Thousands of Chinese lured abroad and forced to be scammers – now Beijing is cracking down
“Should I feel anything?” asks the beady-eyed man, sitting in a padded cell with handcuffs around his wrists.
He’s being grilled by Chinese investigators about the time he allegedly ordered a stranger to be killed – a human offering to celebrate his sworn brotherhood with a business partner.
“Wasn’t he a living, breathing person?” an investigator asks.
“I didn’t feel much,” the man maintains.
The scene may sound like it came straight out of a crime drama. In fact, it is part of a documentary on Chinese state media – a look inside the workings of the justice system almost unheard of in a country where court proceedings are largely kept out the public eye.
The handcuffed man answering questions is Chen Dawei, a member of the infamous Wei family, one of several powerful mafia groups that for years operated with impunity in Myanmar’s border town of Laukkaing.
His confession forms just one part of a months-long propaganda push by Chinese officials. It both warns Chinese people of South East Asia’s billion-dollar scam industry, and highlights the Chinese government’s crackdown on the men behind an industry which has trapped thousands, and stolen billions.
The message China wants to send, as one investigator puts it, is clear: “It’s to warn other people, no matter who you are, where you are, as long as you commit such heinous crimes against Chinese people, you will pay the price.”
Or, to use a Chinese idiom: kill the chicken to scare the monkey.
Paying the price
There are few chickens bigger than the Weis, Lius, Mings and Bais – Godfather-esque families who rose to power in Laukkaing in the early 2000s.
Under their rule, the impoverished backwater was transformed into a flashy hub of casinos and red-light districts.
More recent are the scam farms – which hold people against their will, forcing them to defraud strangers online, or face brutal punishment or even death. Many of those trapped were Chinese and targeted people in China.
But the families’ empires came crashing down in 2023, when Myanmar authorities arrested them and handed them to China. Since then, Chinese courts have tried them for crimes ranging from fraud to human trafficking to homicide.
Chen Dawei, from the Wei family mafia, confesses to his crimes on national television [CCTV]
Examples are now being made out of the families: 11 members of the Ming clan and five of the Bais have been sentenced to death, while dozens have been given lengthy jail terms. Prosecution is under way for the Lius and the Weis.
Their ignominious falls from grace are clear in the documentaries they feature in, from the glint of their handcuffs to the colour of their prison uniforms.
It is a far cry from the lives they were living just two years ago.
The rise of Myanmar’s scam clans
The godfathers of Laukkaing rose to power after Min Aung Hlaing, who now heads Myanmar’s military government, led an operation to oust the town’s then-dominant warlord.
The military leader had been looking for co-operative allies, and Bai Suocheng – then a deputy of the warlord – fitted the bill.
Bai was appointed the chairman of Laukkaing district and his family came to command a 2,000-strong militia, Chinese media reported.
In the power vacuum left by these changes, a handful of families swooped in, securing military and political power.
According to Chinese investigators, the Wei family had one member of parliament and another military camp commander. Meanwhile, the Lius controlled key infrastructure like water and electricity and exerted strong influence over local security forces.
Bai Suocheng became the chairman of the Laukkaing district in 2010 [CCTV]
For years they made their money through gambling and prostitution.
But more recently they expanded to cyberscam operations, with each family controlling dozens of scam compounds and casinos that raked in billions of dollars.
While the families lived large with grand banquets and luxury cars, a culture of abominable violence thrived behind the walls of their scam compounds, Chinese authorities said.
Testimonies collected from freed workers point to a common pattern of abuse: fingers chopped off with knives, zaps of electric batons and regular beatings. Unco-operative workers were locked in small dark rooms and starved or beaten until they gave in.
China’s war on the ‘scamdemic’
Many of the Chinese workers had been lured there with lucrative job offers – no doubt tempting amid China’s economic slowdown and high youth unemployment.
Horror stories of such scam centres have seeped into daily chatter in China, from taxi rides to social media and pop culture.
No More Bets, a 2023 blockbuster about Chinese people trafficked to a foreign scam farm, kept millions of Chinese tourists away from Thailand – which has gained a reputation for being a transit hub to scam centres in Myanmar and Cambodia.
No More Bets, a blockbuster about Chinese nationals being lured to scam centres abroad, swept box offices in 2023 [Getty Images]
In January this year, the national spotlight was on Wang Xing, a small-time Chinese actor who had flown to Thailand for an acting gig, only to be taken to a scam centre across the border in Myanmar.
His family’s search for him went viral and he was ultimately rescued.
But Wang is in the lucky minority. Many Chinese people are still looking for their loved ones who have disappeared into South East Asia’s scam centres.
“My cousin was lured there four or five years ago. We haven’t heard from him at all. My aunt is in tears every day, it’s hard to describe her current condition,” a Weibo user wrote last month.
Selina Ho, associate professor specialising in Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore, tells the BBC that “by publicising the most recent crackdown, Chinese authorities are aiming to calm domestic sentiments and reassure the families of victims”.
In January Chinese actor Wang Xing had flown to Thailand for what he had thought was an acting gig, only to be taken to a scam centre in Myanmar [EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock]
The UN estimates that hundreds of thousands of people are still trapped in scam centres worldwide.
Much to Beijing’s chagrin, those running many such scam centres are often Chinese themselves.
This is common knowledge among Chinese citizens. “Once you’re abroad, the people you should least trust are your own countrymen,” reads a comment on Weibo.
“The fact that Chinese nationals are the masterminds behind many of these operations has been deeply damaging to China’s image on the international stage,” Ivan Franceschini, co-author of Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, tells the BBC.
As anxieties rise at home, Chinese authorities are eager to show their resolve in eradicating these massive scam networks.
Since 2023, Chinese and Myanmar authorities have arrested more than 57,000 Chinese nationals for their role in cyberscams, state media reported.
In the Bai family’s scam centres, like many others in South East Asia, workers are trapped and forced to defraud victims online [CCTV]
And they’ve made it clear that it’s not just the Godfathers they’re after.
In October, China announced the prosecution of another syndicate which they described as a “new generation of power” in Laukkaing that’s “no less violent” than the infamous families.
In – yet another – state media documentary, a Chinese official investigating this syndicate recalled what his team leader had told him: “If this case can’t be solved, there will be a permanent stain on your career.”
For all the effort that China is putting into its crackdown and the ensuing publicity, the numbers offer some optimism: cyberscams reported in China have declined steadily over the past year, and authorities say such crimes have been “effectively curbed”.
As one official told documentary viewers, investigating scam gangs in Myanmar has made him realise “how happy we are in China, and how important a sense of security is to Chinese people”.
Additional reporting by Kelly Ng
