Global pressure forces Myanmar junta to crack down on scam centres

Last week, Myanmar's military leader made a quiet visit to Hpa-An, a city in the country's southeast. What followed was a meeting that would set in motion one of the fastest crackdowns on organized crime the region has seen in years. Army officers sat down with commanders of the Karen National Army, a powerful local militia, and delivered a message that came directly from the top: the scam centres operating along the Thai border had to be shut down, and they had to be shut down now.

The timing was not accidental. Just days before, the United States had announced a new "Strike Force"—a multi-agency task force including the FBI and Secret Service—dedicated to dismantling the sprawling criminal networks that operate from Southeast Asia. These networks, which span Myanmar and Cambodia, pull in billions of dollars annually by defrauding victims worldwide. Many of the people running the scams are themselves victims: human trafficking survivors forced to work in the compounds. The junta's concern was immediate and practical. According to sources with direct knowledge of the military's internal discussions, officers told the militia that they could not afford to have American investigators crossing into Myanmar territory. "We must solve the problem ourselves," one military official said at the meeting. The message was clear: act before the U.S. does.

The junta chief, Min Aung Hlaing, had made his position explicit. He told military officials that the scam centres were damaging Myanmar's international reputation—a concern that took on added weight given that the junta was preparing to hold elections starting December 28, a vote widely dismissed as a theatrical exercise designed to legitimize military rule. The pressure was not only coming from Washington. Thailand, a neighboring country also targeted by the scam operations, had recently extradited a major gambling kingpin to China, signalling that regional powers were coordinating their response.

By Tuesday, the operation was underway. Soldiers from Myanmar's military and the Karen National Army fanned out across Myawaddy, a frontier town that had become the epicentre of the scam business. The scale of what they found was staggering. In just days, they demolished more than 180 buildings, detained over 1,000 foreign nationals, and seized 2,653 computers and 21,750 mobile phones. The compounds they raided were not small operations. Shwe Kokko, one of the largest, had been established in 2017 as an ostensibly legitimate casino destination, registered in Hong Kong and initially backed by a precursor organization to the Karen National Army. Over the years, it had evolved into something far darker.

The scam industry itself had grown out of loosely regulated online gambling operations that began in the 1990s but exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic. As lockdowns tightened and borders closed, criminal networks saw an opportunity. They built compounds where thousands of workers—many trafficked from across Asia—were forced to make fraudulent calls and messages to targets around the world, posing as investment advisors, romantic interests, or lottery officials. The victims lost billions. The workers, trapped in these compounds, lost their freedom.

For years, the Myanmar military had claimed it lacked authority over these border areas and largely ignored the problem. The junta's public position was that it was cooperating with international efforts to shut down the scams. But the internal discussions revealed a different calculation: the military was moving only because it feared what would happen if it didn't. The Karen National Army, which the U.S. Treasury Department had sanctioned in May for facilitating cyber scams and human trafficking, claimed it had initiated the crackdown and invited the military to join. But the speed and scale of the operation suggested coordination from the highest levels.

Experts saw the shift as significant. Jason Tower, a senior analyst at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, noted that when two global powers—the United States and China—began pushing simultaneously for action, the Myanmar military found itself in an impossible position. The junta could no longer afford to look the other way. What had been tolerated for years was suddenly intolerable, not because the crimes had changed, but because the international cost of ignoring them had become too high. The question now is whether this crackdown will be sustained or whether, once the immediate pressure eases, the compounds will quietly rebuild.