*By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK. | 23 January 2026 (IDN) —With Myanmar’s three-stage elections hitting the home stretch later this week on Sunday, ending the country’s civil war may need to take center stage in the post-election period. It is fueling a global scam industry that is destabilizing not only the Southeast Asian region, but also threatening to become a global problem that could invite outside power interventions.
“We cannot treat organized crime simply as a law enforcement or even security problem. It is evolved structurally as a human rights crisis,” argued Bhanubhatra Jittiang, Thailand’s representative to the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, addressing a packed house at Bangkok’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) on January 8.
All three panelists – that included a top UN official and a European cybercrime specialist – stated in the FCC seminar that the so-called autonomous regions of Myanmar, where a civil war has been rampant for almost five years, is the epicenter of a global cybercrime pandemic
Shadow economy
Jittiang warned that these crime networks are becoming more powerful economically than governments in the region as they link up with such networks globally. “We are seeing the criminal actors that are covering the space, not just physical space, but also the digital space. So they are no longer just evading the states, but they are substituting the states,” Jittiang added, pointing out that there are areas that have become lawless, such as in Myanmar, which has made people desperate, so they need money from any source to survive. They become drivers and victims of cybercrime.
The international media has often focused on Myanmar’s rebel groups as fighting for human rights, ignoring the fact that they have been raising the funds for their armed activities first through the drug trade, and lately by cybercrimes, by mastering new digital tools.
Jeremy Douglas, deputy director of operations of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) noted that the international cybercrime industry is estimated to be in the magnitude of USD 8 trillion, and that it is the previous narcotics trade that “has underpinned the scams that we see taking place in the region”.
The mountainous border areas encompassing northern Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos were known as the “Golden Triangle” for decades, where they grew opium. “The drug money [which created] the casino architecture in the region, had set the stage for today’s scam centers,” argues Douglas, pointing to how drug trade and casino development has gone hand-in-hand.
Since many of the casino and scam center operators have been reported to be ethnic Chinese, he was careful not to pin the blame on the Chinese government. He said crime syndicates from other regions have also come to the area.
Rights violations
In an interview with IDN after his presentation, Jittiang said that the scam centers that originated in the lawless rebel-controlled areas in Myanmar, also having spread to Cambodia, are where human rights are violated. He argues that human trafficking into scam centers, physical abuse on locations, scamming of peoples’ savings, and the general exploitation of people by cybercrime networks, are a violation of peoples’ fundamental rights, and especially economic rights.
According to a recent analysis published by the BBC, based on data from local organizations, the military junta controls about 21% of central Myanmar; resistance forces and ethnic militias control 42% of the territory, with the remaining 37% consisting of disputed areas where fighting continues[1].
John Wojcik, a Senior Threat Researcher for US-based Infoblox warned that cybercrime has become a service industry. “We’ve seen really the proliferation of multibillion-dollar illicit online marketplaces [with] aggressive pieces of spyware that go after your bank accounts. This is tied to an actor in the Mekong region, tied to scam centers, and targeting globally,” he noted.
“They have automated processes to immediately steal everything in your photo gallery, immediately exfiltrate all of your notes, all of your passwords, all of your contacts, SMS messages and logs, phone logs”, he told a worried audience. “[in bulk they hold possession over], Bank statements, travel records, criminal history of individuals, property records, all of this seemingly irrelevant information [but, when] packaged together to socially engineer people [to fall for the scam]”.
Rooted system
Dr Xu Peng, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Illicit Economies, Violence and Development, at the University of London, last year travelled to areas controlled by ethnic militias in Karen State, where Thai authorities have estimated that over 100,000 people work in scam centers. In an article he wrote in The Conversation[2], he described how these militias raise taxation and control the security in the area, effectively protecting the scam centers. Thus, when their cross-border networks of recruiters, traffickers, militias, and complicit border guards warn about impending attacks on the scam centers, they can easily move the staff to safety across borders.
The Myanmar military has recently started attacks on these centers under pressure from mainly Chinese authorities, who are moving against big Chinese cybercrime tycoons in Southeast Asia. Earlier this month, Beijing got a big fish, when they assisted Cambodia to arrest and extradite ‘Chen Zhi’ to China. Zhi was also on the United States’ wanted list, claiming that his Prince Group conglomerate is a cover for a “sprawling cybercrime empire”.
“You can’t police your way out of some of these problems if the special economic zones are not dealt with, if the autonomous regions of Myanmar are not dealt with in some way.” Because, the groups operating within them, be they the armed groups or be they the organized crime groups or partnering together, if they’re not dealt with, then what are we doing? asks Jeremy Douglas of UNODC.
Thus, as a new government takes shape in Myanmar, rather than arguing about its legitimacy, ASEAN and regional powers would need to cooperate with a new government to stamp out the scam centers from the region, which is a bigger human rights issue than mere freedom of expression.
* Kalinga Seneviratne is an IDN Special Correspondent for Asia-Pacific. He is currently a research fellow at the Shinawatra International University in Bangkok.
[1] https://www.fides.org/en/news/77228-ASIA_MYANMAR_Elections_in_a_country_at_war_There_is_hope_for_change_and_national_dialogue
[2] https://theconversation.com/huge-online-scam-operations-are-flourishing-in-war-torn-myanmar-i-travelled-there-to-find-out-why-271701