By Yan Naing May 2, 2022

The large presence of Chinese criminal syndicates in Southeast Asian countries is proving to be a major problem for law enforcement and other public agencies in the region.

Several Chinese gangs are active in the border areas between Cambodia and Thailand. The scale of these illegal activities has increased since the emergence of COVID-19, as many organized groups have begun to take advantage of vulnerable young people who have found themselves unemployed due to the pandemic.

The increase in Chinese-led scam operations is closely linked to the growing economic integration between China and Southeast Asia over the past decade, which has seen an increase in Chinese investment in the region. . As they grow, these operations look more and more like an industry. These operations have been facilitated by weak legal frameworks and corrupt local elites in parts of the region, providing favorable conditions for illicit activities. Activities also take place in territories and special economic zones that exist beyond the effective reach of the host country’s legal system.

This was again confirmed in a recent case in Cambodia. In a cross-border operation on April 10-11, Thai and Cambodian police rescued 68 Thai workers from Chinese rogue gangs who ran call centers in Sihanoukville in western Cambodia, the capital Phnom Penh and Krong Bavet at the border with Vietnam.

Held captive against their will, workers were coerced or tricked into organizing phone scams. They were ordered to stay inside a guarded 12-story compound where Chinese “bosses” gave their instructions through an interpreter.

Workers have been lured on social media with promises of well-paying online sales jobs in Poipet, a Cambodian town on the border with Thailand. As soon as they arrived in Cambodia, their travel documents were seized and they were detained and forced by racketeers to make fraudulent calls in their own language. Instead of selling online, workers were told to make unsolicited phone calls posing as customs officials, police or potential investors seeking a bank transfer.

Chinese gangsters order their victims, mostly poor workers, to defraud at least 500,000 Thai baht (nearly $15,000) every month; if they don’t, they risk being sold to another gang. Those who refuse are subjected to various forms of violence and mistreatment, including being whipped, electrocuted, beaten or locked in dark rooms without food.

Due to more than two years of pandemic-induced poverty, workers have been forced to take virtually any job they can find away from their remote rural villages. In Thailand, it is normal for brokers to travel to poor border villages offering jobs to locals, especially after the harvest is over and underemployment is rampant.

Southeast Asian media reports that hundreds of Malaysians, Filipinos and Indonesians have also been lured to Cambodia by organized crime groups based in and around Sihanoukville, a town notorious for lawlessness, casinos and Chinese criminal gangs. Most of the ringleaders are in China, but they employ people in neighboring countries to carry out their broader Chinese transnational criminal activities.

Similar operations have also been exposed in the past. In November 2021, Cambodian police rescued 99 Thai workers from a building in Phnom Penh where they were being held and forced into illegal labor by a Chinese gang.

Highlighting the activities of Chinese criminal gangs, 35 civil society groups urged the Cambodian government in mid-March to address “a crisis of forced labour, slavery and torture” at facilities it called of “slave complexes”.

Thai police estimate that more than 1,500 Thais are still working in fraudulent call centers in cities including Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville and Poipet, held against their will by the scam gangs. They have already rescued 800 Thai nationals from criminal gangs in Cambodia since October 2021.

Exactly how these rackets work remains unclear, but there is growing evidence that they are regionally coordinated and linked to other nodes of illicit activity, such as the massive drug syndicates that operate across the country. east of Myanmar. Many see it as a byproduct of China’s economic boom and growing connectivity with once remote regions of mainland Southeast Asia. But the main cause of these activities is poor law enforcement in border areas, both by Chinese authorities and host countries.

Yan Naing is the pseudonym of an observer of Myanmar affairs.

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