Last fall, a coalition of rebel groups known as the Three Brotherhood Alliance launched a rapid-fire offensive across Myanmar’s northern Shan state, quickly overrunning more than 100 military outposts and seizing several key towns along the country’s border with China.
This in itself was not unusual. Myanmar’s military government has faced insurgencies from ethnic and political militias for decades, and there’s been a major uptick in rebel activity since the 2021 coup, which brought the country’s current military junta to power, ending a short period of representative government. Over the past few months, the government has been rapidly losing ground to rebel forces in several regions of the country.
But what made “Operation 1027,” named after the date it began, so notable was the declared goals of the rebel groups that carried it out. In addition to their long-term aim of overthrowing the military government, one they share with a variety of other groups throughout the country, the Three Brotherhood Alliance also vowed to “eradicate telecom fraud, scam dens and their patrons nationwide, including in areas along the China-Myanmar border.”
This might sound more like a piece of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s platform than a goal for a rebel group fighting a civil war. But the statement was a testament to both the rapid rise in Southeast Asia of a novel form of criminal enterprise — abducting people across national borders and forcing them to carry out internet scams — and how this practice has drawn China’s government to become ever more enmeshed in the dizzyingly complex and increasingly bloody war in neighboring Myanmar.
The explosion of such scam centers is a reminder that even crimes carried out in the virtual world need physical infrastructure in the real world. And just like more established criminal enterprises that range from drugs to conflict minerals, the perpetrators of cyberscams have taken root in a zone of armed conflict and…
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