Over the past few years, multiple articles have appeared about scam calls, and text / WhatsApp messages coming from massive cybercrime centers. In some variations of the article, the staff are people who were themselves victims of a job scam, trapped in an unfamiliar country trying to pay off debts or avoid detention. Recently there's elevated interest in these scams being based in the "Golden Triangle", a large area of Southeast Asia, and Myanmar specifically:

Article from German media about 100,000 people trafficked for Chinese-language scam factories on the unregulated Myanmar border: https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinese-mafia-are-running-a-scam-factory-in-myanmar/a-68113480
Article in Burmese exiles' publication, about a local employed at an English-speaking WhatsApp scam in Yangon: https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/investigation/scam-operations-flourish-in-myanmars-biggest-city.html

Since 2023, a new claim in the narrative is that the Chinese government is so incensed by Myanmar-based scams that they lost confidence in the junta government and support rebel operations:

Border regions of Myanmar were never unified with the ethnic Burmese core until colonization. There are significant differences in culture, language, and political autonomy. On the Chinese border, there have been stories for years about lawless havens for wildlife trafficking, casinos using Chinese Yuan, ruby mines, etc. (2014 BBC video).
In the past year "Operation 1027" led to the junta and rebels cracking down on the Kokang region, with Wiki saying:

a rescue attempt […] resulted in upwards of 80 people were killed, and […] four undercover Chinese police officers had been buried alive. This incident has been credited with forcing China to tacitly allow anti-junta forces to begin Operation 1027

Chinese Wiki on the 1020 incident: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/1020%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6

The thing is, if you're an American like me receiving English language scam calls about credit cards, Social Security, Medicare, and special offers, it likely still comes from offices in India, Pakistan, and Jamaica (NatGeo visits Jamaican scammers), where it's been happening for years. I think the scambait subreddits are right, that despite the UN envelope calculations, it's unlikely that you have received a call or had a 1:1 English text exchange with someone trapped in the Golden Triangle. I'm also skeptical that the Chinese government has offered meaningful support to rebels, likely more focused on protecting their own citizens: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/china-tnla-letter-stop-fighting-08302024075230.html - and catching drug traffickers.

The lawless zone stories sell, but scam call and messaging centers are also being broken up in countries where American businesses would outsource legitimate call centers - Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. As the Irawaddy article described, even within Myanmar there are employees doing regular shift work. Scam texts go out to many people from a few employees who generally supervise a script. We should discourage this trend of assuming and asking their scammers about this:

reddit source

Recently the Philippines has been breaking up large scamming and trafficking operations within locally-legal online gambling centers called POGOs. A Senate inquiry into ties between a POGO in Bamban and the city government opened up a bizarre conspiracy where the mayor (Alice Guo) and her sister are now believed to be unrelated people who arrived in the Philippines as teens and acquired backdated birth certificates. The sister (Sheila Guo) was captured in Indonesia's Riau Islands (not the same island that I visited, but close) and told the Senate about escaping through Borneo and Singapore.

There's a campaign vlog from 2022 where Guo works on an egg farm. Happier times:

Alice Guo's fugitive status led to a meme where businesses offer special in-store discounts or deliveries:

Source

Additional video: https://x.com/migseu_/status/1826617606360776872

There is an unfortunate current of racism or othering in the Alice Guo case, for example in this inquiry she was challenged to speak Fookien (Philippine Hokkien dialect):

video/TikTok source

It's not super clear what steps the government took to restrict the Guos' travel, with officials reluctant to revoke her passport or issue an Interpol notice until charges were brought this week.

The latest reports are that Guo is headed to "the Golden Triangle", possibly to connections in Cambodia: https://thediplomat.com/2024/08/fugitive-philippine-mayor-may-be-bound-for-golden-triangle-investigators-say/

Georeactor Blog

Is the call coming from inside the Golden Triangle?