Inside Myanmar's Jungle Scam Factories: How a Global Crime Industry Evades Every Crackdown

Key points

• The Karen National Liberation Army freed roughly 3,000 captive workers from a compound called Shunda Park in Myanmar's border region in 2025.
• The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates at least 120,000 people are trapped inside scam compounds across Myanmar.
• Workers described being hung by chains and locked in dark rooms with little food or water as punishment for not meeting scam quotas.
• Investigators say the industry is not disappearing but moving deeper into Myanmar's jungle, further from the Thai border, where oversight is almost nonexistent.
• Satellite imagery shows new compounds under construction even as authorities announced crackdowns on larger, better-known sites.

Pro-democracy fighters in Myanmar recently walked into a jungle compound and found something closer to a prison than an office. Behind razor wire and dense tree cover sat Shunda Park, one of the country's biggest scam operations, where approximately 3,000 people had been forced to defraud strangers online for the benefit of criminal bosses.

The Karen National Liberation Army, an ethnic armed group fighting Myanmar's military government, retook the territory and discovered the site. The Free Burma Rangers, a humanitarian organisation that provided medical care to survivors, documented what was inside.

What actually happens inside these compounds?

People are trafficked there, meaning they are lured or kidnapped across borders and then held against their will. Ivan, a Malaysian man freed from Shunda Park, told ABC News Australia he was brought through Thailand under false pretences. Once inside, workers were ordered to run "pig butchering" scams, a fraud method where criminals build fake romantic relationships online over weeks or months before persuading victims to hand over large sums, usually through cryptocurrency.

Fail to hit your quota, and the punishment was severe. Ivan described being suspended by chains and kept in dark rooms. Guards reportedly carried rubber-coated batons designed to cause intense pain without leaving visible marks. Lin, a Taiwanese man held in a separate compound, said he was caged and handcuffed in direct sunlight after he tried to contact police. He told aid organisations he could hear his ribs grinding when he breathed.

Those who generated enough money for their bosses were housed on upper floors with better conditions. Those who did not were placed in isolation rooms. Wi-fi stayed on. The only way out was to keep scamming.

Troops who entered Shunda Park recovered thousands of phones, SIM cards, and hard drives, along with training manuals that walked workers through how to run romance scams targeting people in the United States and Australia.

If you have been contacted online by someone who quickly became romantic and later asked you to invest money through an unfamiliar platform, that is the shape of this fraud. You should stop contact, tell your bank, and report it to your national consumer protection authority.

Crackdowns on large, well-publicised sites such as KK Park, which once held up to 25,000 people, have not stopped the industry. Anti-trafficking investigators say the demolitions were, in many cases, staged for cameras, with buildings near main roads made to look damaged while operations shifted elsewhere. One investigator told ABC News Australia that KK Park remains standing and operational.

Satellite analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shows new, smaller compounds appearing in 2024, particularly along the Moei River in southern Myanmar, far from border crossings where Thai or international observers might notice. These sites hold fewer workers and, according to analysts, use more violence precisely because they cannot recruit freely from nearby towns.

"Scam centres require only a small footprint: a rented hotel, computers, electricity, an internet connection and permissive local law enforcement," one analyst said. That combination makes the industry extraordinarily hard to shut down region-wide.