Cybercrime costs billions of dollars a day for the global economy, but many of the perpetrators in Burma’s fraud centres can be victims themselves.
News Analysis
Every day people in the United States and many other countries are scammers. Fake customer service operators, romance scammers, and perpetrators of more complicated cryptocurrency investment scams.
But those who are scamned from retirement savings and university funds probably don’t realize that the person on the other side of the phone is another victim who is already free to pay.
The revelation regarding the existence of a vast fraud centre along Burma’s Thailand border, run by Chinese organized crime syndicates and human traffickers, highlights the scale of international cybercrime.
She is based in Maysot, Thailand, where she talks to hundreds of con artists from her cybercrime hub across the border.
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“These people have no other options. They scam someone, get electric shock, they scam someone, they’re locked up in prison with their hands without using food or water,” Miller said.
“So it’s obviously a very harsh aspect of the damage that happens.”
“Global annual losses on cybercrime are over $10 trillion, or we’re putting $32 billion a day in a different way,” he told The Epoch Times.
Matthew Hogan, a Connecticut State Police detective and officer with the Secret Service Financial Crime Task Force, said that Burma (also known as Myanmar) fraudsters are working on romance scams and various scams that charge bank customers over the phone.
However, he said during the Epoch era that the biggest growth was a long-term fraud known as “slaughter of pigs.”
“They consider their victims to be pigs and they fatten them by creating this appeal of incredible investment opportunities. So the pigs fatten… and at some point it’s time to slaughter the pigs,” Hogan said.
Hogan says that scams usually start with people who receive direct messages from strangers on SMS or social media, then start building “trust relationships.”
“They don’t shy about the fact that they are Chinese. …The thing I get is usually a woman and they’ll say, ‘Hey, my name is Emma, I’m actually exercising in California.’
Hundreds of fake domains
“They might say that directly, but they mention passing by, like, ‘I’m going to buy an uncle from the Rolex store,’ and they either send photos of themselves at the Rolex store or selfies from inside the Porsche,” Hogan said.
Ultimately, the scammer leads the conversation to invest in cryptocurrency, convincing the victim to invest in a completely false crypto scheme.
He said the entire fraud is supported by hundreds of fake domains aimed at showing fluctuations in cryptocurrency investments.
“There are hundreds of domains where these scammers are operating in one of these scam centers. Trafficked people are technically savvy, so they are building websites. They are building iOS and Google compatible apps. They are designing domains.
Over the past two months, several cyber fraud centres in Burma, near the border with Thailand, have been shut down, and thousands of workers (many claiming they were trafficked) have been stuck.
However, last month, General Sachai Pitaneraboot, who is in charge of investigating Thai police, said that up to 100,000 people are still working at the Cybercrime Hub in Burma’s Miyawaj region.
“Inside, there are conspiracy scammers. Those people may feel a bit of regret, but I think they are very separate from what’s going on,” Miller said.
The con man’s “Incredible Regret”
“A lot of them have saved people’s lives…and they came out with incredible regret, guilt from the survivors, and incredible trauma about what they did,” Miller said.
“Many of these people are religious people, they are either Christians or Muslims and have quite a moral problem with what they did.”
She said the Chinese syndicate, with links to the Triad Organized Crime Group, runs a cyber fraud centre, along with the cooperation of the Democrats Karen Buddhist Army (DBKA) and the Border Patrol (BGF), a group loyal to the Burmese military government.
Miller said the same syndicate is also operating in Laos and Cambodia.
“We have seen Myanmar overall being more cruel as far as treatment (of workers) is concerned. Because of the uncertainty of the citizens of Myanmar, it is very challenging.
Miller said 8,000 workers rescued from cyber fraud centres this year came from 29 different countries.
She said the numbers include 3,000 from China, 1,000 from Ethiopia, 600 from Indonesia, over 500 from India, and then from Kenya, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and several African countries.
Jenkinson said all of these scams are data dependent.
“They attack the servers, remove terabytes of information, and remove any personally identifiable information.”
“Data is money.”
He states: “In the 1930s, legendary bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he targeted the bank. He said, ‘That’s the money.’ Cybercriminals attack servers because they have the data and the data is new money. ”
Jenkinson said these hacking gangs will runsom the company due to the encrypted keys to decipher the information and release it to the company.
However, data burglars also use it to target vulnerable people and sell it to other organized crime gangs who use it to scam it from millions of dollars each year.
“It is known that more than 90% of ransom-paying companies will not get all their data back, and data will be found later on the dark web,” Jenkinson said.
Hogan said he spoke to many victims of what he called a scam epidemic across the United States.
“We had people put Hellok (the home equity credit line) in their homes, and we had people mostly removed their second mortgage.
“We had a woman who was supporting us in the Midwest and it got a loan in her home and we lost it, so she had to seize it, we had the whole territory.
Three examples of messages sent by scammers as part of the “pig slaughter” scam. Courtesy of Detective Matthew Hogan/Connecticut State Police
“I spoke to victims all over the country. I spoke to many of them all around the world. It’s definitely not us alone.”
“What we’re talking about is organised crime, exploiting cybersecurity that has been confused due to massive rewards, non-attacks and non-tax systems,” Jenkinson said.
Jenkinson said that not only do most large companies ignore theft of this data, they have not made public the fact that they have become victims.
“They would rather ignore it… (Think) some of their customers become scams, but hopefully not everything about them,” he said.
“What happens is a trickle-down economy. Let’s say the banks earn £1 billion in profits last year and suffer cyberattacks.
“Well, what they’re doing is, ‘Okay, we’ve been allocated with a bit of creative accounting. Since cyberattacks are $250 million, we’re deducting the billion dollar profit.”
Jenkinson said CEOs and CFOs, who are at the top of the world’s leading banks and credit card companies, do not personally bind them to losing money from cybercrime, and therefore have no incentive to tackle it.
“They are non-compliant because banks don’t do their jobs properly, and they are unstable, but they are very rarely explained.
“The data is plagiarized and extracted from unsecure servers. This means that everyone who uses that bank or facility is literally stepping into the fire, and they’re not aware at all.”
Jenkinson said outsourcing customer service by banks and other financial companies can blame people for declining defenses.
Disadvantages of outsourcing
“For many years, we have mistakenly outsourced to India and other parts of the world, and that was one of our downfalls,” he said.
Jenkinson said that the advent of cloud computing since around 2010 allowed companies to outsource their domain name systems (DNSS) and content delivery networks (CDNs) to server farms around the world, speeding up data acquisition and reducing latency.
Police officers spoke to the suspect at the Cybercrime Investigation Bureau in Bangkok, Thailand on March 22, 2023, wearing a light green shirt, sitting with their backs on camera. Thai Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau via AP
However, he said data centers run by companies such as CloudFlare, Akamai, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are not secure enough.
Jenkinson said this gave them access to data from people being investigated by the National Security Agency and other Intelligence Reporting agencies, but that meant that criminals could “exploit the exact same data due to ransomware such as fraud, cybercrimes and other.”
He said it was no coincidence that cybercrime has increased exponentially since 2010.
“The reason is because you love him, hate him, or Edward Snowden showed the world what America was doing for 20 or 30 years and what its enemies said… If they can do that, we can do that too. It was a cybercrime,” Jenkinson said.
The Epoch Times contacted the Federal Reserve, the American Bankers Association, and the Data Centers Union on the issues raised in this article, but did not receive a response per publication time.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to the report.
