Thailand completes transferring some 900 scam victims from Myanmar to China: PM Srettha
- The Chinese nationals were transported from Myanmar’s border town of Myawaddy to Thailand’s Mae Sot, where they were transferred to Chinese planes
- Thai deputy police chief Surachae Hakparn said the operation involved 15 flights over three days to return Chinese scam victims to China
The operation, which Thai police say started last Thursday and was completed on Saturday, involved transporting the Chinese nationals from Myanmar’s border town of Myawaddy to an airport in the Thai border district of Mae Sot, where they were transferred to Chinese planes.
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“The process was done voluntarily, based on humanitarian principles, it was not forced,” Srettha said, adding that Thailand had facilitated the transfer to the flights at Mae Sot.
Thai deputy police chief Surachae Hakparn said the operation involved 15 flights over three days to return Chinese scam victims to China.
The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Myanmar’s military spokesperson also did not respond to a call seeking comment.
Last November, Myanmar authorities handed over 31,000 telecoms fraud suspects to China in a joint crackdown against online scams in Myanmar.
China and Myanmar also helped facilitate the transfer back to Thailand of more than two hundred Thais, both victims and those involved with telecoms fraud gangs, who were trapped in fighting between Myanmar military and armed ethnic-minority groups in Laukkaing in Myanmar’s northern Shan State.
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Pig-butchering scams
The transfer of victims comes as a new study found pig-butchering scammers have likely stolen more than US$75 billion from victims around the world, far more than previously estimated.
John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and graduate student Kevin Mei, gathered crypto addresses from more than 4,000 victims of the fraud, which has exploded in popularity since the pandemic.
With blockchain tracing tools, they tracked the flow of funds from victims to scammers, who are largely based in Southeast Asia.
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Over four years, from January 2020 to February 2024, the criminal networks moved more than US$75 billion to crypto exchanges, said Griffin, who has written about fraud in financial markets. Some of the total could represent proceeds from other criminal activities, he said.
“These are large criminal organised networks, and they’re operating largely unscathed,” Griffin said in an interview.
Pig butchering – a scam named after the practice of farmers fattening hogs before slaughter – often starts with what appears to be a wrong-number text message.
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People who respond are lured into crypto investments. But the investments are fake, and once victims send enough funds, the scammers disappear.
The people sending the messages are often themselves victims of human trafficking from across Southeast Asia.
They’re lured to compounds in countries including Cambodia and Myanmar with offers of high-paying jobs, then trapped, forced to scam, and sometimes beaten and tortured.
The UN has estimated more than 200,000 people are being held in scam compounds.
