A Chinese actor was enslaved in a compound running online scams

For Xu Bochun, left down and nearly out in Shanghai by pandemic layoffs, a month’s work as a movie extra in balmy southwest China sounded like easy money.

It turned out to be anything but.

Armed men kidnapped the aspiring actor, then 37, last year after he showed up for what proved to be a fake part and marched him at knifepoint through jungle and across the border into northern Myanmar. There, he was beaten and sold to a criminal group running cyber scams, targeting victims with fake investment schemes and online romance. He was forced to spend three months duping people out of their money until his family paid a ransom for his release in October.

Xu was one of at least 48,000 Chinese nationals that worked in a lawless, isolated corner of Myanmar called Kokang until a Beijing-led crackdown there last year. He provided screenshots of his initial chat messages about the movie part, photos of the cash ransom payment and Chinese police documents about his case to support his account.

His experiences are similar to those of six other people interviewed by The Washington Post who were trafficked or misled into traveling to Myanmar, including from Thailand and Taiwan. All responded to similarly fraudulent job postings, some asking for candidates with experience in web management or online advertising, before being kidnapped. The U.N. Human Rights Office estimated in a report last August that more than 200,000 people are still being forced to work as scammers in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, the epicenter of this global, multibillion-dollar criminal industry, run predominantly by Chinese criminal gangs.

Accounts from those who escape, the United Nations and human rights groups say, offer a window into this new iteration of global human trafficking and the digital platforms fueling it. The problem has not been met with a global or even regional response, the groups add, even as victims continue to be recruited from more than three dozen countries, predominantly through social media apps like WeChat, Telegram and Facebook. The U.S. State Department said in June that forced labor in scam compounds has continued to grow. Citing the expansion of scamming operations, its latest Trafficking in Persons report put both Cambodia and Myanmar on its blacklist, opening the door to possible penalties and sanctions.

“There has been an extreme uptick in sophistication and reach of these recruitment networks,” said Jacob Sims, a visiting expert on transnational crime at the United States Institute of Peace.

Sold to scammers

In June 2023, Xu was living job to job, scouring casual work groups on WeChat when he came across an offer of 10,000 yuan ($1,380) for an acting gig in the tourist town of Xishuangbanna, on China’s border with Myanmar.

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Xu signed up, despite the ad offering few details.

On arrival, Xu and a handful of other people from across the country gathered in a hotel and were then taken by car to an unlit street near the mountains. The setting immediately seemed off. Ten men in camo and hiking boots, knives hanging from their belts, appeared out of the dark. One tried to calm everyone down while the rest stood in menacing silence.

“It’s not a big deal,” the man said, according to Xu. “We are still going to give you part-time work, it just won’t be the work you thought you’d be doing.”

After taking everyone’s luggage, phone and identity cards, the men marched them down overgrown mountain paths in the pitch black, then drove them on dirt bikes. They eventually reached a wire fence — the border — with a gap big enough to wriggle through one at a time.

Uniformed guards at checkpoints in Myanmar showed little interest in them as they were transported from the border — so long as drivers handed over one to two thousand Chinese yuan in cash.

“The whole way we were yelling to sound the alarm, calling ‘save us.’ They understood too. They’d say ‘Chinese?’ But nobody cared,” he said. “They only recognized money, not people. It was a lawless place.”

On arrival in Laukkaing, the capital of the Kokang region, Xu felt he had been transported back 40 years to a far-flung town only just emerging from poverty. Then, sticking out from among the run-down buildings and dirt roads, he spotted signs of extreme wealth, flashy sports cars and a handful of palatial hotels.

Xu’s first stop in what he called a “supply chain” of criminality was a walled compound on the outskirts of town used by traffickers to hold abductees before they were sold on to scammers. Beneath a roof of plastic sheeting that blocked out the sun, 70 to 80 young Chinese men squatted shackled in the mud as 20 armed guards enforced silence by meting out beatings with plastic pipes.

Every day, scam “agents” would come in search of new workers for their operations, Xu said, while the traffickers would bring in 15 to 20 new arrivals, mostly from China. Many were in their 20s or 30s. Some were teenagers.

Xu, who was considered old, was held for an unusually long 10 days. His legs grew numb from beatings, he said. There were no showers or toothbrushes and the beds were stained with blood.

“They were training us to obey like slaves,” he said.

The traffickers robbed them by forcing captives to unlock accounts on online payment services like WeChat Pay and Alipay and transfer cash out. They would then use the apps to apply for personal loans to ensure a steady supply of funds.

Five or six days after arriving — Xu had lost count — he said he saw four people shot dead when they tried to grab guns from the guards.

“I don’t know their names, don’t know where they were from, don’t know if they were Chinese, I just know they were cheated into going there,” Xu said. “I bet their families don’t even know they were in Myanmar, don’t know that they died.”

In July, Xu was eventually sold to a scamming outfit run from the Red Lotus Hotel. It was owned, he said, by Liu Abao, a nickname for Liu Zhengxiang, a patriarch of one of the three crime families that ruled over Kokang, according to U.N. officials, Chinese court records and analysts.

In January, Myanmar police handed Liu to the authorities in China, where he is awaiting trial on suspicion of violent crimes including illegal detention. He could not be reached for comment.

Xu’s team on the seventh floor of the hotel targeted people in Southeast Asia. With four phones each logged into 20-odd Instagram and Facebook accounts, they would rely on machine translation to send messages to hundreds of potential victims from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day.

After establishing a rapport, they would switch to WhatsApp or Line messaging apps and try to interest the mark in buying Tether coins, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies which is pegged to the dollar. Anyone who agreed got sent a link to a fake platform built to look like a crypto exchange.

A slow and costly release

At Red Lotus, beatings were a tool to enforce a frantic work pace. Xu regularly failed to meet targets. The most severe punishment was reserved for people who tried to escape or contact families back home.

Once every couple of weeks, the bosses would gather the workers — under strict supervision — to send messages of reassurance to family members. Only approved text and photos were allowed.

That itself was another ploy, according to Xu. The scammers wanted families to know just enough that they were ready to pay a ransom if needed.

It was in one of these sessions that Xu was able to send a single line of text to a childhood friend, alerting him to his captivity. At first, nothing happened. In late September, over Mid-Autumn Festival, Xu again briefly contacted his friend, only to discover that Chinese police had refused to look at his case, citing a lack of evidence.

Eventually, Xu’s family gathered enough proof for police in Yunnan to start negotiating for his release. Handling the process were brokers from overseas Chinese business associations in Kokang who approached scam ringleaders to negotiate terms.

Xu’s captors initially didn’t want to let him go. He begged them to accept the deal, saying that he was too old and unsuited to scamming. “People like me are just a waste,” he recalled telling the boss while bowing repeatedly. “If you let my family buy me back, you’ll definitely make more money.”

After his family agreed to pay 620,000 yuan ($85,300) in cash, his boss relented. His mother handed stacks of bills to intermediaries in a hotel room near the border. Xu was returned to Chinese authorities at Qingshuihe port, a border crossing on Kokang’s southern tip recently upgraded by Chinese investment.

Police on the border took two tubes of blood — one to check for drugs, the other to check for infectious diseases — and interrogated him for 10 days. Then he was flown to Nanjing, the eastern Chinese city where he attended university, for another full day of questioning.

When Xu was finally let go — his mother first had to pay Chinese police to cover his travel expenses — he learned that his mother had sold her house to pay his ransom.

Though the scam compounds in Kokang have been closed, new centers continue to crop up all over the region and in burgeoning hotspots, including Dubai.

“There must still be so many people waiting to be saved,” he said.

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