Scam central Myanmar's brutal boom in web fraud compounds

Five years ago, the land now home to KK Park - a vast, heavily guarded complex stretching for 210 hectares (520 acres) along the churning Moei River, which forms Myanmar's border with Thailand - was little more than empty fields.

- Rebecca Ratcliffe

Set against rugged mountains south of the town of Myawaddy, KK Park, with its hospital, restaurants, bank and neat lines of villas with manicured lawns, looks more like the campus of a Silicon Valley tech company than what it really is: the frontline of a multibillion-dollar criminal fraud industry fuelled by human trafficking and brutal violence.

Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits.

There have been attempts to crack down on the centres and rescue the workers, but drone images and research shared exclusively with the Guardian show the number of such centres operating along the Thai-Myanmar border has more than doubled since Myanmar's military seized power in 2021.

Data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi), a defence thinktank in Canberra, shows that the number of scam centres on the Thai border has increased from 11 to 27, and they have expanded in size by an average of 5.5 hectares a month.

Drone images and photographs of KK Park and two other Myanmar scam centres, Tai Chang and Shwe Kokko, taken by the Guardian last month, show new features and active building work.