Myanmar’s Pig Butchers Brought to Justice in China

The long arc of the universe bends towards justice – at least when it comes to the pig butcher scam artists of Southeast Asia. This month, the Chinese government executed 11 members of an organized criminal family that operated so-called pig butchering scam centers across the border in Myanmar and sentenced to death at least another five members of another organized crime family from the same location.

Pig butchering refers to a sophisticated scheme to defraud victims of large sums of money by feigning love interest and then providing investment advice, usually involving cryptocurrencies. The victim often experiences initial profits to lure them into investing more, but when they try to withdraw their money it has already been stolen.

As the BBC reported, the town of Laukkaing became a center of organized crime when a local warlord was ousted by a coalition of the Myanmar national army and local gangsters, who almost certainly were paying off national-level politicians. These gangsters originally financed their activities by promoting prostitution and gambling, but by the mid-2010s discovered that they could make more money running centers that scammed people out of their hard-earned money in romance scams, fake crypto-investment schemes and all sorts of plots that centered around contacting people and defrauding them via smartphone apps. The revenues generated by the schemes reached into the billions of dollars over the course of eight years.

The largest number of victims of these calling centers by nationality were from China. Many thousands of Chinese were lured abroad and abducted to staff the calling centers under abusive and even life-threatening conditions by the organized crime families. In turn, they were used to entice orders of magnitude more Chinese citizens to fall prey to the financial scams. The damage this did to Chinese society, led the Chinese government to act. Chinese communist authorities eventually supported an ethnic insurgent army to capture the town of Laukkaing and  extradite many members of the organized crime families that ran the scam operations at the heart of the town’s underground economy.

‘Wired’ Magazine Expose

Recently, Wired magazine ran an expose on the activities of these pig butchering criminal networks based on documents and information supplied by a victim, dubbed Red Bull, working in one of the call centers. 

The magazine waited until Red Bull managed to escape the clutches of the organized crime group that had been holding him to report the revealing information, in addition to his harrowing escape.

Meanwhile in Cambodia

The recent executions this month follow the arrest this month in Cambodia of Kuong Li, a 50-year-old local, charged with various offenses related to the operation of a pig butchering scam center based out of the Cambodian coastal city of Sihanoukville. The activities of Kuong Li were uncovered by a whistleblower recruited against his will into working at the scam center, who managed to get in touch with the BBC and the Global Anti-Scam Organisation (GASO). GASO is a volunteer-run group that helps rescue and support trafficked victims.