China is not messing around when it comes to fighting the organized criminals that orchestrate scams. Gary Warner reports on his blog, CyberCrime & Doing Time, about the sentences given by the Chinese justice system last week to 39 scamlords extradited from Myanmar.
…Chinese authorities sentenced to death 16 members of “The Four Families” for the multitude of crimes they committed while operating scam compounds in Northern Myanmar near the Chinese border. This was the culmination of an investigation that has been on-going since July 2023 and that we have been tracking primarily through Chinese Telegram channels that discuss the scam compounds. Thirty-nine criminals were sentenced in the hearing. Eleven will be immediately executed, while five others have a two year reprieve, during which their sentences might be commuted to life in prison. Eleven more received life sentences, while the rest received sentences of between five and twenty-four years.
Warner has carefully pieced together the story of the gangs operated by these criminals and when these ringleaders were arrested. It makes for reading that is as compelling as it is depressing. Some are guilty of unspeakable evil to the slaves who were forced to work in their scam factories. The Chinese authorities are taking the fight to scammers situated around the world, but the fight against these crimes is far from over. The orchestration of scams at large scale is now embedded in the culture of organized crime, as demonstrated by a 17 year old Chinese girl recently being indicted on charges of selling her teenage boyfriend into scam compound slavery.
US telecoms fraud expert Tom Walker observed in 2023 that China is doing a better job of stopping transnational fraud than the USA. That is confirmed by the punishment imposed by China on these scamlords, and the effort that was put into hunting them down. Meanwhile, the USA continues to drag its feet over sanctions of known scamlords and penalties for American businesses that are blatantly enabling scams. It is no trivial matter to arrest scamlords that can afford to employ private armies to defend them. Westerners have begun to talk more about the steps they are willing to take to reduce scams, but much of it still involves pointing fingers of blame elsewhere instead of identifying action that can be taken to disincentivize the comms businesses that facilitate crime.
Commsrisk reported in 2023 on the bounties offered by China for four of the criminals sentenced last week. The compounds run by just these four individuals once housed 10,000 slave workers. An attempted escape by these prisoners resulted in at least 60 being murdered by the gangsters. However, the web statistics at that time suggested relatively few members of Commsrisk’s Western audience was interested in reading about scam compounds in East Asia. Interest levels have since risen somewhat, but not by as much as I would have hoped. The data continues to show that stories about victims in some Asian countries receive considerably less attention from readers in some Western countries.
There are plenty of communications businesses that continue to obstruct the defeat of scammers by prioritizing their profits over basic anti-scam controls such as know-your-customer (KYC) checks. Any comms business which does not check who their customers are is effectively encouraging criminals to be their customers. They can boast of higher revenues and customer numbers because they are undercutting the anti-crime controls adopted by their competitors.
In a little while I will share my own stories about industry associations that talk a lot about ‘collaboration’ but who consciously rejected the opportunity to present a united front against crime by refusing to support the i3Forum’s new KYC Code of Conduct. Those people are charlatans. They repeat platitudes in parrot fashion about the cost of crime and the desire to stop it, but their actions speak louder than their words. Or to be precise, their studious lack of action reveals how readily they shrug off responsibility for tackling crimes that can have devastating consequences for its victims.
Inaction by Western associations also demonstrates why it is important to discuss the efforts being taken to tackle crime by Asian countries including China and Thailand. Failing to recognize how they are stopping crime at its source encourages delusions about the effectiveness of those few anti-scam controls that Western businesses have implemented.
Gary Warner’s report on the members of the scamlord families sentenced in China last week can be found here.
