Portable internet helps Asia's scam centres bypass blackouts

• Some 7,000 victims were rescued from scam compounds in Myanmar
• UN estimates hundreds of thousands of trafficked workers still trapped
• ASEAN agreement allows internet kits to be transported from Thailand into other countries

BANGKOK - In February, Thai and Myanmar authorities worked together to turn off electricity and the internet in an unprecedented operation to free thousands of trafficking victims forced to work in cyber-scam centres in Myanmar.

It succeeded, and some 7,000 people from 29 countries were released.  

But trafficking experts question how significant the blackouts were, and will be, if satellite internet technology such as Starlink, China's SpaceSail or the French-German Eutelsat becomes abundant in the region.

Owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk's Space X, Starlink provides high-speed internet via portable packs.

Registered Starlink users simply plug in the device, which is slim enough to carry in a backpack, and point it towards the sky to access a stable internet connection. Service plans begin at £50 ($65) per month.

“We're starting to see Starlink signals pop up more and more in the areas where these compounds are,” said Andrew Wasuwongse, country director of International Justice Mission Thailand, an anti-trafficking non-profit organisation.

More than 80 Starlink devices were seized by authorities in Myanmar and Thailand last year, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Countries have differing restrictions on the devices that make their legality ambiguous. In Thailand and Myanmar, they are considered illegal and not licensed by authorities.

Starlink states on its website that users cannot engage its services for “fraudulent or illegal” activities. It did not reply to a request for comment.

Aware of the devices' use in propping up illegal operations, Thai authorities attempt to seize them when they find them, but an ASEAN trade agreement allowing goods to be imported into Thailand and taken into another Southeast Asian country without inspection makes it difficult.

“We know that they import a lot of Starlink devices through Thailand,” said Siriwish Kasemsap, director of the Bureau of Human Trafficking Crime in Thailand’s Ministry of Justice.

Yet their clandestine presence has also proven useful amid the recent earthquake in Myanmar, providing connectivity to help support relief efforts amid wider blackouts.

Many of the scam centres also rely on illegal Thai internet connections, Wasuwongse said, and freed workers reported that as a result, the internet shutdown during the rescue operation did very little.

The arrest warrants and threats of raids had more of an impact in the release of what he described as a “drop in a bucket” of victims, he said.

Bogus schemes

The United Nations estimates hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in scam farms run by criminal networks in places like Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.

Sara, who did not want to use her full name, is one such worker, lured to Bangkok from South Africa with the promise of a tech job, only to be trafficked into Myanmar.

There, she said she spent nine months coercing strangers online, 21 hours a day, to invest in bogus schemes or she risked being sent to the “prison.”

“It's an underground place that is dark, where they will hang you upside down and torture you, electrocute you and beat you up for three days, or they would lock you in a room alone, with no human contact, with no water, with no food for three days,” she told Context/Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Sara was released when she convinced her captors her mother was sick, and she managed to claw together close to $100,000 as ransom. She is still paying off debts to friends and family who lent her money.

Palit, a 42-year-old Thai national, escaped a similar compound in 2023 after six months of being forced to engage in fake online relationships that would coerce people into giving significant amounts of money.

He lived with 11 men in a small room with one bathroom that only had dirty water. Many got sick, he said, but there was no medicine nor opportunities to rest.

“If we couldn't work and if we did not listen to commands, we would get abused like hit, shot and [other] punishments,” he said.

While Palit was rescued in a small raid and returned to Thailand, thousands of victims remain stuck, propping up an operation that lines the pockets of criminal syndicates.

Thai leverage

Internet access is vital to their operation, and criminal gangs, largely from China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, invest in ensuring connections via unconventional means, experts said.

Despite the gangs' canny access to the internet, wider shutdowns are not useless, said Rebecca Miller, Southeast Asia and Pacific regional coordinator of human trafficking and migrant smuggling at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

This operation, the largest of its kind, was symbolic, “showing that Thailand is taking this issue seriously and there's multiple levers that they wanted to pull," she said.

The strong government reaction was long overdue, said Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates.

With a porous border, Thailand is a key transit point for people and products, from internet devices to drugs, and has the power to make it difficult to operate the centres, he said.

“Thailand has a great deal of leverage over the Border Guard Forces who have been the key local protectors of the scam centres, so this is more about Bangkok getting serious about going after the scam centres than anything the Myanmar government has done,” Robertson said.

The Thai government has said it plans to strengthen border controls, so people like Sara cannot be easily transported.

When she was in Myanmar, Sara said she mistakenly thought she was still in Thailand, given there had been no border checks.

"I couldn't have imagined that I was in a different country,” she said.

The multiple jurisdictions, where the syndicates conduct money laundering, trafficking, assault and cybercrime, make investigations difficult, but this first joint operation could create positive momentum, Wasuwongse said.

Otherwise, the released victims may simply be replaced by others, he said.

UNODC is already seeing the targeted compounds move south of Myawaddy, a town across a narrow river from Thailand, along the mountainous Three Pagodas Pass, “almost like a 'whack-a-mole' effect,” said Miller.

“You take action in one spot, and then suddenly the problem shifts somewhere else," she said. "This definitely is not the end of it all.”

(Reporting by Rebecca L. Root; Editing by Amruta Byatnal and Ellen Wulfhorst.)