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In October of 2021, La Awng travelled from his native Kachin State in Myanmar to Laukkai, the capital of the country’s autonomous Kokang region near the border with China, planning to work in a casino. Instead, he was trafficked into a cyber-scamming business run by Chinese criminal networks.

The scam industry has boomed across Southeast Asia since the COVID-19 pandemic; by the end of 2023, syndicates in the region were using online fraud schemes to rob people around the world of some $64bn annually, according to a report published in May by the United States Institute of Peace.

The think tank found that criminal networks originating in China relied on hundreds of thousands of people from more than 60 countries to run their operations, typically holding them in “prisonlike conditions” and sometimes using physical abuse and torture to keep them in line.

Myanmar, where the rule of law has collapsed since the February 2021 military coup, has emerged as a major centre for criminality.

Like thousands of other workers in Laukkai, La Awng was held captive in a high-rise building and forced to defraud people in foreign countries using a scheme known as pig butchering. Named for the way scammers “fatten up” targets before their “slaughter”, it involves striking up online romances to lure people into fake cryptocurrency investment schemes.

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