A Chinese court has sentenced five top members of an infamous Myanmar mafia to death as Beijing continues its crackdown on scam operations in South East Asia.

In all 21 Bai family members and associates were convicted of fraud, homicide, injury and other crimes, said a state media report published on the court website.

The family is among a handful of mafias that rose to power in the 2000s and transformed the impoverished backwater town of Laukkaing into a lucrative hub of casinos and red-light districts.

In recent years they pivoted to scams in which thousands of trafficked workers, many of them Chinese, are trapped, abused and forced to defraud others in criminal operations worth billions.

Mafia boss Bai Suocheng and his son Bai Yingcang were among the five men sentenced to death by the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court. Yang Liqiang, Hu Xiaojiang and Chen Guangyi were the other three.

Two members of the Bai family mafia were handed suspended death sentences. Five were sentenced to life imprisonment, while nine others were handed jail sentences ranging from three to 20 years.

The Bais, who controlled their own militia, established 41 compounds to house their cyberscam activities and casinos, authorities said.

These criminal activities involved more than 29 billion Chinese yuan ($4.1bn; £3.1bn). They also led to the deaths of six Chinese citizens, the suicide of one and multiple injuries, state media reported.

The harsh penalties handed down by the court are part of China’s campaign to eradicate the vast scam networks in South East Asia – and send a stern warning to other criminal syndicates.

In September, a Chinese court sentenced 11 members of the Ming family   – another prominent Laukkaing clan – to death.

These families rose to power in the 2000s with the help of Min Aung Hlaing – who now leads Myanmar’s military government. He had wanted to prop up allies in Laukkaing after ousting its former warlord.

Among the clans, the Bais were “absolutely number one”, Bai Yingcang previously told state media.

“At that time, our Bai family was the most powerful in both the political and military circles,” he said in a documentary about the Bai family, aired on Chinese state media in July.

In the same documentary, a worker at one of their scam centres recalled the abuse he had endured there: besides being beaten, he had his fingernails yanked out with pliers and two of his fingers severed with a kitchen knife.

(BBC)