A Chinese court has sentenced five top members of an infamous Myanmar mafia to death as Beijing continues its crackdown on scam operations in South East Asia.
In all 21 Bai family members and associates were convicted of fraud, homicide, injury and other crimes, said a state media report published on the court website.
The family is among a handful of mafias that rose to power in the 2000s and transformed the impoverished backwater town of Laukkaing into a lucrative hub of casinos and red-light districts.
In recent years they pivoted to scams in which thousands of trafficked workers, many of them Chinese, are trapped, abused and forced to defraud others in criminal operations worth billions.
I’m generally against death penalty but this is great news. Chinese syndicates in the region are some of the worst people on earth right now and I say this as someone who’s currently based in Thailand and have been paying attention to the scam center issue for years now.
Seems like whatever protection they had within CCP is crumbling due to critical mass reaching the news lately and mostly thanks to strong exposure here by western journalists and pressure from SEA governments. Even CCP could not tolerate this and hopefully this means the end of this truly despicable source of human suffering.
There’s also been some rumors that CCP is directly involved with this as a policy to harm the west and weaken the SEA region which make sense, especially given the authoritarian nature but AFAIK there is no strong evidence here and it might have gotten too high profile either way so it’s very possible that these centers will be defeated soon.