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]
Hushruzjon Salohidinov, 26, was working as a courier in Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city and President Vladimir Putin’s hometown.
But last year, the Tajik man and practising Muslim says he was arrested while picking up a parcel which police claimed contained money stolen from elderly women.
Salohidinov says he never interacted with the alleged criminals, but nevertheless spent nine months in the Kresty-2 pre-trial detention centre about 32km (20 miles) from the city, while a judge refused to start his trial because of the “weak evidence” against him.
But instead of releasing him after that, prison wardens threatened to place him in a cell with HIV-infected inmates who, they said, would gang-rape him – unless he “volunteered” to fight in Ukraine.
“They said, ‘Oh, you’ll put on a skirt now, you’ll be raped,’” Salohidinov, who has raven black hair and a messy full beard, told Al Jazeera at a centre for war prisoners in northeastern Ukraine, where he is now being held, having been captured in January this year by Ukrainian forces.
Using a carrot-and-stick tactic, the wardens also promised him a sign-up bonus of 2 million rubles ($26,200), a monthly salary of 200,000 rubles ($2,620) and an amnesty from all convictions.
So, in the autumn of 2025, Salohidinov signed up as he “saw no other way out”.
Officials in Kresty-2, St Petersburg’s prosecutors’ office and Russia’s Ministry of Defence did not respond to any of Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
Hochu Jit, a Ukrainian group that helps Russian soldiers surrender, has published verified lists of thousands of Central Asian soldiers like Salohidinov.
“They are literally sent to be killed, no one considers them soldiers that need to be saved,” the group wrote in a 2025 post on Telegram. These soldiers’ life expectancy on the front line is about four months. “Losses among them are catastrophic,” the group reported.
With its low birthrate and large oil wealth, Russia has for years been a magnet for millions of labour migrants from ex-Soviet Central Asia, especially Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The campaign by the Kremlin to force Central Asians to fight in Ukraine dates back to 2023 – the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – when police began rounding up anyone who didn’t look Slavic and charging them with real or imagined transgressions such as a lack of registration, expired or “fake” permits or blurred stamps on their documents. Sometimes, migrants are simply bused straight to conscription offices.
In 2025, Al Jazeera interviewed another Tajik man who said he had been detained with an expired work permit and was then tortured into “volunteering” while being subjected to countless xenophobic and Islamophobic slurs from his officers.
Migrants say they are abused, tortured and threatened with jail or having their entire families deported.
“The main way of recruiting as many migrants as possible is pressure on them with threats of deportation,” Alisher Ilkhamov, the Uzbekistan-born head of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera.
Sometimes, migrants are simply duped.
Salohidinov said one serviceman in his squad was an Uzbek who “didn’t speak a word of Russian” and was fooled into “volunteering” while signing papers at a migration centre.
In their reports about “catching” migrants, officials frequently use derogatory terms about them, and also when they describe men who have obtained Russian passports but skipped registration at conscription offices. Since the Soviet era, such registration has been obligatory for all men and, since 2024, a newly naturalised Russian national can lose his citizenship if he fails to do it.
“We’ve caught 80,000 such Russian citizens, who don’t just want to go to the front line, they don’t even want to go to a conscription office,” chief prosecutor Alexander Bastrykin said in May 2025, referring to the migrants’ alleged patriotic sentiments.
He boasted that 20,000 Central Asians with Russian passports were herded to the front line in 2025.
The year before, he said 10,000 Central Asians had been sent to Ukraine.
Such remarks resonate with the Russian public that lives with “a high level of xenophobia in the stage of fear and helplessness,” Sergey Biziyukin, an exiled opposition activist from the western city of Ryazan, told Al Jazeera.
“For them, such phrases from Bastrykin are a form of sedative.”
What makes Central Asians easy targets is that they hail from police states, which depend on Moscow politically and economically, observers say.
“While the migrants are frightened into signing contracts, their motherland doesn’t really pay any attention,” Galiya Ibragimova, an Uzbekistan-born, Moldova-based regional expert, told Al Jazeera.
Despite hefty signup bonuses and relentless propaganda, the number of Russians who want to fight in Ukraine fell by at least one-fifth this year, and Moscow will strive to recruit more Central Asians, she said.
After signing the contract and leaving his debit card with his sign-up bonus with his parents, Salohidinov was sent to the western city of Voronezh for three weeks of training that did little to prepare him for the war.
“We just kept running back and forth with guns,” he said.
Their drill sergeants, he says, told the conscripts that the standard-issue flak jackets, helmets, boots and flashlights were of subpar quality and urged them to pitch in a million rubles ($13,100) each for “better” gear.
The incident corroborates reports on dozens of similar cases in Russian military units.
Salohidinov was ordered to work in a kitchen – and was verbally abused and beaten for the slightest transgression.
Of 28 men in his unit, 21 were Muslims – but their ethnic Russian officers ignored their pleas not to have pork in meals, repeating a decades-old practice of ignoring religion-related dietary restrictions dating back to the Soviet army.
The commanders demonised Ukrainians, telling them “that if we surrender, we’d be tortured, have our fingers broken, maimed, get [construction] foam up our a**, have our teeth yanked out one by one, have our arms broken”, Salohidinov says.
In early January this year, the conscripts were bused to the Russia-occupied Ukrainian region of Luhansk.
Salohidinov says he was tired, frightened and disoriented – Ukrainian drones were “always” above them and a grenade explosion nearby damaged his left eardrum.
On the fourth day of his service, Salohidinov was ordered to run beyond Ukrainian positions as part of Russia’s new tactic to send two or three servicemen to infiltrate the porous front line.
The mission was suicidal because the terrain was open, dotted with landmines and the bodies of dead Russian soldiers, while Ukrainians were firing machineguns and flew drones above them.
“I ran and ran and saw we were being shot at,” he said. “Me and my commander decided to surrender voluntarily instead of dying for nothing.”
They detached their assault rifles’ magazines, raised their hands and yelled they were surrendering.
What followed was “a calm feeling, beautiful”, he said. “They fed us, let us have a smoke, gave us food and water and even cake.”
Now, Salohidinov hopes to return to Tajikistan and panics at the thought of being made part of a prisoner swap – these have taken place several times each year – and returning to Russia because he would be sent back to the front line.
Tajikistan and other Central Asian nations have never endorsed Russia’s war in Ukraine, but nor have they openly criticised it.
In August 2025, Tajikistan’s Prosecutor General Habibullo Vohidzoda declared that no Tajik national would be charged for fighting in Ukraine.
So, what Salohidinov needs right now is an extradition request.
“I’m even glad that I got captured, because I’m not fighting anyone now, not risking anything,” he said. “I’ll even say thanks to Ukraine for taking me prisoner.”
The Tajik embassy in Kyiv did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
[Aljazeera]
Iranian forces have said they struck down two fighter jets belonging to the United States military, one over the southwest part of the country and another around the Strait of Hormuz.
A spokesperson for the Iranian military’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said on Friday that air defences completely destroyed one F-15 jet. Later in the day, the Iranian military said it targeted an A-10 US aircraft that crashed into the Gulf.
The New York Times had cited unidentified officials as saying that the A10’s pilot was safe after the crash.
But the fate of at least one pilot from the downed F-15 crew is unknown. Several US media outlets reported that one crew member of the jet was located and rescued by US forces, but the other remains missing.
US President Donald Trump told NBC News on Friday that the downing of the jet will not affect the prospect of talks with Tehran. “No, not at all. No, it’s war. We’re in war,” he said.
State media outlets in Iran showed photos of the wreckage of the F-15 jet and what appears to be an ejection seat with an attached parachute.
After the jet was downed, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf mocked Trump’s repeated claims of victory in the war.
“After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’” Ghalibaf wrote in a social media post.
There was no immediate comment on the incident from the Pentagon and US Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees military operations in the Middle East and much of Asia.
[Aljazeera]
United States President Donald Trump has announced that Pam Bondi is out as US attorney general, in his second major cabinet-level shake-up in less than a month.
Trump confirmed the decision in a post on Truth Social on Thursday, after a slate of media reports suggested he was considering removing Bondi from the top law enforcement role. Several cited his discontent over Bondi’s handling of investigative files related to financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will temporarily replace Bondi in an interim capacity, he said.
“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump wrote.
The US president also praised Bondi for leading the Department of Justice during a period when violent crime decreased in the US, part of a wider downward trend in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump did not mention his reasoning for the decision, instead writing, “We love Pam.” He added that she would be “transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector”.
In a statement, Bondi said she would be transitioning the office to Blanche over the next month, adding she was moving to “an important private sector role I am thrilled about, and where I will continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration”.
“I remain eternally grateful for the trust that President Trump placed in me to Make America Safe Again,” she said.
Bondi’s dismissal comes shortly after Trump abruptly fired Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversaw the agency amid a mass deportation campaign that led to the killing of two US citizens.
[Aljazeera]
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