Chinese state media reported on Tuesday that the Wenzhou Intermediate People’s Court in China’s eastern province of Zhejiang executed 11 people convicted of running telecom scam centers in Myanmar.
The suspects were reportedly members of the Ming clan, an organized crime ring that joined forces with other mob families to turn the Myanmar town of Laukkaing into a den of gambling, prostitution, and fraud.
Laukkaing was one of several towns scattered across Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia that have become havens for email and telephone scam operations. The ruthless gangs that run these operations have a penchant for luring young Chinese nationals to apply for seemingly legitimate information technology jobs, then kidnapping and enslaving them.
Satellite surveillance over the past few years has shown some of these scam centers turning into concentration camps, with barbed-wire fences and armed patrols to prevent the captive workers from escaping. Disobedience and escape attempts were punished by torture and death.
In a diplomatically awkward detail of the Laukkaing saga, the reason gangs were able to take over the town and transform it into a highly profitable hive of scum and villainy was that Myanmar military chief Min Aung Hlaing led an operation to take down the warlord who previously ruled the area about 20 years ago. Min Aung Hlaing went on to lead a coup against the civilian government of Myanmar in 2021, and is now the ruler of the junta.
The gangland party in Laukkaing ended abruptly in 2023 when local ethnic militias fighting a civil war against the government of Myanmar captured the town, took the gang lords prisoner, and handed them over to Chinese authorities.
The Myanmar military has since grown more aggressive about raiding scam centers, possibly due to pressure from Beijing, although China also has a habit of overlooking telecom scam operations run by ethnic Chinese bosses, especially if they spread Chinese Communist Party propaganda online in addition to ripping people off, and kick a respectable share of their profits back to the Chinese government.
China seemingly lost patience with the telecom scammers after they made the mistake of kidnapping a famous Chinese actor named Wang Xing from Thailand early last year. Wang’s abduction sparked public outrage and panic among Chinese tourists, jeopardizing the tourist industry in Thailand and other Southeast Asian destinations.
Evidently the Ming clan was in especially bad odor with the biggest gang of all — the one headquartered in Beijing and run by dictator Xi Jinping – because 11 of their members were sentenced to crimes including “homicide, illegal detention, fraud, and operating gambling debts” in a closed-door trial by the court in Zhejiang and executed in September. The executions were not announced until now.
The BBC reported on Thursday that previous trials accused the Mings of collecting about $1.4 billion from their scam centers and gambling dens between 2015 and 2023, and they killed at least 14 Chinese citizens in the course of their organized crime activities.
The top boss in the Ming clan, patriarch Ming Xuechang, reportedly killed himself in 2023 while attempting to evade capture by the Myanmar military. About 20 other members of the family received sentences from five years to life imprisonment in September.
“Five members of the Bai family were also sentenced to death in November, and the trials of two other groups of defendants from the Wei and the Liu families have not yet concluded,” the BBC noted.
Another major development in the scam center saga occurred this month when Cambodia extradited Chinese tycoon Chen Zhi to China. Chen has been accused by U.S. officials of using his massive Cambodian company, the Prince Holding Group, as a front for “one of Asia’s largest transnational criminal organizations.” Prosecutors say Chen’s operation stole millions of dollars from American victims with cyberscams, which were run out of forced labor compounds in Cambodia, similar to the hellhole in Laukkaing.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Thursday that the Ming executions were part of his government’s accelerated crackdown on “crimes of cross-border telecom and online fraud.”
“China will continue deepening international law enforcement cooperation, step up efforts of combating telecom fraud and online gambling and other related cross-border crimes, and eradicate the problems of gambling and scam,” Guo said.
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