SPECIAL REPORT: In my previous life as a foreign correspondent I once had the dubious honour of interviewing the opium warlord Khun Sa at his base inside Myanmar, then called Burma.
Khun Sa, the world’s biggest heroin trafficker at the time, was not only tolerated but deeply embedded with the brutal military regime ruling–and still ruling–Myanmar.
He later moved to the outskirts of Myanmar’s biggest city and former capital, Yangon, where he lived in some splendour and expanded his clandestine empire to embrace human trafficking, gemstone smuggling and illegal logging, until his death in 2007.
Khun Sa’s criminal activities–conducted in flagrant defiance of both official Burmese legislation and international law–mutated into so-called “Scam Centres”, much like The Philippines’ now-closed POGO illicit “off-shore” gambling sites, serving neighbouring countries where gambling is still illegal – such as China and Thailand.
Rebellions
Away from the central Berman heartland, home to some 70 percent of the country’s 54.5 million people, Myanmar has at least 10 ethnic-minority rebellions running, but not all raging, in its frontier states with India and Bangladesh to the west, China to the north and northeast and Thailand to the west.
The instability and concomitant descent into lawlessness and banditry has also made these regions fertile breeding grounds for other hothouse hustles working fake employment steals, money-laundering, online banking cheats and love scams (known, prosaically, as “pig butchering”), pornography, people and sex trafficking – as well as illicit iGaming.
But now, flexing its enormous political and economic power, China has brought the boom down on the hitherto flourishing scam centre trade.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has ordered the military junta in Myanmar–who are totally dependent on materiel and money from China to fight its ethnic rebellions and maintain its 70-year grip on power–to wipe the Burmese POGOs off the face of the earth.
Thailand too, as recently reported in iGamingFuture, has kowtowed to the China dragon – and promised to crackdown on all forms of illegal gambling targeting the vast Chinese market.
Paradox
It’s one of the great paradoxes of world gambling that China’s hardline Communist rulers are fervently and ideologically opposed to gaming – despite ruling Macau, the world’s richest casino hub.
China’s infamous Triad organised crime gangs–centred in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Amsterdam, Vancouver and Manchester–have deep connections with many of these scam centres running also in Cambodia and Laos.
Pseudo-POGOs in the townships of Shwe Kokko and Myawaddy on the Thai-Myanmar border, for example, were initially developed as casino destinations and iGaming sites by Chinese gangsters in league with pro-government ethnic-Karen militias, the Karen National Army (KNA) and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) – who in no way are to be confused with the KNLA, the Karen National Liberation Army.
The KNLA are one of Myanmar’s main armed opposition groups and have been fighting the military junta since 1948 – in what is thought the world’s longest-running insurgency.
At the end of last month Myanmar army and border guard units raided the Myawaddy area and closed down a number of alleged scam centres, arresting 151 foreign nationals from 10 countries, most of them Indians, according to local media reports.
Human Nature
“The government is actively investigating and taking effective measures against illegal telecom fraud activities,” a spokesman from the national Tatmadaw army, said in a statement.
“[We] continue to cooperate with neighbouring countries and international organizations to prevent, expose, and eliminate online gambling and financial scam networks operating along Myanmar’s border areas.
“The State Government continues to identify and detain foreigners who have entered and resided illegally in border areas while being involved in crimes such as online gambling and online fraud. These individuals are being investigated and systematically deported to their respective countries in accordance with laws and procedures.”
Both Myanmar and Thailand have bent to the will of China.
But whither POGOs and the future of Asian off-shore iGaming sites?
Irrespective of what the Communist China superpower dictates, for as long as there is a thirst for gambling in a nation where it is outlawed, online sites, both legal and illegal, will flourish.
This rings true for China and every other market trying to suppress human nature.
