By Jan van der Putten
Worldwide, digital scammers are taking billions of euros out of their victims’ pockets. However, these perpetrators work as slaves for the bosses of small and large gangs. The largest gangs come from China.
Dubious record
In one area after another, the People’s Republic of China is emerging as a world leader. She is also aiming high to become the holder of a dubious record: as the home country of the biggest digital fraudsters in the world. According to the UN drug and crime agency, this industry is worth almost forty billion dollars a year. The scammers leave the dirty work to the at least one hundred thousand people they have lured, not only from China, but also from dozens of other countries, to their scam centers. There they are enslaved.
The slaves have only one task: to knock as much money out of the pocket as possible from as many people, anywhere in the world, in English or in their own language. In a crash course, they learn tactics to gain the trust of their victims, for example by praising them to the skies or courting them digitally. With the promise of fabulous profits, they sell investments, cryptocurrency or participation in gambling games. This worldwide remote theft is dominated by Chinese mafia families. Last year, 78 thousand small and large Chinese fraudsters were sued, more than half more than the year before. Yet it was no more than the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg of scam crime.
Not in the picture
The rapid increase in the number of victims came to the Chinese police on a lot of criticism. She would not be nearly tough enough against the digital bandits and thus damage China’s reputation as a country with relatively low crime. The ubiquitous (facial recognition) cameras are not usable in this case. After all, they cannot portray online crimes, because they do not take place in public spaces. In fact, they often don’t even take place in China.
Death penalty for mafia boss Bai Suocheng
China has numerous criminal gangs, but the groups that specialize in online crime mainly carry out their actions from Southeast Asia, with civil war-torn Myanmar as its main base. They have benefited enormously from the elimination in 2024 of a notorious Myanmar politician and warlord: the mafia boss Bai Suocheng, lord and master of the Kokang region bordering China. In addition to telephone and online scams, he became very rich through drug and arms trafficking, the exploitation of prostitutes and the running of casinos and gambling sites. Bai and his cronies are responsible for the murder of six Chinese. China demanded and obtained their extradition. In November, the verdict fell: for Bai, his son and three others, the death penalty, (life) imprisonment for sixteen family members and employees.
Kidnappings of actors
At the beginning of this year, the Chinese Wang Xing, a fairly obscure actor, was lured to Thailand with an offer for an interesting film role. Upon arrival in Bangkok, he was kidnapped by a Myanmar gang. He ended up in Apollo Park, a scam center in Myanmar near the Thai border. Crime syndicates have the empire there to themselves. Wang’s disappearance was big news in China and Thailand. He turned out not to be the only Chinese actor who had been lured to Thailand with false promises. With the quick liberation of Wang from Apollo Park, this kidnapping ended well.
Campaign against cyber fraud achieves results
To boost its reputation, the Chinese police started a massive campaign against cyber fraud. The results were announced this summer. The figures were staggering, although they may have been inflated: 1.7 million cases of fraud had been addressed, more than twelve billion scam phone calls blocked, almost eleven billion telephone scam messages intercepted, 360 thousand suspects arrested. In cooperation with local colleagues, the Chinese police also struck in fraud palaces in Southeast Asia: more than two thousand scam houses were dismantled, eighty thousand suspects were arrested, tens of thousands of people were freed from slavery.
Modern slavery
Police research and the stories of Wang Xing and freed slaves have revealed more about the working methods of the digital major fraudsters. Their recruitment practices range from kidnapping to recruiting. A standard method is to offer a royally paid position in the IT sector abroad. Typical is the case of Aaron. He seemed to have no future in his country in southern Africa. That is why he eagerly accepted the wonderful proposal someone made him: a brilliant job in a tech company in Thailand.
Upon arrival in the promised land, he was warmly welcomed and, together with two other African young men, was escorted to the car that would take them to a hotel near the airport. However, they did not end up in the hotel, but in a kind of prison camp in Myanmar, called KK Park. The complex was specially built for remote theft on an industrial scale. Journalists from Deutsche Welle have spoken to several survivors. They were treated like slaves: seventeen-hour working days, no rest breaks, let alone holidays, strict surveillance, torture, murder.
“If we said we wanted to leave,” said the West African Lucas, “we were told that they would sell us or kill us.” We know that other former cyber slaves had to rake in at least five thousand dollars a week. If that did not work, there were blows or electric shocks, or confinement in a dark room without windows. Anyone who dared to escape risked death. The guards were former members of a Myanmar resistance movement. They had given up the fight against the regime and put themselves at the service of Chinese scam mafiosi.
The slave population is very mixed. In a cybercrime center that has since been rolled up, people of twenty other nationalities worked in addition to Chinese. They were permanently guarded. Their ethical objections did not count. One of the “employees” later said that he had gotten a targeted victim so enthusiastic about the fake investment that he was planning to sell his wife’s jewelry to finance his purchase. “I thought that was terrible,” he said. “Don’t do it, I wanted to tell him. But that was not possible, because we were constantly bugged by our bosses”.
Chinese successor to Bai Suocheng
Among those arrested last summer were members of an entire Chinese family called Ming, which had made a fortune from online scams. Eleven members of this family were recently sentenced to death in China. Five relatives received a suspended death sentence – usually meaning life imprisonment – while twelve others were sentenced to long prison terms. The Ming family ran a number of large fraud centers in the same region of Kokang where the Myanmar mafia patriarch Bai Suocheng had previously been in charge.
Historical roots in triads
The Chinese mafia families are a continuation of the triads, secret societies that in some cases date back to the fourteenth century. Many of these groups go back to the religious sect of the White Lotus. This movement led a long-term rebellion in 1794 against China’s last imperial house, the Qing Dynasty, which was not of Chinese but of Manchu origin and was therefore despised by many Han Chinese.
The triads increasingly took on a chauvinistic character. They contributed powerfully to the overthrow of the Qing and thus to the end of the Chinese Empire in 1912. Then the triads set the Not so big a step from political violence to gangster violence. This he criminal ‘patriots’ also proved to be very useful for the new leader Chiang Kai-shek. For example, they were used in the mass murder of communist activists in Shanghai in 1927. That massacre was Chiang Kai-shek’s response to the attempt by the Communist Party, founded six years earlier, to unleash a workers’ uprising.
The triads also settled in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore and other Chinese-majority places. There they devoted themselves to the opium trade, extortion, prostitution and other forms of illegal enrichment. After Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, a harsh suppression of the triads began. Hong Kong then became their main operations center. From there they swarmed all over the world, especially to countries where there are large Chinese communities. Investigative journalists have shown that in recent years the Party has been cooperating with these triads infiltrated into the diaspora in various countries. The criminals are used to control, intimidate, or worse critics within the Chinese communities.
Global, borderless working area
The Netherlands is not spared Chinese organized crime. As early as the 1920s, competing Chinese gangs were shooting each other in Amsterdam. In 2021, a mafia leader was liquidated. Branches of five Chinese triads operate in our country, including 14K. This gang, which has an estimated twenty thousand members worldwide, is one of the three largest triads. In the Netherlands, 14K devotes itself to drug smuggling, money laundering, prostitution and the sale of counterfeits, among other things. The operations center of the triads in Europe is Italy, the country where the mafia was born. Chinese organized crime in Italy has excellent ties with the camorra, the mafia of Naples.
Modern technology has proven to be a blessing for the ‘modern’ triads. Nowadays, practically everyone has a smartphone, which means that practically everyone is a potential victim of online scams. Repression does not seem to help, because the business is too lucrative for that. If the ground under the gangsters’ feet gets too hot, all they have to do is move their activities. This explains why the Chinese tele-scam industry is now also active in several countries of Africa and Latin America. Because distances don’t count in the cyber world. Not even for digital criminals from China.
Jan van der Putten is a writer and journalist, who previously served, among other things, as a correspondent in China. His most recent book is “Tijd van illusies: Mijn kleine geschiedenis van de wereld”, published by Querido Facto.
