You can always rely on the Chinese news services to regularly provide new photographs of suspected phone scammers who are brought into the country with hands cuffed together and heads bowed down in shame (see above). Credit for the latest batch of 307 arrests and deportations goes to the United Wa State Army (UWSA), one of the rebel armies that is fighting the central government in Myanmar whilst picking off scam compounds in Shan province, a region of Myanmar that neighbors both Wa and China. UWSA were listed amongst my unsung heroes of 2023, mostly because their operations resulted in 1,207 scammers being deported to China in a single day. Add those figures together and the total comes to 1,514 times more phone scammers than the average Western police force has ever captured.
It is not easy to keep up with the rate at which scammers are deported to China. Put simply, Chinese criminal gangs have spread their tentacles around Southeast Asia and lured hundreds of thousands of willing or not-so-willing workers to scam compounds situated in places that are supposed to be beyond the reach of Chinese authorities. Those authorities have responded by extended their reach and finding ways to motivate local forces to take action, though it never seems to be enough to curb the scale of these lucrative crimes. Cambodian police handed over a total of 680 suspects before the end of April, whilst Vietnamese police surrendered 19 telecom fraud suspects in June. In February it was announced that the total number of telecom fraud deportations from Myanmar to China had surpassed 46,000 following the handover of a batch of 497 suspects. You can read this article from the Global Times for more details about the latest batch of 307 deportations.
