IT-Slaves in Myanmar: Who Said New Technologies Will Make You Free?
© Getty Images / sarayut Thaneerat
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A lot of Russians have been shocked profoundly when learned, recently, about our compatriots released from the infamous call-centers in Myanmar.
The first of the reasons for that surprise was, that only yesterday next to everyone in Russia thought that Ukrainians and nobody else were participating in online scams. The second reason for contemplation was the sad reality of information age bringing us large slave cities, with population swindling people out of their money.
Speaking about Ukraine’s methods of warfare, these folks are notorious not only for chasing and killing civilians with FPV-drones. Right after the start of war a veritable flood of scams engulfed Russia, when callers pretending to be police captains or Federal Security Service officers were warning people, especially the elderly ones, that somebody was hacking into their accounts. In fact, somebody really was doing just that at the moment of conversation, and all they needed was a pin code from the victims. Then more typical scam scenarios followed. And only now that nuisance became rather a joke than a threat.
That’s how we learned that there are numerous scam farms spread all over Ukraine, with people working there capitalizing on their passable Russian, that is Ukraine’s preferable means of communication.
So imagine my surprise when I’ve encountered something very similar in a bank in Malaysia when going on leave there a couple of years ago. The whole of East and South East Asia have been struggling, then, with hundreds of online scams, ruining banking and all kind of transactions. My first reaction was, “so it was not Ukrainians who invented all that? Incredible”.
But only now the fact of existence of the whole jungle towns of slaving crooks in faraway lands is hitting (our Russian) home. The thing is, there is a small trickle of Russians released from these places, met and aided by the Russian consulate in Bangkok. The TV people and other reporters have made numerous interviews with them, telling essentially one and the same story. Scam centers are luring English-speaking Russians into Thailand, then the victims find themselves in another country (Myanmar) and cannot get out of there, living in guarded labor camps, albeit with some small pleasures like shops or massage.
To remind, only one such facility, called KK Park, has been stormed by Myanmar troops. We are told by the Chinese media that a total of 677 people involved in telecom fraud in Myanmar have been detained in Thailand, with more than 2,000 workers released. The group consists primarily of individuals from India and China, with smaller numbers from Vietnam, Pakistan, Indonesia and other countries, Thai army said.
The Global Times, China, also tells us that China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) announced on October 17 that authorities have successfully cracked a major transnational criminal case involving the notorious Myanmar-based Kokang gang leader Xu Faqi, also known as Xu Laofa, who was recently brought to justice under the China-Myanmar law enforcement cooperation framework. Earlier more than 5,400 Chinese suspects involved in telecom fraud in Myawaddy, Myanmar, have been repatriated in a joint crackdown launched by China, Myanmar, and Thailand since the beginning of 2025.
That’s good and nice, but several more scam cities remain in the same Myanmar, in the territories controlled by anti-government rebels. And that simple fact leads Russians, and not only Russians, to lots of pessimistic ideas. “Why is it that technical progress threatens us with mass slavery?” asks Igor Karaulov, a blogger and a known poet.
The mankind is prone to thinking that each and any new technology was meant to liberate us from slavery, Karaulov goes on. But in reality it often happens that the worse scum learns to use these and other new technologies, and do it faster than normal people. Internet was supposed to bring us freedom, too, but all too soon we heard the set phrases like “digital slavery” and “digital concentration camp”, and that was even before these concepts materialized in Myanmar.
All right, that was poetry at its best. Now for some more realistic things. A conference has been held, earlier this week, in Moscow State Foreign Relations University. The subject was a United Nations convention against cyber crimes, signed several days ago in Hanoi, Vietnam. Russia was the nation that proposed it and submitted the initial version of the text.
And that’s what we learn from the discussion there: there is a need to develop obligatory and universally accepted rules on online behavior. Also, there is a problem of obtaining a universally accepted proof of scams in that immaterial world out there. There is yet another problem, like what do you do about crimes with cryptocurrencies and how do you prove that some operations with it are criminal.
Simply speaking, we had to call a crime a crime and make it official, inserting such definition in a legal paper.
One more problem is all too obvious. So far, we were mostly talking about money, that bad people are trying to steal from the more or less good people. But how about cyber attacks against, shall we say, a nuclear power station? Or against a big power grid, with plenty of casualties?
There were several cases of new technologies, universally recognized as unacceptable and banned by this or that convention. Chemical weapons, first used in the First World War, seem to be the most obvious example. An international watchdog, called Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has been created in 1997 to enforce the universal ban for these weapons. But when Russia, these days, tries to bring to OPCW hard evidence of Ukrainian use of these weapons in a war, it’s getting cold shoulder.
Not to mention the fact that nobody is even trying to ban nuclear weapons, since good people use nuclear energy for good aims, while bad people may use it for something else. It’s same with IT, and, indeed, with millions of things that have their good use and bad use, too.
Besides, exactly what do you do not with lonely and evil hackers lurking among us, but with the whole cities – or even countries – of cyber criminals, who are holding slaves in nobody’s land beyond any kind of control? At best, it looks like pirate islands in the Caribbean in the 17th century, but with a global scope of activities.
And, to add to poet’s pessimism, we have to note that only 65 nations have signed the mentioned Hanoi Convention. Which means that more than two thirds of states in our world are somehow reluctant to do that.
You may say these problems are hopeless. Well, they are not. They are just totally new for our age, and the age is also new.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
