Caught in a $60b scam, these workers tried to flee but the soldiers were waiting

They were told their government wasn’t coming for them, and this was true. Months had passed since they had been hauled from the scam compounds of Myanmar’s lawless borderlands and put here, a holding camp, of sorts; a place to wait under the watch of militiamen until their names appeared on a list designating those who were soon to be free.

Other nations had muscled their citizens onto that list. Embassy officials from dozens of countries had swarmed to the border bearing plane tickets and paperwork. But not for them.

On their own, the 270 trafficked Ethiopians decided to escape. Exclusive video obtained by this masthead documents part of their confrontation with armed soldiers that day, just short of the Moei River border with Thailand. The guns won.

The scamlands were roiling at the time. Under way since early February was the first significant crackdown on eastern Myanmar’s scam mega-factories, sprawling faux cities of colourful, almost romantic sounding names: Shwekokko, Taichang, KK Park.

Asian crime games run them. Self-enriching warlords abet them. Impoverished migrants, tricked or tempted into enslavement, staff them under threat and fulfilment of torture.

The common scamming method is known as “pig butchering”. That is, fattening up an online target with small wins, confidence or love, then slaughtering them for the lot.

The Asian mafia makes eye-watering cash this way – more than $60 billion a year, by some estimates, in schemes emanating from South-East Asia alone, where the major hotspots are Myanmar and Cambodia.

The fraud can be incredibly elaborate, fooling everyone from lonely pensioners to bank chief executives.

But one of the syndicates went too far. Waves of bad online PR when little-known Chinese actor Wang Xing was kidnapped in Thailand this year (from what he thought was a shoot), appeared to be the catalyst to shake Beijing and Bangkok from insouciance to action.

On February 5, a day before Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, Thailand cut power, fuel and internet access to communities across the border, an attempt to starve the mafia out. The pressure was on, and crime bosses, working with their militia landlords, cleared out a portion of the less profitable workers.

In a few chaotic and extraordinary months, close to 10,000 people were loaded onto buses and sent over the Moei River to airports in Thailand.

“They transit through Thailand. They don’t stop here; they don’t spend the night here; they are just in and out,” says Amy Miller from the US-based NGO Acts of Mercy International.

“This works for a good percentage of Asian countries. Their flights aren’t expensive, and they have more resources. They have more diplomatic power. They’re in ASEAN.

“But you look at African nations, and it’s difficult.”

Come April, the 270 Ethiopians remained in the borderlands holding camp, kernels forming about what would become their failed escape, their patience thinning in confined rooms and odious toilets, choking down two bad meals a day and sleeping on carpets set out wherever floor space allowed.

The massive earthquake in wartorn Myanmar on March 28 had maimed the nation’s already inept bureaucracy. But this did not explain the sloth of the Ethiopian government, which had neither processed the required paperwork, nor approved embassy staff to travel to the border, Miller said from her base in Mae Sot, a town on the Thailand side of the border.

“We were sending family members to the ministry of foreign affairs in Addis Ababa, saying ‘Go knock on their door and put pressure on them to approve this’,” she said. “They came back saying, ‘Well, they’re not willing to pay for the buses’. We’re like, ‘We will pay, like we told them. We’re going to pay’.”

Days after the earthquake, opportunistic “Chinese bosses” stormed into the holding camp with an unconscionable proposition: the Ethiopians were stuck, and it was time to come back to work.

Mekidem, from Addis Ababa, saw his countrymen swell in fury.

“If they [the bosses] stayed a little longer, things would have gotten bad, as some people were grabbing stones to throw at them,” he texted this masthead this month, the only means of reliable communication from the camp.

Mekidem had been trafficked to Myanmar about 15 months earlier, after responding to a phoney job offer for data processing in Bangkok. After an interview over the messaging app Telegram to test his English proficiency, his recruiters had promised a month of training, and paid for his flight to Thailand.

This is how the mafia gets many of its workers. While some of those enlisted are complicit – at least until they realise they are not allowed to leave – more wind up in Myanmar because they’ve been duped into Bangkok and trafficked over the border at Mae Sot, a seven-hour drive to the north-west.

There are no “data” jobs as advertised. The work is elaborate online swindling, on behalf of highly organised syndicates increasingly with fingers in online gambling, cryptocurrency exchanges, payment processors, illicit online marketplaces and encrypted communications platforms, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Posing as an Asian model named Alicia, Mekidem, 28, was made to chat up men from Eastern Europe and Arabic-speaking nations for their money.

“I refused to work [at first] and they asked me for $US8000 [$12,500] if I wanted to leave the place – which I cannot pay in a million years,” he said.

He was beaten “a few times”, but he avoided the worst of the torture – whippings, solitary confinement, poundings with electrified batons. “Many of my friends have been through it, as I witnessed it right in front of me,” he said. “Their wound marks are still on their backs.”

After that first visit by the bosses to the holding camp, the group of Ethiopians worried that the next visit would mean they would be taken by force back to Taichang, one of the most brutal scam compounds. “They were freaking out, saying ‘We’re going to escape, we’re going to escape’,” Miller said. “We were talking them through it, like, ‘what would happen if you ran’, saying, ‘hey they might shoot you’.”

On the evening of April 13, Australian aid worker Judah Tana, one of three workers in Mae Sot working on thousands of worker cases, sent a group message to the Ethiopian leaders informing them of the bureaucratic problems at play.

“That was a very honest and brief explanation of what was going on,” Mekidem said. “So we immediately gathered and had a meeting … we thought we were going to be deceived again.”

The following morning, Mekidem and the other “committee” members assembled the population and put forward an idea: They would march en masse from the camp and swim across the Moei river. All but a handful agreed, Mekidem said.

Miller, terrified something would go wrong, told Thai officials to be ready to receive almost 300 people who would soon be flapping about in the river under possible gunfire.

About 90 minutes after that group meeting, the Ethiopians walked out the gates of the holding compound, which were open during the day. Footage shows them casually strolling to the river dragging suitcases.

The area, south of Myawaddy, is controlled by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, whose shadowy deals with the crime syndicates have allowed scam operations there to flourish.

Within minutes, nervous young DKBA soldiers blocked the road to the river, shouting and “clucking their guns and beating people who were in front”, Mekidem said.

Voices can be heard on the video of the escape attempt, shouting “go home” and “no fight”. One DKBA soldier can be seen grabbing a gun from an agitated colleague, perhaps so it would not be used.

After about half an hour, the Ethiopians were forced back into the holding camp without shots being fired.

The Ethiopian government has been contacted for comment.

The UN has described the situation at the Thai-Myanmar border as a humanitarian crisis building for at least five years. The release of roughly 10,000 victims this year has not changed this. In fact, it has barely dented the gangs’ workforce. Those who make the most money – “gold collar dogs” as the bosses call them – remain in the scam compounds of eastern Myanmar. It is impossible to know their numbers, but estimates have put the total number of compound workers in Myanmar, including in the northern regions bordering China, at upwards of 100,000.

The journey home again

Transfers from Myanmar to Thailand were at their peak when this masthead visited the border in March. In two days alone, close to 600 Indonesians were escorted over the Friendship Bridge 2 from a holding camp on land of the Karen Border Force Guard, another of Myanmar’s armed, non-government groups.

Once cleared at Mae Sot immigration, their buses moved in convoy, non-stop through the night, to Don Mueang Airport in Bangkok. Stressed Indonesian officials were still organising logistics right up to that moment.

Still, the process was as smooth as co-operation between a third country, Thailand, Myanmar’s military junta and a non-state army can get.

Sometimes, Miller said, the Myanmar side helped to get the victims out, living up to its claim that housing and feeding thousands of traumatised people in the holding camps was a burden they could no longer sustain. Other times, it was “power play … like the wild west”.

“We had 14 Sri Lankans that came today as well – and we weren’t sure they were going to make it. For whatever reason, Myanmar said they were not ready to move them,” Miller told this masthead in March.

“It’s only because the ambassador was here and she went across the bridge. She stood there and said, ‘Today. We’re not doing this tomorrow. We have plane tickets in the morning’. She just kept pushing and pushing, and it happened.”

In another case on the same day, Miller said the planned release of a small group of Taiwanese was delayed because Myanmar allegedly insisted on releasing the individuals to officials from China rather than to those from Taiwan.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would not confirm this, but the same happened last month after a scam compound was busted in Cambodia.

China, of course, had no such difficulties repatriating its citizens from Myanmar, whisking thousands of them – more than half the 10,000 released – aboard chartered planes waiting at Mae Sot airport.

Why, with such sway in these parts, did it take them so long?

Part of the reason could be that China, unlike other nations, viewed the mafias’ workforce as guilty participants in online fraud, regardless of whether they went willingly in Myanmar or not.

State-owned media published a photo in February showing repatriated citizens disembarking a plane in China, each one of them handcuffed and flanked by police officers.

Miller offered another insight. Months before the mass release, she said, Chinese officials visited KK Park and put conditions on the gangs: No more murders, no excessive torture, no scamming Chinese, and no more obscene prices for individuals wishing to buy their freedom.

“They put that pressure on them and things did start to shift in KK,” Miller said. “But it’s always been China for China. They don’t really care that their citizens are there so long as they’re scamming somebody else.”

The Chinese government has been contacted for comment.

How the scam operators get their victims

At Mae Sot airport in March, 19 Bangladeshis were literally tasting freedom. It was Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, but the men were so sapped and hungry the chicken rice served up in the waiting area did not stand a chance.

They had been out for minutes, having just cleared Thailand immigration after weeks in Myanmar holding camps. Soon, they would board the first of their flights home. The men had been forced to scam inside Taichang and another crime estate referred to as Hexen Group.

One of them, Akash Ali, told this masthead it was only at that moment, in the airport, that he was convinced of his freedom. “I thought we were going to be sold,” he said.

His story was typical. Unhappy in Dubai as a construction worker, Ali wished to return to his “niche” of training people in Microsoft Excel and data processing, so he answered such a job ad on Facebook.

The work was in Thailand, which he knew nothing about, not even its cities. What mattered was the offer: $US1000 a month and regular days off. It sounded good.

As in Mekidem’s case, the criminals paid for Ali’s flight to Bangkok. But things quickly turned strange. For starters, the “company” driver who picked him up from the airport did not speak a word of English. Then there was the drive; hours and hours, until finally reaching Thai checkpoints around Mae Sot.

“[Thai checkpoint guards] asked me what I was there for. I said ‘visit’. And then they let me go. It was this way three times, at every checkpoint,” he said. “I was told that once I entered the company, they would definitely make a legal work visa for me, that’s why I said it.”

But that was wrong. This and all the recruiter’s promises evaporated for Ali when locals took his luggage at the river border and loaded it onto a small boat for Myanmar. “This is when I knew,” he said.

Inside the compound, he was given fake female Facebook profiles and made to draw personal information from lonely Indonesian men up for a chat: age, location, phone number and hobbies. Once in hand, he passed the data to his bosses, who he presumed passed it along the scam production line to more skilled workers.

“I wanted to share [with the online victims] how terrible a place I am right now, ask them, ‘Can you help me?’,” he said. “I wanted to, but I could not because [the bosses] were always monitoring on another PC.”

Still in the Myanmar holding camp a few weeks after the escape attempt, Mekidem, the Ethiopian, sent a photo of himself, looking stern and thin-lipped.

“We have a high hope of leaving this place very soon,” he texted, before sending through another photo, this time of him smiling.

“You can use this picture!! Nice and clean.”

Miller informed this masthead on Monday that Mekidem had been released a few days earlier, along with most but not all of the 270 Ethiopians in that group. He was now home. Tens of thousands more people trapped in Myanmar remained at their computers.

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