Pale, gaunt, and with a freshly shaved head, Chinese actor Wang Xing sat flanked by Thai police in the border town of Mae Sot on Jan. 7 to discuss his terrifying ordeal. The 31-year-old had flown to Bangkok for what he thought was a meeting with Thai movie executives. Instead, he was trafficked across the border to wartorn Myanmar’s lawless Myawaddy region, where he was forcibly put to work conducting online scams.
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“The environment was very dangerous,” Wang said on a video filmed on his flight home published by Chinese media. “I can’t sleep. I didn’t even have time to pee.”
It’s a story so common these days as to barely warrant a shrug in law enforcement circles. Experts estimate that more than 220,000 trafficking victims from over 100 countries ranging from Ghana and Nigeria to Brazil and the UAE are held in “pig-butchering” scam operations—so named after fattening a hog for slaughter—in Myanmar and Cambodia alone. Many of the trafficking victims are young, tech-savvy graduates from regions where unemployment rates are high.
Read More: Poppies to Pig-Butchering: Inside the Golden Triangle’s Criminal Reboot
Yet Wang’s minor celebrity profile combined with his girlfriend’s heroic efforts raising the alarm on social media has once again thrust Southeast Asia’s scam centers back into the spotlight. Following his ordeal, China’s embassies in Thailand and Myanmar have warned their citizens to beware of recruitment scams, while the state-run China Daily published an opinion piece warning that lawlessness “could undermine the confidence of Chinese tourists in neighboring countries.”
Sure enough, Chinese tour bookings to Thailand have plummeted just in the run up to the usually busy and lucrative Lunar New Year holiday. Hong Kong pop star Eason Chan even canceled a sold-out concert in Bangkok next month given “safety concerns for Chinese citizens and fans around the world traveling to Thailand,” according to organizer SFEG. Chinese comedian Zhao Benshan also postponed a gig in Bangkok. (During his public statement, Wang was tellingly urged by Thai police to insist he felt Thailand was safe.)
But apart from negative repercussions for Thailand’s crucial tourism sector, the public outcry over Wang’s abduction raises uncomfortable questions about the ability of the supposedly all-powerful Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to protect its citizens against a ragtag bunch of gangsters lurking in the poorest fringes of Asia’s poorest nations. “It’s bad for the brand,” says Nick Bisley, a professor of international relations at Australia’s La Trobe University. “And it speaks to the Party’s deep-seated anxiety of not being in control and having citizens doing things beyond its powers.”
Yet the sheer scale and dogged endurance of the “scamdemic,” as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has dubbed it, has led others to draw bolder conclusions.
“It isn’t that China can’t stop this,” says Erin West, a former Deputy District Attorney in Santa Clara County, Calif., who founded the Operation Shamrock anti-scam NGO and earlier this month briefed the National Security Council at the White House. “I don’t think they have any real interest in stopping it, unless it affects a Chinese victim. I think China is directly benefiting.”
The roots of the scamdemic lie in Southeast Asia’s illicit betting industry, which has long been run by Chinese “Triad” organized crime syndicates. Gambling is heavily proscribed across Greater China, yet it’s a region where nearly $850 billion is estimated to be wagered annually.
But when the physical casinos perched in shady entrepots along China’s periphery were shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic, these criminal organizations were forced to find other sources of income. Other than turning their gambling operations online, they used the same illicit communications systems to convert derelict casinos into scamming hubs, where trafficking victims are forced to orchestrate romance-investment cons, crypto fraud, and deepfake pornography, targeting people across the globe, and increasingly the U.S.
The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) estimates that cyber scamming in Southeast Asia generates more than $43.8 billion annually, with U.S. citizens “now a top target” who lost $3.5 billion to scams originating in the region in 2023 alone. “This scamming industry could soon rival fentanyl as one of the top dangers that Chinese criminal networks pose to the United States,” said the USIP.
Initially, affluent people across Greater China were the targets. The explosion of scamming and the trafficking that feeds it even inspired a 2023 film, No More Bets, which broke box office records in China. In late 2023, the Chinese government responded to growing public outrage with a series of raids and joint operations with local law enforcement in Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Indonesia that saw some 56,000 people involved in pig-butchering to be repatriated to China. Most notably, China pressured Myanmar authorities to bring down the Kokang “Four Families,” an ethnically Triad group operating along its frontier with China’s Yunnan province.
In the wake of those arrests, many of the scam operators went further underground. Yet they’ve since returned with devastating potency. “It continues to accelerate,” says West. “I am constantly bombarded—as is local police, as is the FBI—with more and more victims. It’s constant and doesn’t show any signs of slowing.”
West goes further to say the sheer scale of fraud committed by Chinese nationals suggests complicity by the state. The goal, she alleges, may be to weaken China’s superpower rival. “We’re talking about a generation’s worth of wealth being moved from the United States,” West adds. “It’s just way too much money to be allowed in the hands of a few kingpins. This smells like state involvement.”
West concedes that she doesn’t have any smoking-gun evidence to point to CCP collusion, though she says she “finds it hard to believe that they are allowing this kind of behaviour to continue by Chinese fugitives unless they are getting a cut.”
There are certainly difficult questions to answer. How, if China doesn’t hold significant clout with traffickers, did officials manage to negotiate Wang’s release just three days after his abduction on Jan. 3? And why, after the flurry of arrests in 2023, has Chinese law enforcement action slowed despite a resurgence in criminality?
Still, Jeremy Douglas, chief of staff and strategy for the UNODC, disagrees with West’s assessment. “The largest number of victims to this day remains in China,” he tells TIME. “And slowing or stopping capital moving outside through different mechanisms is a national priority.”
Asked about the slowdown in enforcement actions, Douglas explains that “there was a lot of intelligence in-place that led to the big operations in 2023, and the situation now is more reactive—they’re chasing things in a different way. They’re following-up on cases and victims, and trying to find leads into the criminal groups.”
China’s government insists that it is fully committed to stamping out pig-butchering. In a Jan. 17 statement, China’s Ministry of State Security said it “will continue to maintain a high-pressure crackdown on cross-border telecommunications network fraud crimes, … pursue them relentlessly, deepen special crackdown operations, increase international law enforcement cooperation, make every effort to destroy overseas telecommunications fraud dens, arrest the ‘financial sponsors’ and backbones of criminal groups, and coordinate to rescue trapped people.”
Still, West’s skepticism regarding Chinese enforcement is shared by other experts up to a point. “Judging by its actions, China’s goal has never been to stop scams in their entirety but simply to try to ensure their own citizens are not suffering, and also to ensure these criminals cannot be more powerful than the Chinese government,” says Mina Chiang, founder of the Humanity Research Consultancy, which specializes in combating modern slavery. “That’s their primary interest instead of ethics or justice.”
Indeed, one former scam operator working in Laos’s notorious Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone was quoted by Taiwanese media saying there’s a tacit understanding that “+86” people—referring to China’s dialling code—were off-limits while it was open season on other nationalities. However, it appears that Chinese targets are now firmly back on the menu. In the midst of the Wang episode, a list of more than 170 other Chinese trafficking victims went viral on China’s Weibo microblog amid a crescendo of appeals from families for help. On Jan 18, a Chinese male model who had been duped in a manner identical to Wang was freed after almost a month in Myawaddy.
Read More: For Trafficking Victims Forced to Scam Others, the Nightmare Continues Even After Escape
Certainly, the way China deals with scamming is problematic. For one, it doesn’t have a specific law on human trafficking, which is instead only defined in Article 240 of China’s Criminal Law. However, this only stipulates potential trafficking victims as “a woman or a child,” meaning that officially men cannot be trafficked under Chinese law. “While there are some female [pig-butchering] victims, the overwhelming majority are men because their law is structured in a way that criminals can exploit male citizens with less accountability for their actions,” says Chiang.
In addition, Chinese nationals who participate in scams even under extreme duress are treated as criminals themselves once repatriated. This legal quagmire means that Chinese men are not only among the most targeted demographic—given the overriding need for Chinese language skills—but also the most likely to resist once snared, so they are much more likely to suffer beatings and torture, too. “One of the main problems about China’s approach is that they only focus on scams,” adds Chiang. “There’s almost zero focus on victims of human trafficking.”
Still, even if China could do more to rein in the scammers, they are far from alone. According to the Bali Process, an international forum focused on human trafficking, the proceeds from scam centers ends up with “unscrupulous businesspeople, and in many cases, corrupt bureaucrats and law enforcement officials, who are also essential to facilitating these operations.” In September 2024, Alice Guo, mayor of the Philippine town of Bamban, was removed from office due to alleged ties to illegal gambling operations that involved trafficking.
Every day, trucks hauling cement and other building materials trundle over the Thai border from Mae Sot to Myawaddy, Myanmar, where new scam compounds like that where Wang was imprisoned spring up constantly in full view of the Thai authorities. There are estimated to be as many as 40 separate scam compounds in the town, many of which are plugged into Thai electricity and internet services.
Even the U.S. could be doing more. In response to Thai authorities efforts to shut off those utilities, the scammers have increasingly turned to the Starlink internet connections of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to multiple law enforcement officials. (SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TIME before publication.)
In addition, the unstoppable rise of AI capabilities means the scamdemic is set to grow. From 2022 to 2023, the Asia-Pacific region experienced a 1,530% rise in deepfake fraud, according to the Sumsub online security firm.
Douglas of the UNODC describes the scam phenomenon as a “multi-headed hydra” which requires a coherent and united effort to defeat. “States have their limits, and even the biggest have difficulty exerting authority inside some of these spaces to the extent that they would like,” he says. “Unless you dismantle a lot of organized crime infrastructure and address the underlying environmental conditions it will continue to mushroom.”
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