Myanmar's Scam Compounds Rebuilt in Plain Sight, Running on Unlicensed Starlink Access

In February 2025, officials from China, Thailand and Myanmar stood before cameras and declared victory over the scam compounds lining Myanmar's border with Thailand — the sites where trafficked laborers are forced to defraud victims around the world. Roughly seven thousand people were released and the story faded from the news cycle. Satellite images taken in September tell a different story: cranes, wet concrete, and expanding perimeter fencing at compounds that were supposedly being dismantled.

KK Park, one of an estimated twenty-seven such compounds along the Thai-Myanmar frontier, now hosts roughly eighty Starlink satellite dishes on a single rooftop. SpaceX's Starlink service is not licensed to operate in Myanmar, yet it has risen from obscurity to become the country's most-used internet provider. Every dollar these compounds extract moves across that same connectivity, and in 2024 alone, Americans reportedly lost more than $10 billion to the networks behind them.

01How one trafficked worker ended up inside the machine

Sun, 25 years old with one child and a second on the way, left home in June 2024 believing he'd found a job selling Chinese goods online from the Thai border town of Mae Sot. Instead, he says he was abducted and marched across the river separating Thailand from Myanmar's Myawaddy township. "I kept begging them on my knees to let me go," he later told AFP. Militia handlers sold him into a scam center for 650,000 Thai baht — about $20,000 — the first of several transfers between operators. His captors drilled him in typing exercises to boost his output, but a deformed finger kept his speed down, and each time it did, he was resold to a different compound.

While Sun was being traded like inventory, the money generated by operations like his was moving just as fast. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis traced roughly $100 million in Tether processed through KK Park back to a single pig-butchering ring — the term for scams in which fraudsters cultivate a relationship with a target over weeks or months before persuading them to pour savings into a fraudulent crypto investment platform. Separately, Protos reported Americans lost $10 billion to Southeast Asian scam networks in 2024, a 66 percent jump year-over-year that followed $37 billion in losses in 2023. The UN Human Rights Office estimates 120,000 people have been forced into scam work in Myanmar, with another 100,000 in Cambodia.

The laundering follows the trafficking in its precision. TRM Labs documented one victim's roughly $1 million loss being split into fifteen transactions and routed through eleven separate exchanges, with Tether's presence on the TRON network making the trail harder to reconstruct. TRM found signs of on-chain laundering — intermediary wallets, mixers, rapid transfers — in 75 percent of addresses linked to pig-butchering cases. Chainalysis uncovered an even grimmer overlap: some wallets received both scam proceeds and ransom payments — meaning families paying to free a trafficked relative were sending funds to the very addresses holding money stolen from scam victims.

Conditions inside the compounds match the financial brutality. Survivors describe strict quotas enforced with beatings, confiscated phones, threats made against family members, and routine torture; some workers were reportedly chained to their workstations, and others recount hearing about organ harvesting. "Almost everyone inside had been beaten at some point," one survivor told reporters. What keeps people like Sun in place isn't only armed guards and fencing — it's an economic system that depends on their captivity to run.

02Militias, a junta, and a business model built together

The compounds aren't simply the work of Chinese crime groups exploiting a lawless frontier — that framing is convenient but incomplete. According to The Diplomat's reporting, the arrangement runs through Myanmar's military junta, ethnic militias that switched allegiances for a cut of the profits, and crime networks with roots stretching back to the Golden Triangle opium trade — all of whom built the scam economy jointly rather than merely tolerating it.

The Karen Border Guard Force (BGF) controls the ground around KK Park. Its leader, San Myint — also known as Saw Chit Thu — functions as both a militia commander and a businessman, holding shares or directorships in at least five BGF-linked companies. His sons, Saw Htoo Eh Moo and Saw Chit Chit, together control fourteen additional companies, and the family collectively holds majority stakes (50 percent or more) in six Karen BGF/Karen National Army-linked businesses, one of which is tied to cyber-scam compounds. The United States sanctioned all three family members in May 2025; construction at the compounds continued regardless.

Nearby, the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) — former rebels who signed a ceasefire with the junta — holds territory, guards compounds, and eases movement across the Thai border in exchange for protection payments. As Jason Tower, Myanmar director at the U.S. Institute of Peace, put it: "In some cases, the Border Guard Force directly owns and operates scam facilities. Revenue from these enterprises flows into military coffers and armed groups, used to purchase weapons and consolidate territorial power."

North of Myawaddy sits Shwe Kokko, a second major compound of office towers, dormitories and security fencing that the U.S. Treasury has labeled a "notorious hub for virtual currency investment scams". The Yatai New City/Shwe Kokko development was founded by She Zhijiang in a joint venture with the Karen BGF, making him a major stakeholder in the site. Last month, the U.S. sanctioned nine people and entities tied to Shwe Kokko and She Zhijiang; construction and new ferry crossings supplying the site from Thailand continued after the sanctions were announced.

An Australian Strategic Policy Institute analysis concluded the compounds function in a "highly permissive environment with permission from junta-affiliated Burmese militia" — meaning that even as Myanmar's civil war continues and resistance forces fight the military nearby, the scam centers are essentially never targeted. The junta relies on the militias to hold ground it cannot control directly; the militias need scam revenue to buy weapons and pay fighters; the crime syndicates need militia protection to run fraud at industrial scale. Each actor depends on the others, which is why sanctioning individuals hasn't dismantled the structure — the structure is the arrangement working as intended.

03Crackdowns, relocations, and a widening footprint

The February 2025 announcement freed about seven thousand people after China, Thailand and Myanmar pressed local militias to promise an end to the compounds. But satellite imagery from March already showed construction resuming, and by autumn KK Park had added an entirely new section — dormitories, office blocks, expanded checkpoints — within seven months. New roads and a roundabout appeared at the compound's main entrance, and five additional ferry crossings opened along the Moei River to keep it supplied from Thailand. Planet Labs PBC satellite data showed dozens of structures built or modified at KK Park between March and September alone, and Shwe Kokko expanded on a similar timeline. All twenty-seven compounds along the Myawaddy corridor remained active, and Thai police estimated roughly one hundred thousand people remained trapped inside them — fourteen times the number freed in February.

China has taken the harshest enforcement measures of any government involved, executing eleven scam-syndicate members and handing five others suspended death sentences, while pushing Myanmar and Thailand toward the February crackdown. Beijing has also repatriated more than 45,000 people from scam operations, including senior crime figures whose interrogations reportedly revealed how deeply Myanmar's military benefits from the trade. Yet operations displaced by enforcement simply relocated — some to Laos, some to Cambodia, others deeper into Myanmar's Karen and Shan States under fresh deals with local militias. As analyst Nathan Ruser, who tracks the compounds, observed: "As long as the military junta enables and fuels this industry, it's only ever going to be a game of cat and mouse."

The tools used inside the compounds have kept pace with enforcement. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime recorded a 600 percent rise in deepfake material tied to scam operations in the first half of 2024, including AI-generated personas, synthetic voices designed to imitate victims' relatives, and fabricated video calls convincing enough to reassure someone their family member was safe.

International coordination has lagged behind both the criminal networks and the technology. In the U.S., multiple agencies — the Department of Justice, FBI, National Security Council and State Department — are involved, but none has been given clear authority or funding to lead a unified response. The UNODC's Emergency Response Network, launched in May 2024, links law enforcement across seven Southeast Asian countries, yet Cambodia and Myanmar have continued to deny the scale of the problem, and ASEAN has never produced a joint response. On the sanctions front, the UK designated fourteen individuals in December 2023 — its first sanctions aimed directly at regional human traffickers — while the U.S. sanctioned nine people and entities tied to Shwe Kokko. None of these efforts were coordinated with one another, and the compounds have continued growing partly because their operators can count on that lack of coordination.

04The Starlink question

Enforcement against the compounds' physical infrastructure has repeatedly run into the same obstacle: connectivity. Thailand cut electricity to border areas in February, killing landline internet and severing the networks the compounds relied on. Within weeks, Starlink terminals filled the gap. Myanmar internet-ranking data cited by France24 shows Starlink at 56th place among the country's internet providers in late April, then first place by July 3 — a position it has held every day through October, despite SpaceX/Starlink holding no operating license in the country.

Phone-location data reviewed by the Stimson Center found more than 40,000 connections to Starlink originating from known scam-center locations between November 2024 and February 2025. Vendors on Telegram have made little effort to hide the trade, openly advertising Starlink access as a "solution for online scam operators". Prosecutors in California warned Starlink directly in July 2024 that fraud syndicates were relying on its satellites, and say they received no response. A year later, in July 2025, Senator Maggie Hassan publicly urged Elon Musk to cut Starlink access for the trafficking networks; neither Musk nor Starlink has responded to her publicly. That same month, the U.S. Congress's Joint Economic Committee opened an inquiry into Starlink's role in the Myanmar compounds, a committee with the power to compel Musk's testimony; SpaceX declined to comment. Thai police had already seized dozens of Starlink units during 2023 raids, yet the roughly eighty dishes documented on KK Park's roof, plus hundreds more scattered across the wider network of compounds, show the seizures barely dented supply.

The company has demonstrated it can restrict service geographically when it chooses to: Starlink has previously geofenced or disabled coverage over specific areas, including blocking service in parts of Ukraine during a period of contested territory. No comparable action has been taken in Myanmar. "It is abhorrent that an American company is enabling this to happen," said Erin West, the former California prosecutor who raised the alarm about Starlink while still in office. Starlink has not responded to that criticism either.

05The bottom line

Max Weber's concept of the "iron cage" — bureaucratic and technical systems so efficient they trap the people inside them — is an apt description of what's happening on Myanmar's border. Trafficked workers are made to scam other victims, compounding one form of exploitation with another, while the militias and syndicates who bought and sold them profit from every successful fraud.

The pattern by autumn 2025 is consistent: California prosecutors flagged the problem in July 2024; Senator Hassan pressed Musk publicly in July 2025; Congress opened a formal investigation; Thai police had already confiscated dozens of Starlink units back in 2023. None of it slowed the buildout. Twenty-seven compounds remain active and expanding. Starlink remains Myanmar's top internet provider despite having no license to operate there. An estimated 100,000 people remain inside the compounds, against roughly 7,000 freed in the February crackdown. SpaceX/Starlink has declined to comment on any of it.