Xu was one of at least 48,000 Chinese who worked in Myanmar’s lawless and isolated Kokang region until a Beijing-led crackdown last year. To back up his claim, Xu provided screenshots of the original chat messages about the film part, photos of the ransom payment and Chinese police documents about his case.
His story is similar to that of six other people interviewed by The Washington Post who were trafficked or scammed into Myanmar from Thailand, Taiwan and other countries. Some had responded to similar fraudulent job ads seeking people with experience in web management and online advertising before being kidnapped. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated in a report last August that more than 200,000 people remain forced to work as con artists in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, the epicenter of this global multibillion-dollar criminal industry run primarily by Chinese criminal gangs.
The stories of those who escape offer insight into new forms of global human trafficking and the digital platforms that facilitate it, according to the United Nations and human rights groups. Victims continue to be recruited from more than 30 countries, mainly through social media apps such as WeChat, Telegram and Facebook, but the problem is not being addressed on a global or even regional scale, the human rights groups added. The U.S. State Department said in June that forced labor in the scam hubs continues to grow. Due to the expansion of scam operations, the latest trafficking in persons report blacklisted both Cambodia and Myanmar, suggesting possible fines and sanctions.
“We’ve seen a remarkable increase in the sophistication and reach of these recruitment networks,” said Jacob Sims, an expert on international crime at the United States Institute of Peace.
Sold to a scammer
In June 2023, Xu was hopping from job to job, cruising through casual work groups on WeChat, when she came across an offer for 10,000 yuan ($1,380) for an acting job in Xishuangbanna, a tourist city on the China-Myanmar border.
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Even though the ad provided few details, Xu signed up.
Upon arrival, Xu and several others from around the country gathered at a hotel, then were taken in a car to a darkened street near the mountains. Something immediately seemed strange. Ten men in camouflage uniforms and hiking boots, knives hanging from their belts, emerged from the darkness. One of them tried to calm everyone down, but the rest stood in a menacing silence.
“It’s not a big deal, we’ll give you a part-time job, it’s just not the job you expected,” the man said, according to Xu.
The men took everyone’s belongings, cellphones and identification, then led them down an overgrown mountain road in pitch black, then drove them on dirt bikes, eventually reaching a chain-link fence. — Border — There’s a gap large enough for one person to get through at a time.
Uniformed guards at Myanmar checkpoints showed little interest in their transports across the border, as long as the drivers handed over 1,000 to 2,000 yuan in cash.
“We kept shouting ‘help’ to raise the alarm. They understood. They asked ‘Chinese?’ but nobody cared,” he said. “They only recognised money, not people. It was a lawless place.”
Arriving in Laukhane, the capital of Kokang region, Xu felt like he had been transported back 40 years to a remote town that had only just emerged from poverty, and among the dilapidated buildings and dirt roads he found great wealth, flashy sports cars and several luxury hotels.
The first stop in what Xu calls the criminal “supply chain” was a walled compound on the outskirts of town used by traffickers to hold abducted victims before selling them to con men. Under a plastic roof blocking the sun, 70 to 80 young Chinese men crouched handcuffed in the mud, while 20 armed guards beat them with plastic pipes to enforce silence.
Every day, scam “agents” arrive looking for new workers for their operations, Xu said, while traffickers bring in 15 to 20 new migrants, mostly from China, many in their 20s and 30s, some even in their teens.
Considered elderly, Xu was held for an unusually long 10 days, and says the beatings left his legs paralyzed, he was denied a shower or a toothbrush and his bed was stained with blood.
“They were training us to obey like slaves,” he said.
Traffickers robbed their captives by forcing them to unlock their accounts on online payment services such as WeChat Pay and Alipay and withdraw cash. The captives then used the apps to apply for personal loans to ensure a steady supply of funds.
Five or six days after he arrived (he lost count), Xu said he witnessed four people being shot dead while trying to grab a gun from a guard.
“I don’t know their names, I don’t know where they came from, I don’t know if they were Chinese, I just know they were tricked into going there,” Xu said. “Their families don’t even know they were in Myanmar, and they probably don’t know they’re dead.”
Xu sold it in July to a fraud ring run by the Red Lotus Hotel, which he said was owned by Liu Abao, a nickname for Liu Zhengxiang, one of the three crime families that controlled Kokang, according to U.N. officials, Chinese court records and analysts.
Myanmar police handed Liu over to Chinese authorities in January where he is awaiting trial on charges of violent crimes including illegal detention. He could not be reached for comment.
Xu’s team on the seventh floor of the hotel targeted people in Southeast Asia, using four mobile phones each logged into more than 20 Instagram and Facebook accounts and relying on machine translation to send messages to hundreds of potential victims between 10am and 2am every day.
After building trust, they switched to messaging apps like WhatsApp and Line and tried to interest people in buying Tether coins, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar. Those who agreed were sent a link to a fake platform that appeared to be a cryptocurrency exchange.
Slow and expensive releases
At Red Lotus, beatings were a means to enforce a ferocious work pace; Xu regularly failed to meet targets. The harshest punishments were meted out to those who tried to escape or contact their families back home.
Once every two weeks, supervisors would gather workers under strict supervision to send reassuring messages to their families, with only approved text and photographs allowed.
That was another ploy in itself, according to Xu: The scammers wanted the family to know they were willing to pay the ransom if necessary.
During one of these conversations, Xu managed to send a one-line text message to a childhood friend informing him of his captivity. At first, nothing happened. When Xu briefly contacted his friend again in late September around the Mid-Autumn Festival, it emerged that Chinese police had refused to investigate Xu’s case, citing a lack of evidence.
Eventually, Xu’s family gathered enough evidence for the Yunnan police to begin negotiating Xu’s release, a process handled by brokers from the Kokang Overseas Chinese Business Association, who approached the fraud masterminds and negotiated the terms.
Xu’s captors were initially reluctant to release him. He begged them to accept the deal, saying he was too old to commit fraud. Xu recalled bowing repeatedly and telling his boss, “A person like me is just a waste. If you get my family to buy me back, you can definitely make more money.”
He relented when the family agreed to pay 620,000 yuan ($85,300) in cash. In a hotel room near the border, the mother handed the stack of bills to a middleman. Xu was returned by Chinese authorities at Qingshuihe port, a border crossing on the southern edge of Kokang that was recently upgraded with Chinese investment.
Border police took two tubes of his blood, one for drugs and one for infectious diseases, and interrogated him for 10 days, after which he was flown to Nanjing, the eastern Chinese city where he attended university, for another day of interrogation.
When Xu was finally released (his mother had to first pay for his travel expenses to Chinese police), he learned that his mother had sold their house to pay the ransom.
While the Kokan fraud hub has been shut down, new ones continue to pop up across the region and in fast-growing hotspots, including Dubai.
“I’m sure there are many people out there still waiting to be saved,” he said.
