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A pro-junta Myanmar militia that oversees online scam operations has said it will release more than 60 foreigners who were trafficked into working in its eastern border enclave.
Scam centers proliferated in lawless corners of Southeast Asia following the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, when many casinos turned to online fraud, often staffed by unsuspecting job-seekers lured by false offers of work, to make up for lost gamblers.
Thousands of people from around Asia -- and from as far away as Africa -- have been trafficked into centers in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, which are often run by ethnic Chinese gangsters, rights groups and law enforcement agencies say.
“We’re ready to return them,” a spokesperson for the militia, known as the Border Guard Force, or BGF, Maj. Naing Maung Zaw, told Radio Free Asia on Wednesday, referring to the more than 60 people.
The spokesperson said the foreigners would be released from the notorious KK Park and Shwe Kokko centers in Myanmar’s Myawaddy district, in Kayin state, and sent back over the border to the Thai town of Mae Sot.
The spokesman did not release any details about the foreigners but the Thai media outlet The Reporters said that they included 39 Chinese, 13 Indians, five Indonesians, one Kazakh, one Ethiopian, one Pakistani and one Malaysian.
Naing Maung Zaw said his group was waiting for authorisation from Myanmar military authorities to go ahead with the release.
“We haven’t heard any confirmation back from this side. We’ve submitted it to relevant officials … We’re getting permission from the responsible people,” he said.
RFA tried to telephone Kayin state’s junta spokesperson, Khin Maung Myint, for information on the return but he did not answer.
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The rescue of a Chinese actor from a fraud operation overseen by the BGF has raised international alarm in rent weeks and has scared off Chinese tourists from visiting neighboring Thailand and brought pressure on governments to rein in the businesses.
China and its five Mekong River neighbors have agreed to cooperate to fight the scam operations while the BFG militia said it would stop forced labor and fraud in its eastern Myanmar zone of operations.
Thai authorities will investigate whether any of the more than 60 people due to be released were trafficked or were involved in trafficking others, The Reporters said, adding that some Chinese nationals being released would be extradited to China for their involvement in crime.
A senior Chinese official, Deputy Minister of Public Security Liu Zhongyi is due to travel to Myawaddy from Mae Sot, the Thai outlet said.
The ethnic Karen BGF emerged from a split in the 1990s in Myanmar’s oldest ethnic minority guerrilla force, the largely Christian-led Karen National Union, when Buddhist fighters broke away and sided with the military.
The military let the splinter group rule in some areas in Kayin state, where it set up the BGF under the auspices of the army and profited from cross-border trade and later from online gambling and scam operations.
Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff.