The inside scene of a self-fraud syndicate in Myanmar, whose leader calls himself "Brother Xi", is a middle-aged Chinese man. The Xige gang deceived mainly Chinese women between the ages of 30 and 50, preferably married. Because they fear for their reputation, they will do everything they can to avoid asking their families for help or calling the police.
This article was originally published in The New York Times, December 17, 2023Original title: Seven months in the Myanmar "pig killing plate" scam parkBy Isabelle Qian*All of this article is from The New York Times.
AdrafinO'Lue is looking forward to his new job, which pays well. But from the moment he arrived, he knew something was wrong.
He was not hired. He was kidnapped and forced to participate in a vicious online fraud campaign. Only by understanding how it works can there be hope of escaping. He was promised a good salary. More reasonable working schedules. Get the chance to live in the bustling metropolis of Bangkok. The recruitment agency said that with his English skills, he could work as a translator for an e-commerce company.
Above all, the 28-year-old Chinese office worker believes the job allows him to start from scratch and save money for his dream of moving to the West. So he said goodbye to his people around him in June last year and went to Thailand to take up his new job.
However, when he arrived, the sun was shining on his head - he felt that something was wrong. Instead of coming to an office building in the city, he was left in a camp-like place, which was a few improvised buildings between the jungle and muddy fields.
The park is very simple, with low cement houses and fences on doors and windows. Two men in camouflage uniforms stand guard at the entrance, armed with rifles. The high fences and fences are topped with barbed wire, apparently not only to prevent outsiders from entering, but also to keep those inside from getting out.
Neo Lu soon realised that this was not really a translation job. There are no e-commerce companies either. All of this, starting with a post on a Chinese recruitment forum, was carefully laid out by human traffickers in order to deceive people like him to Thailand.
Traffickers took Neo Lu across the Moi River — a murky river on the non-existent Thai border — and unknowingly took him to a remote corner of Myanmar. There, he was handed over to a Chinese gang who had paid for him.
Neo Lu was abducted to a place he was completely unfamiliar with and sold to a criminal gang.
In this way, he became one of the hundreds of thousands of people who were trafficked into criminal gangs, trapped in a trap of exploitation, violence and fraud, from which a research group called a "criminal tumor."
Fearing reprisals from criminals, Neo Lu chose a character from the movie "The Matrix" as his pseudonym, and he asked that his surname be used only in the text. Through interviews with his parents and two friends, as well as reviewing text messages, copies of travel documents and letters issued by Chinese authorities, The Times verified the circumstances of his travel, captivity and eventual rescue.
His account of the trafficking process is consistent with the accounts made by other people who have been rescued in similar parks. His experience and the information he brought out gave us a rare opportunity to learn about the workings and strategies of an extremely large underground world.
The gangs have bases in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar to force people in their captivity to commit sophisticated online scams that target people around the world who feel lonely and gullible. Usually this type of scammer uses fake online identities to lure people into fake romantic relationships, and then swinds them out of a large amount of money through fake cryptocurrency**.
Such a scam is called a "pig killing plate" because the whole process requires tricking the target's trust, which can take weeks – also known as fattening the pig – before the killer is killed.
Many of the abducted and forced to work for fraud gangs are Chinese, because these gangs initially deceived people in China. But their goals are already starting to spread around the world. In the United States, the FBI reported that Americans lost more than $2 billion in 2022 as a result of "pig slaughter" and other investments**. More and more people from India, the Philippines and more than a dozen other countries are being trafficked and working for fraud rings, so much so that Interpol has declared the trend a global security threat.
In order to bring the abductees into compliance, criminal gangs use a combination of violence and distorted logic. Those who disobey are beaten. Once they start working, these victims often feel that they have become accomplices and will go to jail if they return home. Gangs often confiscate the passports of trafficked people and let their visas expire, creating immigration problems.
Neo Lu's gang would give a small portion of the profits to the workers for food, gambling, drugs and sex, making the poor working conditions more bearable. Some gangs also give rewards, sometimes with extra money, sometimes with promises of travel documents to leave.
The fraud gang needs to give the trafficked people the illusion that they can leave the system by working hard," Lu said. "The donkey used to move forward in order not to be whipped in order to end up chasing carrots dangling in front of his eyes. ”
Lu said he begged them to release him, but was refused. They put him to work as an accountant, and over the course of a few months, he handled millions of dollars in illegal income and managed their day-to-day expenses.
An electronic ** produced by Neo Lu while working as an accountant for the fraud syndicate, recording expenses and fraud income for November 2022.
Lu was still in the park when he got in touch with The New York Times. He sent out hundreds of pages of financial records, as well as the ** and ** of the park, hoping to one day expose the crimes.
He also sent a screenshot of a map showing his approximate location in Myanmar. The Times analyzed the satellite ** in the area and determined that the location of his ** was a known fraud gang park called Dongmei Park.
But in January, he was no longer heard from.
Arrive at "Little China".
Myawaddy, in southeastern Myanmar, home to the Dongmei Campus, provides the perfect base for scam groups like the one that kidnapped Neo Lu.
* Nothing can be done here. They pay people to protect themselves, and they run amok with the support of local ethnic armed groups. Such conditions attracted Chinese criminal gangs, leading to the proliferation of illegal casino enclaves and a surge in drug and money laundering.
U.S. authorities said one of the key investors in the East American Park was Yin Guoju, a convicted Chinese criminal nicknamed "Broken Tooth Horse." Yin could not be reached for comment.
The U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington-based research firm, estimates that the Dongmei campus was accompanied by more than a dozen similar illegal developments run by Chinese fraud rings.
People like Neo Lu cut off contact with family and friends once they are abducted to Myanmar, an area that is largely off-limits to foreigners and ** and away from police control.
Neo Lu called Myawaddy "Little China".
Established between February 2020 and February 2022 in the Thai-Myanmar border area, the Dongmei Park is a hub for online fraud. Source**: Maxar Technologies
In some ways, Dongmei felt a lot like a Chinese factory. Workers have access to a canteen, a convenience store with ** Chinese products, a Chinese restaurant, a small casino called "Golden Horse" and a karaoke bar.
But it is clearly organized around illegal activities. Neo Lu said that the MDMA (also known as *** and *** can be purchased in game halls and karaoke halls, and a dormitory-like building in the complex doubles as a brothel.
Security is tight, especially around the perimeter of the campus. Guards were at the watchtowers and gates to prevent workers from escaping. The Moi River surrounds much of Eastern America.
The view from Neo Lu's window shows that he lives in a building rented by a scam organization.
The head of the group is a middle-aged Chinese man with gray hair and bulging eyes, and everyone calls him "Brother Xi." No one in the park uses their real names.
Mr. Lu said Mr. Xi had rented the space from the Dongmei Campus and ran a business with about 70 people, most of whom were Chinese nationals who were also trapped in Myawaddy. Neo Lu was later told that he had paid $30,000 to traffickers to buy him.
The operational structure of the pig killing plate
Since most of the targets are in China, the organization sets all clocks up an hour and a half to align with Beijing time. Every day seems long and hard: the work starts at 10:30 a.m. and ends at midnight, with three breaks in between, each lasting only half an hour. Workers have only one day off per month.
They sit in an open-plan office and are closely monitored by their supervisors. In one room, staff used hundreds of mobile phones lined the walls to build what appeared to be real profiles on WeChat, a popular Chinese chat app. Enter stolen WeChat accounts, mobile phone numbers, ** and ** and other data into these profiles.
These workers use WeChat on a daily basis, browsing social media feeds on every device, mimicking normal use to evade the app's fraud detection system. 、
Neo Lu's room, which was littered with cockroaches and smelled foul, was living with seven other Chinese men.
As he lay in bed, Neo Lu wondered how he had strayed from the life he had envisioned.
At the age of 17, he studied engineering at a university in England for a year, but his parents, who ran a small business in eastern China, had to drop him out because of the high tuition fees. He became depressed and then restless. In the years since, he has worked for Chinese companies in Oman, Nigeria and Kenya, but he was eager to save enough money for his own university and eventually moved to the West. In his view, it was this vision that he was bent on achieving that brought him to Myanmar.
Now, he's bent on how to escape. He knew he needed help, but by the time he arrived at the park, his phone had already been confiscated by the supervisor. In the first week, he used his work** to contact a friend who uses the instant messaging app Telegram.
The next day, the supervisors confronted him and threatened to beat him or sell him to another camp in Myawaddy, where it was said that the organs of trafficked workers would be harvested.
Neo Lu broke down and begged them to let him go. "I can't do it. I'm not this piece of material. Let me go!He recalls saying this to his captors.
But it was completely useless.
In the end, Brother Xi gave Neo Lu three options: pay a ransom of $30,000Be like everyone else;Or put his skills to work and help Brother Xi with accounting. Hee said that after six months, the gang would consider releasing him.
Neo Lu chose accounting.
Neo Lu keeps charges such as electricity, office rent, and commissions on his books. But other sums he tracked were unique to the crime industry. "Tea fees" refer to money paid to middlemen to connect them with traffickers. "River crossing fees" include the cost of smuggling workers across the border. The "troop fee" is the cost paid to the armed guards to escort people in and out of the camp. "Fleet fee" refers to the funds used for money laundering.
How the scam works
The Xige gang deceived mainly Chinese-speaking women between the ages of 30 and 50, preferably married. A group leader is responsible for buying personal data in bulk, from which possible victims are identified. Another group took the initiative to use WeChat to send requests and messages to potential targets to add friends.
Once the target accepted the request for additions, the workers followed a pre-written script, and according to Neo Lu, the deception process went something like this:
Xige's gang targets married women because they go to great lengths to avoid asking their families for help or calling the police out of fear for their reputation, Mr. Lu said.
The speed of the scam was so fast that Neo Lu was surprised. In the five months from July to November last year, the gang received the equivalent of more than $4.4 million from 214 victims, according to records he kept.
The documents kept by Neo Lu also include some of the victims' contacts**. The Times hit more than a dozen women who had been defrauded by the gang. A woman, who asked not to be named, said she was scammed out of 10 last November80,000 yuan. Another woman, who said only her surname was Yi, said she was scammed out of 25 in August last year20,000 yuan, including the money she borrowed, and she is still trying to pay it back.
Tencent, the internet giant that owns WeChat, said in a statement that it banned criminal conduct on the platform and was committed to fighting fraud. Tencent also urged users to be vigilant.
Punishment and imprisonment
After working for the gang for almost six months, Neo Lu earned the trust of his kidnappers, who allowed him to use his personal cell phone for a few minutes a day.
He got in touch with his family and friends and told them that he had been kidnapped. He filmed the ** in the park, and also shot the short ** in the main office of the gang, while trying to avoid attracting attention. He drew up an organizational chart of the gang and also compiled a glossary of industry terms. He uploaded all those files to an encrypted email account and deleted them from his work device.
He then sent the materials, financial records he kept from July to November of last year, and a list of scam victims' real names, financial transactions and ** numbers.
On January 3 of this year, Neo Lu begged Brother Xi to keep his promise and let him go. Instead of being freed, he was taken into a dormitory dedicated to punishing disobedient workers.
Neo Lu was handcuffed to a bunk bed and could only come down when he was eating and going to the toilet. A guard monitored him at all times. Neo Lu's electronic devices were confiscated. He told his captor that he had called for help from ** and his friend.
I wanted them to understand that I had cornered myself and them," he recalled. "They can no longer trust me or resell me to another gang. I'm a ticking time bomb. ”
It was at that time that the torture began.
A man in charge of the park's logistics slapped him in the mouth and punched and kicked him, and he only knew that this person's name was Ah Hong. Ah Hong hit him with a hollow PVC pipe and shocked him with an electric baton. Neo Lu was in unbearable pain.
Hong tells him that he will continue to be punished until he no longer offers to leave. In between beatings, the leaders of the gang took turns trying to persuade Neo Lu to give up the idea of leaving. They promised him to lead a new unit dedicated to English-speaking victims, a position in which he would earn more money.
Neo Lu refused, saying his family would pay the ransom.
One day, Hong went into the house and covered his face with a gray scarf. He set up a camera in the house, and a group of people gathered around**.
After pressing the "record" button, he picked up the electric baton. He was recording blackmail**.
Screenshot of the blackmail received by Neo Lu's parents in China.
On January 14, in Taizhou, China, more than 3,000 kilometers away from Neo Lu, his parents' mobile phone lit up. The criminal gang sent them two paragraphs.
* Neo Lu can be seen sitting cross-legged on the floor between two bunk beds, his hands handcuffed behind his back. A man standing nearby brandished an electric baton at him, and the strong electric current when the baton hit his body caused a piercing crackling sound accompanied by blue sparks. The baton bearer struck Neo Lu's right knee, then his left knee, abdomen and back.
In one episode, Neo Lu rolls on the ground in pain, howling in pain.
For his parents, these ** were unbearable.
My husband won't let me see it, he did," said Ms. Peng, Neo Lu's mother, who asked reporters not to use her full name. "I can't stand it. ”
Rescue
The ransom demanded by the gang was 500,000 yuan. Neo Lu's parents run a small business of banners and LED signs, which is a lot of money for them.
Ms. Peng texted back to Brother Xi, asking for more time and information. How should they pay the ransom?To whom do you transfer the money?She added, "Let's take another look at ......."Check it out. ”
Neo Lu's parents called the police and sought help from the Chinese embassy and business associations. They also prayed for a higher level of strength: every morning, Ms. Peng and her husband would go to the beach to pray for the safe return of their son.
Later, ** in Zhejiang Province, where their home is located, introduced them to a man they said could help.
The man, nicknamed "Dragon," said he had managed to rescue more than 200 Chinese nationals from a Southeast Asian fraud ring. He also blogs about these experiences.
Dragon calls Neo Lu's parents and tells them the frightening details of what could happen next. He said that the kidnappers would continue to send them horrific **and**. But if they pay the ransom, the extortion will go on endlessly.
What they should do, he said, is to procrastinate and show willingness to cooperate. He'll find another way.
On January 21, a week after receiving the blackmail, Dragon told Neo Lu's parents that he had a powerful friend, a Chinese businessman with ties to the local armed militia, who had gone to the Dongmei campus earlier in the day and confirmed that Neo Lu was there. Dragon said that the friend would be able to rescue Neo Lu in two days.
Ms. Peng gave the Times Dragon's *** who confirmed the timeline of the incident and described the rescue process in general terms. Dragon asked for anonymity and refused to provide specific details for fear that making things public would jeopardize future rescues.
The well-connected Chinese businessman had traveled to East America again on Jan. 23, this time accompanied by a general and dozens of soldiers from the Burmese Border Guards, a local armed group that had supported the military that ruled Burma, Dragon said. The businessman named Neo Lu.
Local militias usually maintain relationships with the owners of these parks, but also exercise control over criminal gangs operating in the parks when needed, experts said. Dragon said that the torture of Neo Lu, who was sent by Xi Gefa, had caught the attention of the Chinese authorities, and that it crossed the line. Dragon said that this allowed his business partner (the businessman) to get the general to deal with Neo Lu's affairs.
The Times was unable to independently verify the details of the rescue.
Neo Lu was held in that room for a total of 18 days, and he knew nothing about the negotiations. One day, he was suddenly told to change his clothes and then got into a golf cart.
And just like that, Neo Lu was released.
He said he was questioned by local militia and took away his mobile phone, laptop, identity documents and cash. A few days later, he returned to China. His flight arrived in Shanghai on Feb. 2.
His mother prepared a thick winter coat for him, because she knew that her son, who had returned from Southeast Asia, would wear clothes that did not protect him from the cold. She was relieved to see her son emerge from the arrivals area.
Neo Lu hugged his parents, and they couldn't help but shed tears.
While the family avoided paying a ransom to the criminal gang, Ms. Peng said she had transferred $250,000 to Dragon. The dragon said that the money was for his friend and the general to thank them for their help.
The day after returning home, Neo Lu approached China**, handed them all the materials he had gathered, and described in detail what he knew about the fraud. The Times saw a report that the authorities had helped rescue Mr. Lu from a telecom fraud park in Myanmar, adding that Mr. Lu "had not previously engaged in online gambling, telecom fraud, and other activities."
In recent months, Chinese authorities have taken joint operations with Southeast Asian countries** to arrest thousands of Chinese accused of being involved in criminal gangs for telecom fraud and have repatriated them, but experts believe many criminal gangs have simply moved their operations elsewhere.
Neo Lu remembers that one of his kidnappers told him to remain silent when he went out. But Neo Lu had other plans. He has been interviewed by China**, consulted on a film project, and intends to write a memoir.
I want the world to know that these Chinese criminal gangs are engaged in a form of modern slavery. He said. ■