Myanmar’s military says it has arrested more than 2,000 people in a raid on KK Park, an infamous scam centre on the border with Thailand, according to state media.
The sprawling compound was used by international criminal syndicates to carry out illegal gambling, money laundering, and online romance and investment scams, the Myanmar Alin daily reported on Monday.
Operations were spread across more than 250 low-rise buildings, according to the media report. They included warehouses, shophouses, and dozens of one and two-storey buildings.
During the raid, the military also seized 30 Starlink satellites, Myanmar Alin said.
The satellites are built and run by Starlink, a subsidiary of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and can keep compounds connected to the internet, even during power cuts.
Authorities also arrested 2,198 people, among them 445 women, 1,645 men and 98 male security guards, although the newspaper did not list their nationalities.
KK Park is located in Kayin State’s Myawaddy Township, which lies just across the river from the Thai border town of Mae Sot.
The area has seen recent fighting between Myanmar’s military, the People’s Defence Force – the armed wing of Myanmar’s National Unity Government, formed by elected lawmakers, which operates from exile after it was ousted in the 2021 military coup – and armed Karen ethnic groups, according to Myanmar Alin.
Myanmar has been embroiled in a civil war since the coup in 2021, with fighting between the military, armed opposition groups and ethnic armies.
Military spokesperson Major-General Zaw Min Tun said on Monday in a statement that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, one of the groups fighting the military, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Myanmar has been under pressure from Thailand and China to curb scam centre activity, which has drawn in criminal groups, particularly Chinese crime syndicates.
The issue became a cause célèbre in China in January when Chinese actor Wang Xing was trafficked to a scam centre and later rescued by Thai police.
Employees of the scam centres are often themselves victims of human trafficking, lured by the promise of employment but then forced to carry out online scams in slave-like conditions, according to rights groups.
Thai police estimate that as many as 100,000 people are working in scam operations on the Thai-Myanmar border alone, according to Reuters.
Scam centres have spread across Southeast Asia over the past five years, but their epicentre has been in Myanmar and Cambodia. They net international criminal groups billions of dollars each year.
The Department of the Treasury in the United States in September sanctioned more than 20 companies and individuals in Cambodia and Myanmar who were allegedly involved in scam operations.
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