Broken bridge over troubled water

During what I thought might be my last interview with Lieutenant Colonel Naing Maung Zhaw, the spokesperson for the Karen National Army (KNA), I could tell he was losing patience with me. My reporting had never supported his armed group.

Still, I made one final appeal.

I told him I had found many young Karens being lured into illicit businesses. The numbers have grown rapidly in recent years.

“And I want you to save them,” I said.

The KNA controls Shwe Kokko and the nearby border areas where scam compounds operate, so it can intervene.

As spokesperson, Naing Maung Zhaw did his best to stay polite. He listened, said he didn’t know about the recruitment, and finally promised to watch out for it.

Lieutenant Colonel Naing Maung Zhaw, spokesperson for the Karen National Army (KNA), shows the author the camp housing nearly a thousand former scam workers in June 2025. / Kannikar Petchkaew

But the group I was asking to protect these young people had already been sanctioned by the US Treasury in May 2025 for helping with cyber scams, human trafficking, and cross-border smuggling.

After years of reporting on Myanmar’s most well-known scam centers, I have met people from many countries who ended up working there.

One Ethiopian man had spent two years in a compound by the time we spoke. A Filipino woman had been there for eight months and was pregnant by a colleague. Some Thais came to escape debts owed to loan sharks.

These encounters challenge the conventional victim narrative. Many of the young people I met entered the compounds voluntarily. In several cases, allegations of abduction or kidnapping were made only when they wished to leave or when circumstances turned against them.

But make no mistake, entering voluntarily is not the same as consenting to later confinement, violence, or exploitation.

Some people walk in willingly, maybe even happily, but what waits for them is something called “forced criminality,” which is also considered a form of human trafficking.

Yet the harder question is: Why do thousands of young people knowingly accept work connected to criminal syndicates?

The answer often starts with poverty, which comes from inequality, political instability, and war. Years of conflict in Ethiopia have limited people’s options. In the Philippines, deep inequality pushes many young people to seek opportunities elsewhere, even if it’s risky. Thailand is still struggling with slow growth.

Looking at this crisis like a gangster movie, where everyone is either a villain or a helpless victim, will never explain how these crime syndicates really work.

I give you one example.

A scary narrative that floated around is that the crime syndicate is selling the victim's organs if they fail to do their work.

Two Russian media outlets asked me to look into these claims after their citizens who escaped the compound in Karen State told them about it. I told them I wouldn’t risk my life trying to prove this unless they could explain how organ selling actually works.

They failed to do so.

It starts with finding a match between the organ donor, or seller, and the recipient. Both have to be biologically compatible.

If you picture criminals taking out a victim’s heart, lungs, kidneys, or eyes right there, you are completely wrong. You can't just carry an organ around or sell it to someone on the street.

You need a clean operating room and a skilled surgeon. Even if this story were true, you would need fast transport to get the organ to another hospital right away. Think about how long it would take to reach the recipient on Myanmar’s poor roads.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)describesorgan removal as a complex crime requiring medical specialists, healthcare facilities, and coordinated logistics.

Difficulty does not establish impossibility, but it does require evidence.

This rumor would probably make Thailand’s prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, laugh. Since 2014, he has volunteered as a pilot, flying donated organs to transplant patients across Thailand. He should know how complicated organ transplants are.

This partly explains why we keep falling behind the criminals. The syndicates are smart, organized, and quick to adapt. Our response is not.

We may not like admitting it, but they understand our vulnerabilities better than we understand their operations.

Myanmar’s youth bear the heavy burden of these same harsh realities: crippling poverty, deep-rooted social inequality, political upheaval, and over seventy years of war that predates their birth entirely.

“We escaped the conflict, having no place to go. If we go to Thailand, they will just arrest us. You got a better way?” said Hsar, a young Karen working in a fraud complex in Shwe Kokko, on the Thai border, his voice thick with disdain.

“We work across languages using AI,” Tharu, another young Karen who just finished high school in Thailand, described his job in another scam compound. “Scripts are also generated with the help of AI. We have different teams for the script, text, messaging, and dialogue for whoever we initiate the conversation with.”

Tharu grew up as a refugee in a camp in Thailand. He got a good education and is skilled in English and technology, but many jobs in Thailand are off-limits to him. Without permission, he couldn’t even leave the border town.

“I can’t see myself ending up on construction sites for a $9 daily wage with the skills I worked so hard for,” he says. For his role in romance scams with people in both Asia and the U.S., he is paid $1,000 a month,10 timeswhat his countrymen typically earn.

A recent United Nations Development Program (UNDP)surveyfound that one in four youths in Myanmar is unemployed, and three in four aged 18–24 are either out of school or not in training.

The survey calls them a “generation on hold."

But the biggest change came in February 2024, when the military started mandatory service for young men and women. That’s when I began to see many desperate young people leaving, ending up in scam compounds and other criminal groups.

“It is the only way to survive the military and starvation,” Hsar said.

Children live their lives in the familiar scene./ Myo Naing

Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne who has studied Southeast Asia’s scam centers for years and co-authored Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, told me it is a misconception that people working in the cybercrime industry are generally highly educated, technologically skilled or fluent in English or another international language.

His interviews with 62 former Chinese scam workers found that almost half had completed only middle school, 15 percent had only a primary education. All spoke only their mother tongue.

China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate made a similar observation in its2023 reporton telecommunications and online fraud. It described many offenders as displaying the “three lows”: low age, low income and low educational attainment.

“We observed the same on the ground across a number of countries,” Franceschini said. This does not mean technologically skilled scammers don't exist, he added, but that most workers come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

These conditions make Myanmar and its borderlands especially fertile recruiting grounds.

War, poverty and the lack of safe work have left many young people with few ways to build a future. By simply learning how to fill that void, the syndicates profit from that desperation.

Stone thrown from where the criminal groups generate their money.

A small girl attempts to cross a rocky river, carrying her baby sibling on her back. The old bridge behind appears as if it might fall to the tide at any moment.

With a duty heavier than her life, just beginning. How long can she keep up? I wonder.

And who will she turn to when she can't?

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Remark: We've changed the young Karens' names to protect their identities.