Thailand completes transferring some 900 scam victims from Myanmar to China: PM Srettha

The operation, which Thai police say started last Thursday and was completed on Saturday, involved transporting the Chinese nationals from Myanmar’s border town of Myawaddy to an airport in the Thai border district of Mae Sot, where they were transferred to Chinese planes.

“The process was done voluntarily, based on humanitarian principles, it was not forced,” Srettha said, adding that Thailand had facilitated the transfer to the flights at Mae Sot.

Thai deputy police chief Surachae Hakparn said the operation involved 15 flights over three days to return Chinese scam victims to China.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Myanmar’s military spokesperson also did not respond to a call seeking comment.

Last November, Myanmar authorities handed over 31,000 telecoms fraud suspects to China in a joint crackdown against online scams in Myanmar.

China and Myanmar also helped facilitate the transfer back to Thailand of more than two hundred Thais, both victims and those involved with telecoms fraud gangs, who were trapped in fighting between Myanmar military and armed ethnic-minority groups in Laukkaing in Myanmar’s northern Shan State.

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‘It’s scary’: Asian cryptocurrency scams bilk tens of thousands of ‘brainwashed’ victims

The transfer of victims comes as a new study found pig-butchering scammers have likely stolen more than US$75 billion from victims around the world, far more than previously estimated.

John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and graduate student Kevin Mei, gathered crypto addresses from more than 4,000 victims of the fraud, which has exploded in popularity since the pandemic.

With blockchain tracing tools, they tracked the flow