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Lights dim at South-east Asia's scam hub but 'pig butchering' continues
Despite a major crackdown, trafficked workers are still powering crime empires along the Myanmar border.
Across the Myawaddy district on the Myanmar side of the border, separated from Thailand by just the 20m-wide Moei River, construction activity hums along: amid the loud clanging of metal and the whir of power saws, tower cranes swing overhead completing high-rise buildings. In an April report, it said transnational organised crime in the region is evolving faster than at any previous point in history, marked by the proliferation of industrial-scale cyber-enabled fraud and scam centres, driven by sophisticated interconnected networks of money launderers, human traffickers and data brokers. “This makes transnational fraud perhaps the most dominant economic activity in the entire Mekong sub-region – equivalent to nearly half of (the) total GDP (gross domestic product) in the primary host countries,” Mr Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Centre who has researched the region’s scam syndicates extensively, said in his May report.
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