“Pig-Butchering” Cyber Scammers From Myanmar?

                  (Will Jackson’s article from the ABC NEWS on 16 May 2024.)

KNA-Controlled Shwe-Koke-Ko in Myanmar.

How South-East Asia's pig butchering scammers are using artificial intelligence technology: The video shows a young Asian man with stubbly facial hair and blond tips sitting in a gaming chair in a messy bedroom. Over the next minute his face cycles through more than a dozen different genders and ethnicities.

It's not just another new TikTok filter. The video is advertising a real-time deepfake face-swapping system reportedly being employed by South-East Asian crime syndicates in so-called "pig butchering" cyberscam operations.

Experts say the technology and other new artificial intelligence (AI) tools — such as generative AI chatbots — are increasing the effectiveness of the scams and broadening their reach to new victims. However, some of the scam operations appear to be having less success with the new tech than others.

Proliferation of 'pig butchering'

Since 2020, scores of predominantly Chinese-run call-centre style scam operations have sprung up across South-East Asia mostly in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. Their trademark is "Sha Zhu Pan"or "pig butchering" scams in which victims are contacted through social media or text messages, befriended or seduced and then lured into fake investment schemes — usually cryptocurrency.

The syndicates initially employed and victimised mostly ethnic Chinese but are reportedly increasingly targeting people from different nationalities following a crackdown by Beijing. Operating out of tall office buildings in fortified compounds, the typical team has "keyboarders" who chat with the victims via messaging apps, models who act as the face and voice of a scam and bosses who manage the operations.

Their proliferation has led to a massive surge in scam activity, with lives ruined across the globe and total losses in the billions of dollars. And according to the authorities, AI is making their scams even more effective. 

Earlier this year the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned "recent advances in large language model-based chatbots, deepfake technology, and automation" had enabled "more sophisticated and damaging cyber fraud schemes".

"By using artificial intelligence (AI) to create computer-generated images and voices that are virtually indistinguishable from real ones, scammers can execute social engineering scams with alarming success rates, exploiting people's trust and emotions," the organisation said.

'A very, very, very twisted thing'

Many of those working these cyberscam operations are lured from other countries with promises of legitimate jobs before being forced to work in slave-like conditions. Escapees have reported being beaten and tortured.

Judah Tana is the director of Global Advance Projects, a Thailand-based NGO which has aided hundreds of trafficking victims who have escaped from scam compounds in Myanmar.

In response to the proliferation of sweatshop-style online scam centres in South-East Asia, individual volunteers and groups have stepped up — often at great personal risk. Mr Tana said the crime syndicates had made AI research and development a priority since "day one" and were willing to go to great lengths to get the most advanced technology.

He said some scam compounds in Myanmar were using advanced face-swapping tech. "It's not everywhere, but it is in some of the larger ones for sure, and they're just always moving to increase and get better," he told the ABC.

Among the people he had helped was a computer engineer whose sole job was AI development for the syndicates, he said. Mr Tana and his associated partners aided her after she managed to slip away, despite being accompanied by security guards, during a visit to a coffee shop in northern Myanmar.

"She said [their technology] was more advanced than anything she had seen in the world, anything she had ever studied," he said.

KNA (BGF) Boss General Saw Chit Thu.

(A blue Chinese-style multistory building in the background with a river in the foreground. Shwe Kokko is a notorious "scam city" controlled by the Karen National Army (KNA) formerly the BGF in the Myawaddy area of Myanmar.)

Mr Tana said to motivate the woman, compound managers had brought people into the room and beaten them in front of her. "It's a very, very, very twisted thing. But it's not an isolated case," he said.

(Below is The video of similar beating at a Laukai Scam Centre called The Tiger House from the Kokang Territory in late 2023.)