Myanmar’s proliferating scam centers
14 comments
·July 14, 2025dddddaviddddd
v3ss0n
We are pretty much done now , due to coup, the junta's involvement in scam gangs and anti junta revolution civil war in full swing.
Not just scam gangs, the thugs collaborative with military,kidnap and sell youths to junta for
1. Forced military drafting.
2. Human trafficking
3. Organ harvesting .
That what military dictatorship done to our democractic country within 5 years.
30minAdayHN
I always thought that people willfully participate in scams to make more money. For example, I know there are quite a few telephone scam centers in India, that call US folks for SSN fraud etc. I thought these folks just work for salary.
It's scary to look at the scale of 'organized' crime / modern slavery. This is almost like Squid Games.
herbst
To my understanding this also was the common reality no 5 years ago.
gkanai
Japan should qualify any future ODA to Myanmar requires the junta goes in and breaks up these scam centers and put the scam owners in jail.
charlysl
Here is a good documentary about these scam centers, where some management staff even openly admit what is going on there:
kragen
Will AI take their jobs? This seems like what current LLMs would be best at.
swarnie
That's a really tough call, what sets off your internal "Scam alert" more, a thick Indian accent from a busy call centre or a TikTok robot voice?
swores
The best AI voice generation is already much more realistic than the typical TikTok robotic voices, and they're only going to get better. It won't be long before the only reason anyone will generate artificial voices that are obviously fake will be choice, not tool limitations.
willvarfar
As genuine customer service migrates to robots, it may change expectations as to what sounds legitimate? So in the future the genuine human ringing you up would smell like a scam whereas the genuine robot will have weight - irregardless of its legitimacy?
Incipient
The tiktok robot voice is deliberate I believe, it's branding. It's not a limitation of technology.
jacknews
These might be features of large scale purpose-built scam centers, but there are myriad smaller centers occupying apartment blocks, whole floors of office towers, and of course ex-Casino buildings and so on.
eg Cambodia is especially rife with these. There are so many recently-built apartment blocks that lie empty, often built with corrupt money anyway, they make easy and fairly low-key dens.
t24o234234234
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mschuster91
> The Eastern Indian state of West Bengal has a similar complex, where all the international scam-calls targeting English-speaking nations originate.
Yup. But - as much as I love to dunk on India for not doing anything on a federal level to combat the scammers - it's not exclusively India that's got issues with running scam callcenters. The Philippines are a hotspot as well [1], and Turkey is also ramping up [2] although their scammers mostly target Germany [3] as there is a sizable Turkish-origin diaspora here and a lot of Turks speak decent-enough German.
[1] https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/afp-partner...
[2] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/turkiye-to-contain-fra...
[3] https://www.dailysabah.com/turkiye/istanbul-police-uncover-i...
I was looking at the Wikipedia article for the "Global Organized Crime Index" today, and Myanmar is #1, above Colombia and Mexico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Organized_Crime_Index