Myanmar’s military says it stormed one of the country’s most notorious online scam hubs on the Thai border, detaining nearly 350 people in a fresh push to prove it’s finally taking the booming cyberfraud industry seriously, or at least to look like it is.
The raid targeted Shwe Kokko, a gambling-and-fraud enclave long linked to Chinese-Cambodian tycoon She Zhijiang. State-run The Global New Light of Myanmar reported that troops moved in on Tuesday morning, seizing “nearly 10,000 mobile phones used in online gambling operations” and arresting “346 foreign nationals currently under scrutiny.”
The military pinned the compound’s existence on armed opposition groups, claiming scam centres thrive “under their protection.” But officials also noted they were able to strike only after regaining territorial control, an admission of how fragmented the country has become since the 2021 coup.
Shwe Kokko has been synonymous with She Zhijiang and his Yatai firm, which the paper named as “the entity involved.” She was arrested in Thailand in 2022 and only last week extradited to China, where authorities accuse him of running sprawling online gambling and fraud networks. He and Yatai were already under British and US sanctions.
The wider border region, stretching across Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, has exploded into a multibillion-dollar cyberfraud zone since the pandemic. The UN estimates “hundreds of thousands” of people have been trafficked into these walled compounds, forced to run scams for criminal networks.
Beijing’s shadow looms large here. After months of pressure from China, the Myanmar junta began loudly promoting a series of raids earlier this year. Analysts say these operations are as much propaganda as law enforcement, carefully calibrated to soothe China without disrupting the revenue streams feeding the military’s allied militias.
The scam industry remains deeply entangled with Myanmar’s war economy. Civil conflict has turned border areas into unregulated playgrounds for criminal syndicates, packed with both voluntary recruits chasing fast cash and trafficked workers trapped under armed guard.
Still, the junta is eager to showcase numbers. In October, the military claimed it arrested more than 2,000 people at KK Park, another infamous Thai-border scam hub. And last month, the US Treasury sanctioned more than 20 companies and individuals in Cambodia and Myanmar linked to the scam operations.
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