As a plane landed at Changshui Airport in Kunming, Yunnan, the "four major telecom fraud families in northern Myanmar" that once caused everyone to panic were finally arrested. The main leaders of the Bai family, Wei family and Liu family were all arrested and brought back to our country. This kind of happy event suddenly became the number one trending topic on Weibo. In the past year, we have frequently struck hard at telecom fraud centers in northern Myanmar.

Since the beginning of September last year, when the first batch of suspects were "twisted and sent" back to China, we have been catching both big fish and small shrimps. Today, a full 44,000 suspects have been handed over to my country.

The "Four Big Families" that were destroyed recently were considered to be the local local emperors. They arrested people all over the world to serve as fraud parlu and set up fraud assembly lines.

In order to destroy these four big fishes, in November last year, we issued a "wanted order" for the Ming family, the younger brother of the Bai family, the head of the four major families.

In just three days, the boss of the Ming family, Ming Xuechang, committed suicide out of fear of crime, and the remaining soldiers and generals were all arrested the next day.

After the Ming family was destroyed, following this thread, we found the four major families.

There is also a picture circulating on the Internet that when we were looking for the second son of the Bai family, the other party posted a provocative picture on Douyin that "the enemy will stop us, and the water will cover us."

Then, it was immediately served in a pot.

Ultra-clear, watermark-free beautiful photos

In order to help you understand how deep the problem of electronic fraud in Southeast Asia is, I have read several special reports issued by the United Nations on the situation of telecommunications fraud in Southeast Asia.

I dug up a lot of information that was not mentioned in current reports.

For example, the report gave a very scary set of data.There are at least 120,000 people in Myanmar alone who have been deceived into engaging in electronic fraud, and at least 100,000 people in Cambodia.

Once they fail to complete their recruitment tasks, these people will face heavy fines.

There are even outrageous fines such as "breathing fees", "keyboard wear and tear fees", "crossing legs fees", etc. If you accidentally get sick, you will be fined $1,000.

Compensation is not bad, but in addition to fines, it is often accompanied by confinement, abuse and beatings.

That is to say,The videos of scammers in northern Myanmar who were chopped off their fingers and buried alive that we usually see on the Internet may be true, and the situation is far worse than you and I imagined.

If you count the number of victims who have been defrauded of money, it is impossible to estimate.

In addition to the shocking number of participants, the types of defrauded people mentioned in the report also changed the minds of negative reviewers.

In the past two years of online fraud activities,Those who were defrauded of money were not mainly middle-aged and elderly people, but mostly college students, graduate students, IT practitioners, etc.

A friend from i Chunqiu (a domestic institution dedicated to network security and information security) further told the reviewer that based on their experience,It is true that young, highly educated returnees have the highest proportion of domestic fraud victims. On the one hand, these people do not know much about the domestic electronic fraud situation and are easily psychologically compromised by scammers.

Moreover, mobile phones are very good at playing mobile payments, electronic accounts, account authorizations, etc. They may be more familiar than scammers in operating them.

The elderly may still be studying the first step, while the overseas returnees have already finished transferring money.

In addition, the report also answers a question in the minds of many people, that is, since everyone knows that electronic fraud is rampant in Southeast Asia, why is it so difficult to deal with it?

There are various opinions on the Internet for this reason. In the United Nations report, three main points were pointed out:Organized, digital platform development, and weak regional governance.

It’s easy to understand that there is an organization. The gangs in northern Myanmar are almost “collectivized”, “industrialized” and “officially protected”. After all, they all have four major families.

At the beginning, the four major families were actually landowners. They basically rented out a few pieces of land, or sent some people to help these electronic fraud groups look around.

But after a period of time, they found that e-mail fraud was too profitable, and they immediately jumped to set up a fraud park.

It was mentioned in the report,A group of 10 people can defraud 400,000 US dollars in a week.

These four major families have long controlled the military, political, and economic power in the Kokang region. On the surface, they claim to crack down on electronic fraud, but behind the scenes, they not only maintain the electronic fraud park, but even fight internally to grab territory.

This situation makes it difficult even for Myanmar itself to go in and recruit people.

More importantly, it is also what the negative reviewers think is the most important point.The fraud centers in Southeast Asia are basically in the so-called "Special Economic Zones."

But make no mistake, most of the "special economic zones" in Southeast Asia are different from Shenzhen and Xiamen in our country.

Many of their special economic zones are nominally designed to attract foreign investment and develop the economy. In fact, under this banner, these "special economic zones" have various tax and trade preferences, and even various review and supervision are simplified.

Soon, Southeast Asia's special economic zones, which were originally dreams of manufacturing and trade zones, turned into a paradise for the financial industry and service industry - its other name is also called casino. Opposite is the Starlight Casino on the Myanmar-Thailand border.

The United Nations has issued relevant reports before, all complaining about the various loopholes in the supervision and law enforcement mechanisms related to these Southeast Asian special economic zones, which cannot prevent money laundering at all. Even in some special economic zones near the border, the national supervision is basically a decoration, and they are involved in pornography, gambling and drugs.

During the epidemic, the performance of casinos, which are the main economic pillar of the special economic zones, plummeted.

So they carried out industrial upgrades one after another and turned around and committed electronic fraud.

After an investigation by the United Nations, it was found thatThese criminal gangs have upgraded the entire telecommunications fraud process into an advanced system that they all call sophisticated.

For example, when recruiting people, there will be beautifully designed and attractive "recruitment advertisements". Anyway, more money and less work will lead to better positions;

Then there are various "recruitment methods", including but not limited to looking for headhunters, paying huge sums of money to recruit people, and even offering 300 US dollars in new recruit incentives in some areas, which has also tempted many people to kidnap friends and join the team;

They have even made various localized adaptations according to each country. For example, in China, they use WeChat, which is commonly used by Chinese people, to defraud.

Even if this is already the case, the ever-evolving fraud groups still have a steady stream of new forces.

They defraud highly educated people in different majors, then further plug these people into the original system into different categories, and use their knowledge and experience to re-optimize the fraud process.

According to some insiders,These defrauded workers are more obedient and useful than the specially recruited professionals and team veterans.

What's even more terrifying is thatThese criminal gangs have been semi-openly recruiting and defrauding workers all over the world. Many people have been attracted by the big pie and actively participated in the fraud.

Therefore, they not only deceive people and money from all over the world, but they also use these people and money to upgrade their own industries.

For example, in the past, bank cards were used to "run scores" for money laundering, but now they are changed to virtual currencies and "on-chain" directly;

With the latest GPT, we are redesigning fraud routines;

In the past, I liked to trick people who learned foreign languages ​​to "work", but now because of AI, I am more inclined to recruit people who study computer science or have experience in self-media.

Of course, there is also the issue of corruption involving various official "deceptions" and collusion. Some high-ranking officials simply serve as guards during the "worker trafficking" process, or assist in smuggling, appearing on camera, informing others, etc.

Forced Crime Human Trafficking Offender Levels

After reading these complex interest entanglements disclosed in the report, we can understand why Kokang and even Southeast Asia as a whole have become a particularly difficult nut to crack.

Moreover, because China cannot have long-arm jurisdiction, it is very difficult to directly deal with such overseas hideouts.

In order to bite them off bit by bit, we could only take precautions from within in the early years.

In 2021, an additional crime was first added to the Criminal Law: the crime of assisting information network criminal activities.

It is also commonly referred to as the crime of helping and trusting. It is also a crime for those who still provide help even though they know that the other party is using it for telecommunications fraud.

Later, restrictions and specifications on personal payment codes for WeChat and Alipay were added.

Coupled with the publicity and crackdowns through various domestic channels, our "battle" against e-mail fraud had already yielded a lot before the news broke.

for exampleFrom August last year to now, domestic electronic fraud cases have dropped by nearly 30%, with 3.5 billion yuan frozen.

Coupled with the disintegration of the four major families in northern Myanmar, it is no wonder that many colleagues in the editorial department feel that the number of fraud calls has decreased significantly recently.

In the past, a large factory would report the number of people and amounts defrauded by electronic fraud within the company every month, but it has stopped updating these reports in the past few months. It turns out there is a reason.

But looking at it rationally, the battle against telecom fraud is far from over.

It is said that there is a more notorious KK fraud park hidden between Myanmar and Thailand. Today, when the four major families have been taken advantage of, not only has it not restrained at all, it is even expanding.

Even if these KKs are also taken away, other dens will still appear in the future. Now it is reported on the Internet that these fraud groups have gone to Dubai and Turkey to open secondary mines.

Therefore, as long as there are huge profits, this industry will continue and rise in another form.

We certainly hope to see more and more effective measures to combat electronic fraud in the future.

But at this stage, all we can do is protect ourselves, and the most important thing is to be vigilant at all times.