And he himself has not recruited anyone to work for the scam centers.”

A barge crosses the river next to the KK Park complex in Myawaddy Township in September 2025. / AFP

Large-scale construction in Shwe Kokko began in 2017 and, when I visited in February 2019, I saw huge warehouses being built along with apartment blocks, villas, Chinese restaurants, karaoke parlors, beauty salons, casinos, golf courses, and what was going to be shopping centers. Chinese nationals were already buying condominium units in buildings that were still under construction. The workers, most of whom were Chinese, lived in temporary barrack-style buildings and were guarded by armed security guards with Chinese characters on their armbands.

It was not an entirely illegal operation. The main investor, the Yatai International Holdings Group, was registered with Myanmar’ Ministry of  Planning and Finance in February 2017 under the name Myanmar–Yatai International Trading Company. It was owned by the Chinese tycoon She Zhijiang, who partnered with the Chit Lin Myaing Company, an entity controlled by Saw Chit Thu’s Karen BGF.

The division of responsibilities was obvious. The Karen group received 30 percent of declared profits in exchange for providing the project with overall protection, which enabled its leaders to built a new Karen town next to the main investment zone, while Yatai ran operations inside Shwe Kokko New City, the Chinese-run part of the new settlement that sprung up on the western banks of the Moei border river. Building material, machinery, and food and other supplies for the workers came from the Thai side, which also benefited from the emergence of Shwe Kokko and its various sections. The reason for the Chinese involvement was obvious. Shwe Kokko New City was of strategic importance to China as it created another outpost in its envisioned China–Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), a vital part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to connect China with the rest of the region and beyond. However, in August 2020, the Chinese Embassy in Myanmar said the project is a third-country investment and has nothing to do with the BRI.

At any rate, the 2019 Covid pandemic put everything on hold. BRI came to a standstill, and, at the same time, authorities in Cambodia locked down the entire country and banned online gambling. Chinese investors and crime syndicates were forced to shut down their vast casino operations in the port city of Sihanoukville, and the way out of the quandary was to relocate to Shwe Kokko. The pandemic had also made many IT experts, mainly in Dubai and of Indian origin, unemployed and looking for work. These could now be recruited with promises of well-paid jobs, ostensibly in the Thai internet industry, before ending up on the other side of the border. There, many they were forced to work in harsh and strictly supervised conditions, or so they claimed after they had been “rescued”—while others went there of their own free will to earn money, and some even moved back and forth between the centers in eastern Myanmar and those remaining in Cambodia.

Smoke rises from KK Park in Karen State as junta forces demolish buildings in the scam hub on October 31, 2025. / Naphat Kongchan

Shwe Kokko flourished, and new scam centers mushroomed in the border areas south of Myawaddy. The much-written about KK-Park may be the best known, but it is far from the only one. While Yatai and its KNA partners are the only players in Shwe Kokko, the area to the south is far more diverse and chaotic. Chinese-run companies with names such as China Unicorn (Hong Kong), Junxin Holdings, Xiong Shijia and the Huan Ya International Holdings Group have invested millions of U.S. dollars in the southern scam centers, and it’s next to impossible to identify the actual ownership of those companies. The names they use semi-officially are probably not the real ones; the actual operators are hidden behind layer after layer of shell companies, most of which can be traced back to China, Hong Kong, Macau and jurisdictions in the South Pacific. But all of them work together with various Karen armed groups.

The centers would typically be housed in a lowrise building with a convenience store and a café on the first floor. Upstairs, there is normally an open hall with computer operators who scour social media platforms for potential victims, mostly older people who they assume are more gullible than youngsters. The operators chat with them, establish friendships, and win their confidence. After quite a while, the operators suggest an investment opportunity, usually in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If the victim swallows the bait, the case goes up to the third floor, where skilled scammers and computer specialists empty the victims’ bank accounts in a way that’s near-impossible to trace.

According to inside sources, approximately US$6-7 billion was illicitly withdrawn last year from individuals’ bank accounts by those cross-border scam centers. The stolen funds are then laundered through an extensive network of banks and other financial institutions.

Given these vast amounts of money and widespread corruption in Myanmar, it is hardly surprising that the crackdowns, bombings and arrests have had little effect: the centers have just moved inland, or down to the Three Pagodas Pass further to the south. There is simply too much money to be made for everybody, and as long as local and international law enforcement agencies don’t seriously try to follow the money—and go beyond the operations on the border and the array of spurious front companies—little headway is likely to be made.