BANGKOK: More than 1,000 people, mostly Chinese, have fled from Myanmar into Thailand this week, Thai authorities said on Friday, after the Myanmar military raided one of the country’s largest scam centres.
Sprawling cyberscam hubs, where fraudsters swindle victims through online cons, have flourished along Myanmar’s loosely governed border during its years-long civil war.
While some scammers are trafficked into the often-fortified compounds, experts say others work voluntarily, hoping to earn more in the multibillion-dollar illicit industry than they can at home.
Thailand’s Tak provincial office said 1,049 people had crossed from Myanmar into Mae Sot district from Wednesday to Friday morning – up from the 677 who had fled the KK Park scam compound as of Thursday morning.
Nationals from India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and more than a dozen other countries were among them, the office said in a statement.
Thailand’s Immigration Bureau said most of the arrivals were Chinese and men.
Myanmar’s junta said Monday it raided KK Park, located just across the border from Thailand, and seized Starlink satellite internet devices.
An AFP investigation revealed last week that the use of the devices had grown rapidly at the compounds in recent months.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which operates Starlink, said Wednesday that it had disabled more than 2,500 Starlink internet devices at Myanmar’s scam centres.
Sawanit Suriyakul Na Ayutthaya, deputy governor of Tak province, told AFP on Friday that authorities believed most of those who had entered Thailand were from KK Park, but they were still investigating.
He said Thursday that the arrivals would be screened to determine whether they were victims of human trafficking.
Otherwise, they could be prosecuted for illegal border crossing, he said.
Footage from public broadcaster Thai PBS on Thursday showed people using foam boxes to float across the river to Thailand.
“I was sleeping when I heard loud knocking and people shouting at us in Chinese,” a Thai woman told the broadcaster. “They were carrying guns.”
Authorities in Tak released an image showing a group of men sitting on the ground beside luggage and a line of Thai security personnel.
