The Chinese government has released a two-hour, three-part series, designed to expose more of the public to the horrors occurring via pig butchering scams on the southern border.
The scams have become a serious issue in China, with scam call centers in the country increasingly relyings on Chinese kidnapping victims to conduct their business. Most of these centers are located in Myanmar, but the exploding profitability has seen similar locations crop up in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and the UAE.
Pig butchering works in a relatively cookie cutter fashion: a scam artist lures a victim to a region where they can be kidnapped. They’re taken to a remote location that has usually been built up into a commercial park for holding prisoners.
The victim is then forced to scam other individuals via fake romantic interests, celebrity impersonation, or other schemes. Their families are given a ransom that they usually cannot afford.
The birth of pig butchering and a deep dive into crime bosses
While Americans are increasingly seen as easy marks at these commercial park-sized scam centers, many are deeply unfamiliar with how intense pig butchering is affecting China.
According to the documentary, nearly 100,000 law enforcement officials are currently working to disrupt the criminal syndicates, over 50,000 Chinese nationals have been extradited back to China to face charges, and tens of thousands are still imprisoned by the fraudsters.
Read more: Project Brazen links KuCoin to billions in pig butchering scams
These are not haphazardly constructed commercial parks, either. Some of these areas are city-sized, with the scam centers supporting full economies — restaurants, doctors, dentists, firefighters, ATMs.
Most importantly, many of the syndicates hire full-on militias, literally thousands of heavily armed individuals, to both ensure that victims are unable to escape and to fend off any government attempts at intervention.
The recent major syndicates that China was able to disrupt, as shown in the documentary, are the Bai, Wei, Liu, and Ming families.
All four were composed of Chinese nationals who established pig butchering centers in northern Myanmar after being pushed out of China in the late 2010s.
The families were able to take advantage of a porous border between Yunnan Province and Myanmar, along with the ongoing Myanmari Civil War making law enforcement difficult to provide in the Kachin and Shan states.
Read more: China executes four more in pig butchering scam crackdown
Some syndicate leaders actually remained in China while their employees and victims conducted business in Myanmar.
Almost all of them have been arrested and sentenced to prison time or death.
No end in sight
Though China is proud of the operations it’s conducted against the major syndicates operating pig butchering scams within Myanmar, the unfortunate reality is that the profitability of commercial scam centers in a region plagued by civil war means they’re unlikely to go away any time soon.
Chinese nationals continue to be lured into Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and the UAE, kidnapped, and forced into servitude under their scammer masters, largely due to a difficultly in finding decent employment within China.
Until Myanmar can end its civil war, millions in Southeast Asia can escape poverty, and the young in China can readily find work, the pig butchering will continue.
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