BURMA
Published October 25, 2025
DAWN
WELCOME to life in 2025 where the ravages of global conflict, vast disparities of wealth born of failing economies and mass displacement have produced mutant varieties of human exploitation. Recently, the Myanmar army raided an infamous compound known as KK Park, a hub for cybercrime. They detained over 2,000 people and seized dozens of Starlink internet terminals. Following the raid, nearly 700 people, also including Pakistanis, from the compound fled Myanmar into Thailand and were detained by the Thai authorities.
The ‘scam compound’ is a place unimaginable prior to the existence of our digitised lives. Labour camps have existed for thousands of years, of course, but this new version uses indentured humans to scam other humans, resorting to various strategies of digital theft. According to news reports published about KK Park, the sprawling compound is mainly run by Chinese criminal gangs and guarded by groups that are said to be aligned with the Myanmar military. The park is located on the border between Thailand and Myanmar — a restive region that reportedly is only barely in control of the Myanmar military. Some military sources have accused ethnic groups, which oppose army rule, of being involved in criminal activities in the compound.
The raid on the KK compound was one of the largest. The compound was using allegedly smuggled Starlink terminals smuggled into Southeast Asia for internet access. Many of these terminals were seized. Since then, Starlink has said that it has cut access to more than 2,500 terminals in the region that it believes are connected to these scam compounds.
The most harrowing aspect of these scam compounds are the stories of the people imprisoned in them. Given that Pakistan is a labour-exporting country and that Pakistanis have been freed from these compounds, it is crucial that we raise awareness about the tactics used by recruiters to trap mostly young people looking for jobs abroad.
Our digitised lives have spawned new forms of slavery.
In February, an investigation by the BBC revealed the trauma of such people. An Ethiopian man, Mike, described the decrepit conditions inside the camp where men were regularly beaten and there was little food and extremely unsanitary conditions. Even after being freed, people like him remain in poor health.
The story of how he ended up there could be the story of any young man from Pakistan. In Mike’s case, he was approached by someone who said that they could help him get a job abroad that needed English language and typing skills. Once the traffickers win the trust of the victim they extort money from them as payment for getting this job. They then smuggle the men through roads and borders into the compound, where they are forced to take part in scamming and cybercrime operations. The men are watched all the time and face regular physical violence.
According to one Bangladeshi man who was in the compound, he was given a target of $5,000 every week. He and his friends had to approach men in the Middle East and ask them to invest in fictitious investments and promise huge returns. If they did not meet their targets, they were given electric shocks or confined in a dark room without windows. If they met their target their captors would be happy and allowed them to eat and drink.
The compounds are guarded, making escape very difficult. Even when the poor captives are freed, there are many problems. For instance, many countries in Africa refuse to fly their citizens back unless someone else is paying. Since a large number of the captives are from African countries this poses a problem. Even after they return, former captives are often in debt because they borrowed money to fulfil the recruiters’ demands.
All this is what the scammers go through but the situation of their victims is also appalling. In fact, the camps aim to turn the scammers into hardened criminals. It is likely that even when they are freed, the experience will impact their moral health and they may persist in scamming people, believing that their own difficult conditions justify their preying on others.
These traffickers seek to prey on the desperate and take advantage of those who are barely making it on their own. Often the victims of these scams are old, uneducated or naïve people, and others in difficult conditions. As our world becomes ever more digitised, cybercrime is going to be the realm in which so much fraud and coercion will take place. As far as these scammer slave camps are concerned, they represent a dark and Dickensian iteration of the internet’s underbelly, where desperate humans stacked in slavish and filthy conditions wait to pounce on others whose entrapment will deliver them from their daily torture.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment