Infrastructure of a Scam City



Myanmar's border compounds house thousands of trafficked workers forced to run crypto scams targeting victims worldwide.

In February 2025, officials announced an international crackdown had shut them down.

They said they'd eradicated them. The scam compounds along Myanmar's border, where trafficked workers defraud victims worldwide - shut down after an international crackdown.

Eighty Starlink dishes on a single rooftop.

KK Park sits along Myanmar's border with Thailand - one of an estimated twenty-seven compounds where forced labor meets industrial-scale fraud.

February brought headlines about eradication, officials posing for cameras, seven thousand people walking free.

Satellite imagery from September told a different story: cranes lifting steel, fresh concrete flowing, security perimeters expanding outward like a metastasizing growth.

Meanwhile, Starlink, which is not licensed in Myanmar - climbed from obscurity to Myanmar's number-one internet provider.

Americans hemorrhaged over $10 billion dollars to these operations in 2024 alone, and every transaction flowed through infrastructure designed to connect the disconnected.

Progress scaled perfectly.

When liberation technology becomes the backbone of captivity, who profits from freedom?

Credit: France24, US Treasury, The Record, Stimson, Senator Hassan, The Guardian, Reuters, IB Times, cna, Protos, Chainalysis, TRM Labs, Pulitzer Center, The Diplomat, Global China Pulse, Justice for Myanmar, Licas News, IDC, USCC, The Daily Star, USIP, Copernical, UNODC, Gov.UK, ThoughtCo

Thailand cut power to the border in February. Internet lines went dead. Traditional networks collapsed.

Victory declared. Problem solved.

Starlink appeared like clockwork.

Late April: number fifty-six on Myanmar's internet provider rankings.

July 3rd: number one. It stayed there every single day through October, dominating a country where SpaceX/Starlink holds zero licenses to operate.

Phone data told the real story. Over forty thousand logins to Starlink from known scam centers between November 2024 and February 2025.

Telegram vendors weren't even trying to hide it - open advertisements for Starlink access, marketed explicitly as the "solution for online scam operators."

California prosecutors warned Starlink in July 2024 that fraud syndicates were using their satellites. SpaceX/Starlink sent back nothing.

U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan called on Musk to act in July 2025.

Musk, nor Starlink has not publicly addressed Senator Hassan's concerns.

Meanwhile, law enforcement kept finding the hardware.

Operations continued without interruption.

In July, the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee launched an investigation into Starlink’s role in Myanmar’s scam compounds. The committee can compel Musk to testify. SpaceX declined to comment.

Eighty dishes on KK Park's roof alone. Hundreds more scattered across the compounds.

Starlink can geofence. Block service in specific regions, entire countries. They’ve done it before in Ukraine, whole areas went dark during periods of restricted access.

Just not Myanmar for some reason.

"It is abhorrent that an American company is enabling this to happen," said Erin West, former California prosecutor who warned Starlink about the problem while still in office.

Nobody at Starlink bothered to reply.

Satellites built to connect remote villages now power the largest forced labor scam operation on earth. What happens when the infrastructure keeping slavery online comes from Silicon Valley?

The Machine

Sun left home in June 2024. Twenty-five years old, one child already, another on the way.

He'd heard there was money to be made selling Chinese goods online through Thailand.

The Thai border city of Mae Sot turned the promise into a nightmare.

Sun said he was abducted and taken across the river that divides Thailand from Myanmar's Myawaddy. He was terrified, "I kept begging them on my knees to let me go," he told AFP.

They brought him to a militia camp where he was sold for 650,000 Thai baht - twenty thousand dollars - to a scam center.

The first of several such transactions.

They ordered him to do online exercises to speed up his typing.

Sun had a problem. A deformed finger slowed his typing.

Because of it, they kept selling him to other compounds.

While victims like Sun were traded between compounds, the networks behind them were moving millions.

KK Park alone processed one hundred million dollars in Tether.

Chainalysis traced it to a single pig-butchering operation - the romance scams where criminals build relationships with victims over weeks or months, then convince them to drain their savings into fake crypto investment platforms.

Americans lost ten billion dollars to Southeast Asian scam networks alone in 2024.

A 66 percent increase in 12 months. Losses hit thirty-seven billion in 2023.

The UN Human Rights Office reported that 120,000 people had been forced to carry out online scams in Myanmar alone, with another 100,000 in Cambodia.

The compounds moved money with the same relentless precision they moved people.

One victim's million-dollar loss got chopped into fifteen transactions and pushed through eleven different exchanges.

Tether on the TRON blockchain made it complicated to follow.

75 percent of wallets tied to pig butchering showed signs of on-chain money laundering - intermediary addresses, mixer services, rapid movement between platforms.

Chainalysis found something darker in the data.

Some addresses received both scam proceeds and ransom payments.

Families paying to free their trafficked relatives were sending crypto to the same wallets that held victim funds.

The syndicates monetized both ends: scam the marks, ransom the workers.

Inside the compounds, the quotas never stopped. Miss your numbers and the beatings started.

Phones got confiscated immediately. Families received threats. Torture was routine.

Some workers got handcuffed to their desks.

Others heard whispers about organ harvesting operations.

"Almost everyone inside had been beaten at some point," said one survivor.

But Sun and the others weren't just trapped by armed guards and barbed wire. They were trapped by an economy that required their captivity to function.

Who built that economy, and why does it still have permission to operate?

The Warlord Economy

This isn't just Chinese gangsters running scam operations from Myanmar's lawless border zones. That's the simple story, the one that lets everyone else sleep at night.

The real structure runs deeper. Myanmar's military junta. Ethnic militias that switched sides for profit. Crime syndicates with connections stretching back to the Golden Triangle's opium trade.

They didn't just allow the scam compounds to exist - they built the business model together.

The Karen Border Guard Force controls the territory around KK Park.

Led by San Myint, who also goes by Saw Chit Thu, the BGF operates as both military unit and corporate entity. San Myint holds shares and directorships in at least five BGF companies.

His two sons - Saw Htoo Eh Moo and Saw Chit Chit - control fourteen more companies between them. The family owns fifty percent or more of six Karen BGF/KNA businesses.

One of those businesses involves cyber scam parks. The United States sanctioned all three family members in May 2025.

Construction continued anyway.

The Democratic Karen Benevolent Army operates nearby.

Former rebels who signed a ceasefire with Myanmar's junta, the DKBA now controls territory and guards scam compounds, facilitating movement across the Thai border. They collect profits for providing protection services.

“In some cases, the Border Guard Force directly owns and operates scam facilities,” said Jason Tower, Myanmar director at the United States Institute of Peace. “Revenue from these enterprises flows into military coffers and armed groups, used to purchase weapons and consolidate territorial power.”

Shwe Kokko sits north of Myawaddy, another sprawling complex of office towers and dormitories surrounded by security fences.

The U.S. Treasury calls it a "notorious hub for virtual currency investment scams."

The Yatai New City/Shwe Kokko project was founded by She Zhijiang - in partnership with Myanmar’s Karen Border Guard Force - under a joint-venture that makes him a major stakeholder in the scam city infrastructure.

The United States sanctioned nine people and companies connected to Shwe Kokko and She Zhijiang last month.

New ferry crossings supply it from the Thai side. Despite the sanctions, construction there continued.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute studied the compounds and arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: scammers operate in a "highly permissive environment with permission from junta-affiliated Burmese militia."

Translation - while Myanmar's civil war rages and resistance forces clash with the military just miles away, nobody ever hits the scam centers.

Too profitable. Too useful. Too protected.

The junta needs the militias to hold territory it can't control alone.

The militias need the revenue to buy weapons and pay soldiers.

The crime syndicates need the protection to operate industrial-scale fraud.

Each party depends on the others. Sanctions hit individuals, but the structure persists because the structure is the point.

When your government, your military, and your organized crime syndicates form a joint venture, who exactly enforces the law?

The Expansion

February 2025 brought the headlines everyone wanted to read. [Joint crackdown. International cooperation.

Seven thousand people were freed from the compounds. China, Thailand, and Myanmar forced the militias to promise eradication.

Victims crossed borders. News cycles moved on to the next crisis.

Satellite imagery from March told a different story.

Construction restarted within weeks. KK Park added an entire new section in seven months - dormitories, office blocks, expanded security checkpoints.

New roads appeared. A roundabout went in at the main entrance. Five new ferry crossings materialized across the Moei River to supply the compounds from Thailand's side.

Planet Labs PBC satellite data showed dozens of buildings going up or being altered in KK Park between March and September.

Shwe Kokko kept building too. Twenty-seven compounds remained operational across the Myawaddy corridor.

Thai police estimated one hundred thousand people were still trapped inside.

The crackdown freed seven thousand. Left one hundred thousand behind. Then the compounds got bigger.

China took aggressive action.

Executed eleven scam syndicate members. Sentenced five more to suspended death penalties.

Beijing pushed authorities in Myanmar and Thailand to crack down in February.

Repatriated over forty-five thousand people from scam operations, including major crime bosses whose interrogations gave Chinese law enforcement detailed intelligence on how deeply Myanmar's military profits from the fraud.

The operations relocated - some to Laos, some to Cambodia, others deeper inside Myanmar, including Karen and Shan States, often under new arrangements with local militias.

Syndicates consistently outpace government crackdowns.

“As long as the military junta enables and fuels this industry, it’s only ever going to be a game of cat and mouse,” said Nathan Ruser, analyst tracking the compounds.

The technology evolved alongside the relocations.

Deepfake content targeting scam operations increased 600 percent in the first half of 2024. AI-generated personas.

Synthetic voices that could mimic victims' family members.

Fake video calls that looked real enough to convince someone their loved one was safe when they weren't.

The scammers adapted faster than anyone trying to stop them.

The international response remained fractured at best.

The United States deployed multiple agencies - Department of Justice, FBI, National Security Council, State Department - but no single agency received the mandate or resources to lead a coordinated effort.

UNODC established an Emergency Response Network in May 2024 connecting law enforcement across seven Southeast Asian nations, but Cambodia and Myanmar continued denying the problem existed. ASEAN never mounted a collective response.

Sanctions hit individuals and entities but coordination stayed almost non-existent.

The UK sanctioned fourteen people in December 2023, the first designation directly targeting human traffickers in the region.

The United States sanctioned nine. Nobody synchronized their efforts. The compounds kept expanding because the people running them knew the international community couldn't get its act together.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure that made everything possible - the satellites, the crypto, the AI - kept getting better, faster, cheaper.

Every technological advance that promised liberation handed scammers another tool.

When the people trying to stop modern slavery can't agree on a strategy, how does the technology that enables it get held accountable?

Max Weber called it the iron cage - a metaphor for how rationalization and bureaucracy can trap people so thoroughly within systems of efficiency and control that freedom becomes illusory.

Victims scamming victims. Trauma compounding trauma.

Every successful con added to his psychological burden while enriching the warlords who'd bought and sold him like livestock.

The cruelty isn't a bug in the system - it's load-bearing architecture.

California prosecutors warned SpaceX (which operates Starlink) in July 2024. U.S. Senator Hassan demanded action in July 2025. The US Congress opened an investigation. Thai police seized dozens of devices in 2023.

The dishes kept multiplying. Seven thousand people were freed in February's headline-grabbing crackdown. One hundred thousand still inside.

Twenty-seven compounds are operational and expanding.

Starlink: unlicensed in Myanmar, number-one internet provider.

Modern slavery runs on today's technology. The satellites work perfectly. The crypto flows freely. The AI generates convincing lies at scale.

Progress measured in throughput and uptime while one hundred thousand people type under threat of torture.

SpaceX/Starlink declined to comment.

Eighty dishes on one roof. Ten billion stolen from Americans. One hundred thousand still trapped. Zero accountability.

Who profits when progress looks like this?


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