Jonathan HeadSouth East Asia correspondent and
Tessa WongAsia Digital Reporter
A Chinese court has sentenced to death 11 members of a notorious family that ran scam centres in Myanmar, according to Chinese state media.
Dozens of members of the Ming family were found guilty of conducting criminal activities, with many receiving lengthy jail sentences.
The Ming family worked for one of the four clans that ran Myanmar’s sleepy backwater town of Laukkai, close to the border with China, and turned it into a hub for gambling, drugs and scam centres.
Myanmar eventually cracked down, arresting many members of these families in 2023 and handing them over to Chinese authorities.
A total of 39 Ming family members were sentenced on Monday in the eastern city of Wenzhou, according to a report by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.
Besides the 11 members who received death sentences, another five received death sentences with two-year suspensions; 11 were jailed for life; and the rest were given jail sentences ranging from five to 24 years.
The court found that since 2015 the Ming family and other criminal groups had engaged in criminal activities including telecommunications fraud, illegal casinos, drug trafficking, and prostitution.
Their gambling and scam activities had generated more than 10bn yuan ($1.4bn; £1bn), according to the court.
Others had previously estimated that the casinos of each of the four families were processing several billion dollars every year.
The court also found that the Ming family and other criminal groups were responsible for the deaths of several scam centre workers, including shooting workers in one incident to prevent them from returning to China.
Initially developed to take advantage of Chinese demand for gambling, which is illegal in China and many other neighbouring countries, Laukkaing’s casinos evolved into a lucrative front for money laundering, trafficking, and dozens of scam centres.
It was seen as the engine-room of what the UN has dubbed the “scamdemic”, which has seen more than 100,000 foreign nationals, many of them Chinese, being lured to scam centres where they are effectively imprisoned and forced to work long hours, running sophisticated online fraud operations targeting victims all over the world.
The Ming family were once one of the most powerful in Myanmar’s Shan State, and ran scam centres in Laukkai which held at least 10,000 workers. The most notorious was a compound known as Crouching Tiger Villa, where workers were routinely beaten and tortured.
Then, two years ago, an alliance of insurgent groups launched an offensive which drove the Myanmar military out of large areas of Shan State, and took control of Laukkai. China, which holds significant influence over these groups, was assumed to have given the offensive a green light.
Ming Xuechang, the family patriarch, reportedly killed himself; other family members were handed over to the Chinese authorities. Some have made remorseful confessions.
Thousands of those working in the scam centres have also been handed over to the Chinese police.
With these sentences China is signalling its determination to deal harshly with the scam business on its border. Pressure from Beijing also forced Thailand to take action against scam centres along its border with Myanmar earlier this year.
Despite this the business has adapted, with much of it now operating in Cambodia, though it is still prevalent in Myanmar.
