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Myanmar’s proliferating scam centers

https://asia.nikkei.com/static/vdata/infographics/myanmar-scam-centers/
90•WaitWaitWha•7h ago

Comments

jacknews•6h ago
These might be features of large scale purpose-built scam centers, but there are myriad smaller centers occupying apartment blocks, whole floors of office towers, and of course ex-Casino buildings and so on.

eg Cambodia is especially rife with these. There are so many recently-built apartment blocks that lie empty, often built with corrupt money anyway, they make easy and fairly low-key dens.

30minAdayHN•6h ago
I always thought that people willfully participate in scams to make more money. For example, I know there are quite a few telephone scam centers in India, that call US folks for SSN fraud etc. I thought these folks just work for salary.

It's scary to look at the scale of 'organized' crime / modern slavery. This is almost like Squid Games.

herbst•2h ago
To my understanding this also was the common reality no 5 years ago.
kayxspre•50m ago
Three months ago there is a report that 119 Thai citizens were deported from Cambodia after a call center ring was busted. Out of these numbers, 100 willfully worked for the ring. 15 worked for the illegal gambling establishment. Only 4 minors are reportedly the victim of human trafficking. Ironically, when those people came back (willfully or otherwise), they will claim that they were being "misled" or "coerced" to do it even though the evidence suggests that they willfully do so.

Thai authorities are trying to combat this issue by cutting off supply of basic utilities (electricity, network connection) to hinder their work. The government claimed that this reduces the volume of scam attempts by 20%, though it's not entirely gone as long as they can find a way to circumvent it

Muromec•3m ago
Kidnapping Indian and Chinese residents for their languages skills is pretty documents. That's more of a Shan states thing than Cambodia
dddddaviddddd•5h ago
I was looking at the Wikipedia article for the "Global Organized Crime Index" today, and Myanmar is #1, above Colombia and Mexico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Organized_Crime_Index
v3ss0n•3h ago
We are pretty much done now , due to coup, the junta's involvement in scam gangs and anti junta revolution civil war in full swing.

Not just scam gangs, the thugs collaborative with military,kidnap and sell youths to junta for

1. Forced military drafting.

2. Human trafficking

3. Organ harvesting .

That what military dictatorship done to our democractic country within 5 years.

Muromec•6m ago
The country is having a civil war for the last 60 years and was under sanctions until something like 2015. What else would anybody expect to be happening besides this, whoring in nearby Thailand and genociding minorities?
kragen•5h ago
Will AI take their jobs? This seems like what current LLMs would be best at.
swarnie•4h ago
That's a really tough call, what sets off your internal "Scam alert" more, a thick Indian accent from a busy call centre or a TikTok robot voice?
willvarfar•4h ago
As genuine customer service migrates to robots, it may change expectations as to what sounds legitimate? So in the future the genuine human ringing you up would smell like a scam whereas the genuine robot will have weight - irregardless of its legitimacy?
swores•4h ago
The best AI voice generation is already much more realistic than the typical TikTok robotic voices, and they're only going to get better. It won't be long before the only reason anyone will generate artificial voices that are obviously fake will be choice, not tool limitations.
Incipient•2h ago
The tiktok robot voice is deliberate I believe, it's branding. It's not a limitation of technology.
Cthulhu_•14m ago
The tiktok robot voice is old news, they can do realistic-enough human-like voices now, with verbal tics and everything.
djaychela•45m ago
From what I've read, the cost of an llm would be greater than the current operators who are effectively enslaved. If it were cheaper then possibly - certainly easier to manage than people who would try to escape their dire situation here.
ethan_smith•9m ago
Current LLMs still struggle with real-time dynamic conversation and cultural context switching that sophisticated scams require, though they excel at scripted interactions and will likely augment rather than replace human scammers in the near term.
charlysl•4h ago
Here is a good documentary about these scam centers, where some management staff even openly admit what is going on there:

https://youtu.be/kSNn2pHtRH4?si=6WAbOG4p6bd80dJ8

gkanai•2h ago
Japan should qualify any future ODA to Myanmar requires the junta goes in and breaks up these scam centers and put the scam owners in jail.
throwaway48476•1h ago
Scams will not end until all international transactions are insured and reversible.
reliabilityguy•31m ago
Plenty of transactions used in scams are irreversible.
rft•1h ago
There was a talk on the last CCC that covered romance scams from "call centers" in similar conditions in Myanmar. It gives some insights into the daily life from the perspective of someone who managed to flee the compound and take some documents with him. I was very surprised at the level of sophistication and organization that went into this scam. I knew about the tech support scam centers, but I still saw romance scam as something done on the individual level, not fully organized.

Talk is in German, but dubbed into English by the community. https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-erpressung-aus-dem-internet-auf-...

55555•19m ago
This is about to get way worse with AI. They'll be able to call you, say nothing, you'll answer, "hello?" and then hang up and by then they've cloned your voice and left a message on your parents' answering machine that sounds like you begging for them to transfer money because you're in danger. They'll be video calling everybody on linkedin with a job in accounting and will have the face and voice of their boss, asking them to transfer money. The situation is about to be terrible, and the only thing keeping it remotely in check is that most people choose to be somewhat moral.
Cthulhu_•17m ago
This is also the danger with these - apparent - AI meeting attendant bots being a thing now; organizations should ban them wholesale, as if they're unknown / unauthorised 3rd party ones, who knows what they'll do with the voice data of e.g. the boss.
Muromec•8m ago
The time to make money on e-hanko usable for everything is now.
sealeck•4m ago
Yes and no; there is a tipping point, past which hardware/software vendors will be forced to adopt countermeasures and new ways to verify identity.

We will lose a lot though; the most prosperous societies really rely on high levels of interpersonal trust (which allows people to easily do things together, whether that's leaving their buggy outside when they go to buy a coffee or commercial relations). It would be a shame to see that get destroyed.

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Myanmar’s proliferating scam centers

https://asia.nikkei.com/static/vdata/infographics/myanmar-scam-centers/
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