With the arrest of the commander of the Northeast Military Region of Myanmar and four other senior military officers involved in telecom fraud, it can be said that the telecom fraud groups in Myawaddy might soon be eradicated.
Many people are confused about how telecom fraud has spread to Thailand? In the past few years, it was mostly heard of in northern Myanmar and the Philippines, and ten years ago, there was no such thing at all. Let me explain it to you slowly.
One, The Past
It all started with the domestic gaming industry.
In 2000, the global internet bubble burst, and the NASDAQ index in the United States plummeted. The survival of China's early internet companies was at great risk, especially companies like NetEase and Shanda, which were on the verge of closing down. NetEase started with an email service, then followed Sina to become a portal website. Chen Tianqiao founded Shanda with the initial intention of building an online interactive entertainment community platform. As the internet bubble burst, both companies, at the brink of life and death, chose to transform and enter the online gaming industry.
NetEase was founded in 1999 and went public on NASDAQ in June 2000, with Ding Lei replacing Liu Yonghao as China's richest man. Ding Lei was spirited, but the good times did not last long, as he encountered the bursting of the internet bubble, and NetEase's email and portal services were not generating revenue. During that time, Ding Lei spent his days drinking sullenly in his office, quite distressed. Fortunately, NetEase's investor Xu Xin firmly supported him. By chance, there was a small gaming company next door to NetEase, which caught Ding Lei's attention. After a few interactions, Ding Lei decided to buy the company. The partners of this gaming company were very happy, as the game was not even fully developed yet, and someone was already offering a huge sum to buy it.
Ding Lei quickly devoted his energy to this gaming company, focusing all resources on developing the game— "Journey to the West". After the game was developed, he did not know how to sell it. At that time, the most famous product in China was the Subor learning machine by BBK. Thinking of this, Ding Lei immediately went to meet Duan Yongping.
Duan Yongping was a marketing genius, and within a few hours of discussion, he had set the profit model for "Journey to the West", and Ding Lei started promoting it according to Duan's methods, making the game a huge success. Duan Yongping also did not sit idle; through this conversation, he felt that Ding Lei was a spirited young man who could achieve great things in the future. Therefore, he invested all his spare money in NetEase's stocks. At that time, NetEase was facing the risk of delisting, and its stock price was at its lowest.
Duan Yongping made a fortune from this investment, and now he bears the reputation of being the "Warren Buffett of China", which is quite intimidating, although people should not idolize him excessively.
At that time, Chen Tianqiao, on the other hand, bet all of Shanda's remaining funds on licensing the Korean game "Legend", and he even persuaded the telecommunications company to rent him servers on a "try before you pay" basis, ready to risk everything. What he did not expect was that "Legend" became an overnight sensation, so popular that it made him dizzy with its speed of making money. In 2003, Chen Tianqiao became China's newly crowned richest man.
But Chen Tianqiao was a man with great ideals and a strong sense of national pride. He had said more than once to his friends that online games were contrary to his original intention of becoming a mainstream social figure. He fundamentally looked down on online games, so later Shanda continuously transformed and integrated, with Chen Tianqiao aiming to build an internet Disney kingdom. His strategy was unmatched in the internet field at that time, but unfortunately, his strategy was too ahead of its time. In the end, Shanda failed because of the "super family TV box", which later became IPTV, as the technical conditions at the time were not yet ready.
The success of NetEase and Shanda in the gaming field led many internet companies to find the winning formula and start developing online games. Sohu, Tencent, Giant, Kingsoft, and others all joined in. Of course, there was one exception, and that was Alibaba. When Jack Ma founded Alibaba, he set a bottom line for Alibaba: never touch games, because he believed that games would only poison the youth, and his son had once been deeply affected by them. Jack Ma's vision and sentiment can only be described as truly impressive.
Two, The Present
Starting in 2003, the Chinese internet surged forward, with various application scenarios emerging one after another. Various heroes conquered cities and territories, and fields such as video websites, vertical e-commerce B2C, security guards, browsers, navigation websites, etc., were completely divided up. Newcomers could only turn their attention to games. Before 2010, online games were mainly large-scale multiplayer role-playing interactive games, such as "Legend", "Journey to the West", "Fantasy Westward Journey", "Zhengtu", etc.
After 2010, perhaps everyone was tired of role-playing games, and the game market began to shift towards casual and relaxing games. Various casual chess and card games, sports competition game companies sprang up like bamboo shoots after a rain, developing vigorously. Those that developed well went to Hong Kong to go public, and some were acquired by traditional enterprises, also selling for a good price.
The power of successful examples is infinite, which led to more and more companies entering the gaming industry, and the industry was quickly becoming saturated. Gradually, some companies turned their attention offline. They set up tables online and pulled people offline, starting to engage in gambling. Mahjong, Landlords, Poker, Bullfighting, you name it, especially Texas Hold'em.
During that time, disputes arose everywhere due to online gambling, which attracted the attention of the relevant national authorities. Soon, the Cyberspace Administration of China, in conjunction with the public security organs, carried out a severe crackdown on internet gambling platforms, and the largest gaming company in the country dismantled its Texas Hold'em game department entirely.
Other small gambling game companies, in order to survive, turned to Southeast Asia one after another. Most chose Myanmar, backed by the motherland, hiding abroad to continue doing business domestically.
These people were initially serious about making games, but there are few programmers in Southeast Asia, so they had to dig deep into China to hire programmers with high salaries. As more gaming companies went overseas, they began to cluster together, forming various parks, with northern Myanmar becoming the most established.
Myanmar has several characteristics:
1. It has 135 ethnic groups; 2. The central area is a plain, surrounded by highlands and hills; 3. The special terrain combined with multiple ethnic groups has led to a situation of warlords ruling different areas for many years. Myanmar currently has more than 40 armed forces, with the government army occupying the central plains and being the most powerful, while other large and small armed forces are entrenched in the surrounding highlands, deeply supported by the local people.
Therefore, the Myanmar government army has been unable to eradicate these local armed forces for decades. This also shows that Myanmar does not have a strong political leader, and how fortunate China is to have had Chairman Mao.
Because Myanmar is relatively poor, these local armed forces also need to do business to survive. These people have guns and play by rather wild rules, engaging in drugs, pornography, gambling, cultural relics trading, and even cryptocurrency and NFT transactions, doing whatever brings in money.
Because domestic crackdowns on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, those involved in cryptocurrencies and exchanges also flocked to northern Myanmar, joining forces with gambling game companies to form an upstream and downstream industry chain. They also colluded with local warlords, forming a complete closed-loop operation mode that integrates online gambling, pornographic websites, cryptocurrency speculation, pyramid schemes, and telecom fraud.
Some people who did not make money gradually started to have bad intentions. This led to the earliest and most inhumane businesses of buying and selling organs, such as kidneys and hearts. The organ trade business had little room in the local area, as most Southeast Asian countries are very poor, and most organs could only be sold abroad. Once the international community cracked down, this business could no longer continue. So these various forces gathered together still mainly operated online gambling and telecom fraud. Within a few years, this business developed like a rising sun. Some Chinese who were initially deceived also took risks and joined in, turning around to deceive others.
In 2023, before the movie "All In" became popular, the country had already cleaned up the fraud gangs in northern Myanmar thoroughly. However, given the large number of people involved, some inevitably escaped, with some moving to Dubai and other Middle Eastern countries, and some even fleeing to South America, with only a very few hiding on the Myanmar-Thailand border, in the recently sensational Wang Xing incident in Myawaddy.
Myawaddy is under the control of the Karen armed forces, which has only over 7,000 people and is considered small among the more than 40 armed forces in Myanmar. They originally intended to do some small business quietly, but they did not expect to stir up such a big mess. The Karen armed forces knew their own strength, and even the few big warlords in northern Myanmar had been eradicated by the East, so they never thought of provoking the East. Unfortunately, once the telecom fraud business started, the people below did not care and went overboard.
After the Wang Xing incident escalated, Thailand cut off water and electricity to Myawaddy. Just after the New Year of 2025, the Thai female prime minister visited the East, and upon returning, she began deploying a root-cutting operation. The Karen armed forces were also smart, cooperating with Thailand's deployment, knowing who was behind them. In less than a week, those involved in fraud hiding in Myawaddy were all extradited from Thailand to China, with Kunming Airport alone receiving over 600 people. Thus, the Myawaddy telecom fraud gang was eradicated.
Three, The Future
Speaking of this, many people may ask, isn't telecom fraud eradicated? Is there a future?
To be precise, telecom fraud in Southeast Asia is gone. As our country's economic and military strength rapidly improves comprehensively, these Southeast Asian countries will have to consider Beijing's thoughts in the future. The issue of telecom fraud, which the country has put a lot of effort into eradicating, will definitely not be supported by any forces in these countries again.
But as mentioned earlier, when northern Myanmar was eradicated, although the Bai Socheng gang was caught in one fell swoop, some telecom fraudsters fled to Dubai and other Middle Eastern countries, and some fled to Venezuela and other South American countries. These places are far from us, and those people can still cause trouble, and it will be difficult to eradicate them in the short term. Everyone still needs to start with themselves, stay vigilant, not participate in gambling, and not be greedy for the opportunity to make big money in these places, and then there will be no problems.
At the beginning of his term, Trump said that cooperation between China and the United States could solve all the problems in the world. To use the words of General Secretary Xi Jinping: The current world is in a phase of accelerated development of a century of unprecedented changes, and the world order will shift from unipolarity to multipolarity. To put it bluntly: In the future, the affairs of the world will no longer be dictated by the United States alone; China, Europe, and Russia will all participate in the formulation of the world order.
This statement is already very modest, and I believe that before long, China will share the management of the world with the United States. By then, telecom fraud gangs targeting Chinese people will forever disappear from this earth.
