Foreign News
Thousands of Chinese lured abroad and forced to be scammers – now Beijing is cracking down
“Should I feel anything?” asks the beady-eyed man, sitting in a padded cell with handcuffs around his wrists.
He’s being grilled by Chinese investigators about the time he allegedly ordered a stranger to be killed – a human offering to celebrate his sworn brotherhood with a business partner.
“Wasn’t he a living, breathing person?” an investigator asks.
“I didn’t feel much,” the man maintains.
The scene may sound like it came straight out of a crime drama. In fact, it is part of a documentary on Chinese state media – a look inside the workings of the justice system almost unheard of in a country where court proceedings are largely kept out the public eye.
The handcuffed man answering questions is Chen Dawei, a member of the infamous Wei family, one of several powerful mafia groups that for years operated with impunity in Myanmar’s border town of Laukkaing.
His confession forms just one part of a months-long propaganda push by Chinese officials. It both warns Chinese people of South East Asia’s billion-dollar scam industry, and highlights the Chinese government’s crackdown on the men behind an industry which has trapped thousands, and stolen billions.
The message China wants to send, as one investigator puts it, is clear: “It’s to warn other people, no matter who you are, where you are, as long as you commit such heinous crimes against Chinese people, you will pay the price.”
Or, to use a Chinese idiom: kill the chicken to scare the monkey.
There are few chickens bigger than the Weis, Lius, Mings and Bais – Godfather-esque families who rose to power in Laukkaing in the early 2000s.
Under their rule, the impoverished backwater was transformed into a flashy hub of casinos and red-light districts.
More recent are the scam farms – which hold people against their will, forcing them to defraud strangers online, or face brutal punishment or even death. Many of those trapped were Chinese and targeted people in China.
But the families’ empires came crashing down in 2023, when Myanmar authorities arrested them and handed them to China. Since then, Chinese courts have tried them for crimes ranging from fraud to human trafficking to homicide.
Examples are now being made out of the families: 11 members of the Ming clan and five of the Bais have been sentenced to death, while dozens have been given lengthy jail terms. Prosecution is under way for the Lius and the Weis.
Their ignominious falls from grace are clear in the documentaries they feature in, from the glint of their handcuffs to the colour of their prison uniforms.
It is a far cry from the lives they were living just two years ago.
The rise of Myanmar’s scam clans
The godfathers of Laukkaing rose to power after Min Aung Hlaing, who now heads Myanmar’s military government, led an operation to oust the town’s then-dominant warlord.
The military leader had been looking for co-operative allies, and Bai Suocheng – then a deputy of the warlord – fitted the bill.
Bai was appointed the chairman of Laukkaing district and his family came to command a 2,000-strong militia, Chinese media reported.
In the power vacuum left by these changes, a handful of families swooped in, securing military and political power.
According to Chinese investigators, the Wei family had one member of parliament and another military camp commander. Meanwhile, the Lius controlled key infrastructure like water and electricity and exerted strong influence over local security forces.
For years they made their money through gambling and prostitution.
But more recently they expanded to cyberscam operations, with each family controlling dozens of scam compounds and casinos that raked in billions of dollars.
While the families lived large with grand banquets and luxury cars, a culture of abominable violence thrived behind the walls of their scam compounds, Chinese authorities said.
Testimonies collected from freed workers point to a common pattern of abuse: fingers chopped off with knives, zaps of electric batons and regular beatings. Unco-operative workers were locked in small dark rooms and starved or beaten until they gave in.
China’s war on the ‘scamdemic’
Many of the Chinese workers had been lured there with lucrative job offers – no doubt tempting amid China’s economic slowdown and high youth unemployment.
Horror stories of such scam centres have seeped into daily chatter in China, from taxi rides to social media and pop culture.
No More Bets, a 2023 blockbuster about Chinese people trafficked to a foreign scam farm, kept millions of Chinese tourists away from Thailand – which has gained a reputation for being a transit hub to scam centres in Myanmar and Cambodia.
In January this year, the national spotlight was on Wang Xing, a small-time Chinese actor who had flown to Thailand for an acting gig, only to be taken to a scam centre across the border in Myanmar.
His family’s search for him went viral and he was ultimately rescued.
But Wang is in the lucky minority. Many Chinese people are still looking for their loved ones who have disappeared into South East Asia’s scam centres.
“My cousin was lured there four or five years ago. We haven’t heard from him at all. My aunt is in tears every day, it’s hard to describe her current condition,” a Weibo user wrote last month.
Selina Ho, associate professor specialising in Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore, tells the BBC that “by publicising the most recent crackdown, Chinese authorities are aiming to calm domestic sentiments and reassure the families of victims”.
The UN estimates that hundreds of thousands of people are still trapped in scam centres worldwide.
Much to Beijing’s chagrin, those running many such scam centres are often Chinese themselves.
This is common knowledge among Chinese citizens. “Once you’re abroad, the people you should least trust are your own countrymen,” reads a comment on Weibo.
“The fact that Chinese nationals are the masterminds behind many of these operations has been deeply damaging to China’s image on the international stage,” Ivan Franceschini, co-author of Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, tells the BBC.
As anxieties rise at home, Chinese authorities are eager to show their resolve in eradicating these massive scam networks.
Since 2023, Chinese and Myanmar authorities have arrested more than 57,000 Chinese nationals for their role in cyberscams, state media reported.
And they’ve made it clear that it’s not just the Godfathers they’re after. In October, China announced the prosecution of another syndicate which they described as a “new generation of power” in Laukkaing that’s “no less violent” than the infamous families.
In – yet another – state media documentary, a Chinese official investigating this syndicate recalled what his team leader had told him: “If this case can’t be solved, there will be a permanent stain on your career.”
For all the effort that China is putting into its crackdown and the ensuing publicity, the numbers offer some optimism: cyberscams reported in China have declined steadily over the past year, and authorities say such crimes have been “effectively curbed”.
As one official told documentary viewers, investigating scam gangs in Myanmar has made him realise “how happy we are in China, and how important a sense of security is to Chinese people”.
[BBC]
The execution of a Tennessee death row inmate has been postponed after staff were unable to find a vein to administer a lethal drug.
Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was set to be executed on Thursday.
But the state’s Department of Corrections said that while its medical team did find a primary IV line to carry out the lethal injection, they could not find a suitable second vein to establish a backup line, which is required under lethal injection execution protocol.
In response, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said he would grant Carruthers a temporary reprieve from execution for one year.
After finding the primary injection line, “the team continued to follow the protocol, but could not find another suitable vein”, the corrections department said in a statement.
“The team attempted to insert a central line pursuant to the protocol, but the procedure was unsuccessful,” the statement continued. “The execution was then called off.”
Carruthers was convicted in 1996 for the kidnapping and murders of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker.
The men were beaten and shot and the three were buried alive in a Memphis cemetery.
Carruthers’ case has drawn national attention as advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have argued there were significant problems with his trial, including that he was forced to represent himself.
Carruthers himself has consistently maintained his innocence.
“His trial was riddled with errors. He was denied legal counsel. There was no physical evidence linked to him,” the ACLU said in a press release demanding the “wrongful execution” of Carruthers be called off.
“The evidence against him that was presented at trial came from informants who have since recanted their statements or been discredited,” the ACLU continued.
The nonprofit group also collected more than 130,000 signatures calling for the execution to be halted to allow for “necessary fingerprint and DNA testing”.
Advocates and community groups delivered that petition to the governor’s office at the Tennessee capitol on Monday, but Gov Lee announced the following day that Carruthers’ execution would go forward as planned.
Last week, Kim Kardashian took up Carruthers’ cause, urging her fans in a social media post to call the governor’s office and demand the DNA evidence be tested “before it’s too late”, according to US media.
In a petition for clemency filed on Wednesday, attorneys for Carruthers argued that his current mental state – resulting from Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Type, and brain damage – is too impaired for him to be executed.
“These disorders manifest in current symptoms of unending, synergistic, and complex delusions that thwart a rational understanding of his imminent execution,” his lawyers argued.
In response to the news of the temporary reprieve, Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said the ACLU will continue fighting on Carruthers’ behalf.
“Tennessee cannot continue torturing a man while refusing to answer serious questions about his innocence,” DeLiberato said.
[BBC]
A French appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of manslaughter in 2009 Rio de Janeiro – Paris crash that killed 228 people – the worst aviation disaster in the country’s history.
The Paris Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday that both companies were “solely and entirely responsible for the crash of flight AF447”, and ordered a payment of 225,000 euros ($261,720) for each passenger, the maximum fine possible for corporate manslaughter.
Although the penalties are largely symbolic, they capped an eight-week trial that victims’ families saw as a last chance to find justice two years after a lower court acquited Airbus and Air France.
Both companies have repeatedly denied all charges.
Following the ruling, Airbus said it would appeal to France’s highest court, saying the latest finding contradicted submissions from prosecutors and the 2023 acquittal.
Prosecutors previously warned that an appeal was likely and denounced the companies’ behaviour throughout the decade-plus legal process.
“Nothing has come of it – not a single word of sincere comfort,” said prosecutor Rodolphe Juy-Birmann as the trial was under way last November. “One word sums up this whole circus: indecency.”
The crash unfolded on June 1, 2009, when flight AF447 disappeared from radar screens as it headed from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to the French capital Paris with 216 passengers and 12 crew.
Two years passed before a deep-sea search uncovered the plane’s black boxes, which record flight data.
Investigators found the pilots had pushed the jet into a climb as it struggled with sensors blocked with ice during a mid-Atlantic storm. The plane stalled and crashed into the ocean.
While Airbus and Air France have blamed pilot error, the lawyers for passengers’ families argued that both companies knew that there was a problem with the plane’s pitot tubes, which measure flight speed.
Pilots were not trained to deal with such an emergency as the tubes malfunctioned, prosecutors said, triggering alarms in the cockpit and turning off the plane’s autopilot function.
Air France lawyer Pascal Weil said in October that the company “had the means to conduct high-altitude training, but we did not do so because we sincerely believed it was unnecessary”.
[Aljazeera]
The US has charged former Cuban leader Raúl Castro with conspiracy to kill US nationals and other crimes over the 1996 downing of two planes between Cuba and Florida.
The case unveiled on Wednesday accuses Castro and five others in the shooting down of the aircraft belonging to Cuban-American group Brothers to the Rescue and killing four people, including three Americans.
Castro, now 94, was then head of the country’s armed forces and faced international condemnation over the crash.
As the US seeks to exert increasing pressure on Cuba’s communist rule, President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the charges “a political manoeuvre, devoid of any legal foundation”.
Speaking at Freedom Tower in Miami, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the US would also charge Castro with destruction of aircraft, and four individual counts of murder over the deaths of Armando Alejandre Jr, Carlos Alberto Costa, Mario Manuel de la Peña, and Pablo Morales.
“The United States, and President Trump, does not, and will not, forget its citizens,” Blanche said.
The charges must be argued in a US court, with some carrying the possibility life terms. The murder charges each carry a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment.
The justice department’s new charges take aim at a key figurehead of Cuba’s communist leadership when it is facing intense US pressure to make significant political and economic reforms to its one-party rule there.
“I think the strategy is to increase the pressure gradually to the point where the Cuban government will give in and surrender at the bargaining table,” said Wiliam LeoGrand, a expert on Latin American politics at American University.
The US has issued sanctions on the country and imposed a blockade on oil to Cuba that has resulted in blackouts and food shortages.
Earlier on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a message to the Cuban people timed to the country’s independence day.
“President Trump is offering a new path between the US and a new Cuba,” Rubio said.
Rubio told citizens of the island that a Cuban military run conglomerate known as GAESA is primarily responsible for the blackouts and food shortages that the country continues to endure.
GAESA owns or operates most of the lucrative parts of the Cuban economy from the ports to the petrol pumps to five-star hotels.
In response to Rubio’s message, Díaz-Canel accused the US of lying and imposing a collective punishment on the Cuban people.
Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges in Miami. (BBC)Díaz-Canel also said that the indictment of Castro was being used to “justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba” and accused the US of distorting the facts around the downing of the plane.
Asked by reporters about the prospects of bringing Castro to the US to face charges, Blanche responded that there was a warrant for his arrest.
He did not confirm whether the US would try to capture Castro, but said, “we expect he will show up here, by his own will or another way”.
American University’s LeoGrande said he believes the US is ready to capture the former Cuban leader “if the Cubans don’t surrender at the bargaining table”.
In January, the US staged a military operation to seize former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and bring him to the US, after the justice department indicted him.
It transformed Venezuela’s relationship with Washington, something LeoGrande cautioned would be unlikely to have the same effect in Cuba, noting Castro retired almost a decade ago.
Nearly 95 years old, Castro, the brother of late Cuban leader Fidel Castro, remains an influential figure, acknowledged on the island as the surviving “leader of the Cuban Revolution”.
Blanche said he would “not compare cases” between Castro’s and that of Maduro.
President Donald Trump was asked about the political aspect of Wednesday’s indictment.
“A lot of those people are related to me in the sense that I’ve had such a great relationship with Cuban-Americans,” Trump said. “On a humanitarian basis, we’re here to help.”
While Castro is not expected to be extradited or to appear in the case, all options appear to be on the table, says attorney Lindsey Lazopoulos Friedman, who served as a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Miami.
“If he did appear in the case, he would be afforded the same legal rights as any other defendant,” Friedman said, adding that would ultimately include a trial by jury.
“No one expects that the case will follow this typical path… but the indictment is compelling and is supported by significant evidence,” she told the BBC.
Cuba unlikely to bow without a fight
The Miami centre where US officials announced the indictment of Raúl Castro was full of Cuban Americans, mostly representing Cuban exile organisations that have for decades led opposition of the Cuban government from within the United States.
Surrounded by pictures of the four people who died in the 1996 crashes, many at the Miami event described being thrilled by the news.
“It was time, 67 years of that murderous regime,” said Isela Fiterre. “Raúl Castro did not merely kill four individuals. Over the course of many years, he has killed countless people,” Fiterre said.
She said it is never too late for justice and that she is grateful to the Trump administration for taking this step.
Another attendee, Mercedes Puid-Soto, echoed those sentiments.
“I feel very happy. Justice has been served,” she said. “It’s very important that the families can close that chapter, and we Cubans too.”
“It’s unlikely that the Cuban regime will surrender to the United States without a fight,” Vigil noted. “And any move that includes working with the Cuban regime would be very difficult for the Cuban diaspora in the United States to accept.”
US and Cuban representatives, including Raúl Castro’s grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, have held “conversations” in recent months, but US charges against the former president are unlikely to smooth these contacts.
On the contrary, the Cuban side showed signs of further entrenching into its “no surrender, no concessions” position against US pressure, with Cuban state media outlets blasting what they called the “false accusations”.
(BBC)
Catholic Council reconvenes after nine years
ICC to widen Women’s Emerging Nations Trophy
Italian Navy’s ITS GIOVANNI DELLE BANDE NERE departs following replenishment visit
PM meets Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations
Tennessee execution called off after failed lethal injection
Landslide early warnings issued to the Districts of Colombo, Gampaha, Kalutara, Kegalle, Nuwara Eliya and Ratnapura
‘Dates have the highest sugar content to fight Coronavirus’
Sunday Island 27 December – Headlines
#SundayIsland 17th December – Headlines
Sunday Island – 28th March
Sunday Island Headlines – 21 March
Sunday Island – 21st February – Headlines
-
Features6 days agoSri Lankan Airlines Airbus Scandal and the Death of Kapila Chandrasena and my Brother Rajeewa
-
News7 days agoLanka’s eligibility to draw next IMF tranche of USD 700 mn hinges on ‘restoration of cost-recovery pricing for electricity and fuel’
-
News6 days agoKapila Chandrasena case: GN phone records under court scrutiny
-
News6 days agoRupee slide rekindles 2022 crisis fears as inflation risks mount
-
Features3 days agoOctopus, Leech, and Snake: How Sri Lanka’s banks feast while the nation starves
-
Business6 days agoExpansion of PayPal services in Sri Lanka officially announced
-
News2 days agoSteps underway to safeguard Sri Lanka’s maritime heritage
-
News6 days agoCourt orders further arrests in alleged USD 42 Mn NDB fraud case