Pig Butchering and Power: How China’s Crackdown Fuelled a Global Cybercrime Empire
The future of crime is not online. It is systemic, strategic and deeply human.
The £100,000 Scam That Started With “Hi, Is This Kevin?”
It begins, as so many modern crises do, with a text.
"Hi Kevin, it’s Mei. From the gym?"
Kevin does not remember a Mei. He does not go to a gym. But the message seems harmless, even warm. So he replies, politely. "Sorry, wrong number."
Mei apologises. Then keeps talking. A little awkward at first, but friendly. She says it is nice to chat with someone kind. She asks about his work. Mentions the markets. Says she invests in crypto, just casually. Kevin replies more often now. He works from home. He lives alone. He is not desperate, just open.
She sends photos. Tasteful, never explicit. They talk about food, holidays, ambition. Weeks pass. He begins to trust her. She invites him to try the platform she uses. It looks slick, modern. The interface shows quick returns. He withdraws a little. It works.
Then, encouraged, he deposits more.
Three weeks in, Kevin transfers just over £100,000. The screen shows profits. Then one day it does not. The funds are frozen. Customer service disappears. So does Mei. The number stops working. The photos stop coming. And Kevin is left not just with financial loss, but emotional wreckage.
This is not a one-off. It is a global phenomenon known by a brutal name: pig butchering. The term comes from Chinese slang. The victim is the pig. The scammers build rapport, fatten them up with affection and fake financial gains. Then they are slaughtered.
In 2023 alone, UN figures suggest global losses from these scams exceeded £8 billion. But that number hides a deeper story. The scams are not random. They are scripted. Industrialised. And they are no longer being run from laptops in dark bedrooms. They are managed from armed compounds in Southeast Asia.
The workers behind these scams are often victims themselves. Many are tricked into travelling for what they believe are legitimate jobs. Some are trafficked. Others are sold between gangs like assets. Once inside the compounds, they are forced to work long hours, manipulating strangers into love, trust and financial ruin.
These compounds are not mythical. They have names: KK Park. Shwe Kokko. Golden Triangle SEZ. They are real places with real economies, run by criminal syndicates who learned their trade in a very different arena.
That arena was Macau.
For years, China's gambling capital operated as a semi-legal pressure valve. Communist Party elites, tycoons and officials with too much money and too little scrutiny funnelled capital into VIP junket rooms. Triads ran the operations. Beijing tolerated them. And when Xi Jinping launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign in the 2010s, the system collapsed.
The triads left Macau. But they did not disappear.
They set up elsewhere. In Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. The skills they had honed in gambling, debt enforcement and money laundering adapted easily to the new frontier of online fraud.
That is what Kevin was caught in. Not a scammer with a clever script, but a global infrastructure of coercion and deceit.
The message from Mei was never a mistake. It was an entry point. A trigger. A test of vulnerability.
And behind it stands a business model, a political failure, and a story that is only just beginning.
From Junkets to Jungle Compounds, the Scam Economy’s Invisible Bridge
To understand how a romance scam in Surrey connects to a prison camp in Myanmar, you need to go back to the card tables of Macau.
In the 2000s, the former Portuguese colony became the epicentre of China’s offshore wealth management experiment. Gambling was the pretext. The real business was liquidity. Hundreds of billions of yuan were funnelled into VIP casino rooms where bets were made, debts were enforced and anonymity was quietly assured.
The brokers of this system were called junkets. On paper, they were travel operators and service providers. In practice, they extended credit, enforced repayment and laundered enormous volumes of grey money. Many were backed by China’s major triads: 14K, Sun Yee On, Wo Shing Wo. These were not rogue groups. They operated in plain sight, often with state tolerance. For Beijing, Macau served a purpose. It acted as a controlled leak in an otherwise airtight capital regime.
That arrangement collapsed in 2014 when President Xi Jinping launched an anti-corruption crackdown. It began with Communist Party officials. Then it spread to private tycoons and finally reached Macau. Junket bosses were arrested. Financial flows dried up. The triads lost their perch. But the cash did not vanish. Nor did the muscle.
Displaced and still wired into global networks, these syndicates migrated south. Cambodia’s Sihanoukville, already a gambling hub, became a triad staging post. In Myanmar, the semi-autonomous border zone of Myawaddy offered a haven with no extradition and minimal oversight. Shwe Kokko, a Chinese-backed development in Karen State, quickly evolved into a fortress. KK Park, just across the river, followed suit.
What began as a replication of Macau’s casino economy soon mutated into something new. When COVID struck and travel shut down, the buildings remained. So did the guards, the tech, and the cash.
The next iteration emerged: online gambling, then scam compounds.
These compounds now operate like digital factories. Inside KK Park, workers are held under guard and forced to meet daily quotas. If they do not, they are beaten, electrocuted or sold to other operators. Some arrived believing they had landed a tech job. Others were kidnapped outright. Mobile phones are controlled. Food is rationed. Escapees have described hearing gunfire from upper floors. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, an estimated 120,000 people are being held in these facilities across Myanmar and Cambodia.
At the other end of the pipeline is the victim. Usually middle-aged. Often alone. Convinced they are talking to a woman named Mei or Ken, who wants to help them invest. They never see the script. They never meet the person behind the text. They only see the loss.
The financial flows are staggering. One Cambodian government report leaked in 2022 estimated scam operations in Preah Sihanouk generated over £1.5 billion annually. Much of it was laundered through cryptocurrency exchanges in Hong Kong, Dubai and the Philippines. The syndicates rotate wallets weekly. Shell companies are set up and dissolved in days. Regulation remains patchy. Prosecution is rare.
And this is what makes the system so effective. It is not just criminal. It is fluid. Agile. Hidden behind legal grey zones and geopolitical blind spots. China forced the triads out. The West failed to track where they landed.
We talk about cybercrime as if it begins online. In truth, it begins with a network. With territory. With labour. And with the lessons learned in a casino city that was never just about cards.
The Future of Crime Is Here. We Are Still Looking the Other Way.
In a safe house on the Thai border, a twenty-two-year-old man sits quietly, blinking against the daylight. His name is withheld for security. He was held in KK Park for nine months. Lured by a fake job advert, he was driven across the border and locked inside a concrete block with dozens of others. He was trained in script work, fed instant noodles, and beaten with electric cables when he failed to convert targets.
His job was to play Mei. He hated it. But the quotas did not care.
That is what the Western public still struggles to grasp. These scams are not operated by masterminds in bunkers. They are powered by kidnapped coders and trafficked students. They do not use AI to write the messages. They use people. Exhausted, unpaid, expendable people.
And yet the harm is not one-sided. The scammer is often a victim too. The cruelty is recursive. The system devours both ends of the transaction.
Meanwhile, the money flows outward.
From fake apps to real wallets, from pension pots to crypto mixers, from iPhones in Birmingham to holding companies in Phnom Penh. The profits wash through exchanges in Hong Kong, Dubai and Manila. According to Chainalysis, crypto-linked crime linked to pig butchering scams moved over £4 billion globally in 2023. The financial infrastructure is in place. The regulation is not.
What should be done?
First, the West must reframe its understanding. Cybercrime at this scale is no longer a police issue. It is national security. It weakens trust, exploits institutional fragility and leaves entire populations vulnerable to emotional and financial predation. Governments need to treat it as hybrid warfare. That means intelligence sharing, offensive cyber operations, and sanctions not just on individuals but on the networks protecting them.
Second, tech companies must be compelled to act. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram are now frontline environments. AI pattern recognition, real-time fraud flagging and identity verification tools already exist. What is missing is enforcement. Governments should legislate to require platforms to report scam activity within 24 hours. Failure to comply should carry penalties scaled to profit.
Third, the aid sector must retool. Western aid budgets should allocate funds not just to traditional development, but to dismantling criminal infrastructure. That includes supporting investigative journalism, funding rehabilitation shelters for trafficked workers and building regional cyber enforcement units that can trace and disrupt scam operations.
Lastly, there is the human dimension.
We focus heavily on the financial loss. Less so on the emotional devastation. Victims report depression, shame, social isolation. The scams work because they speak to something deeper than money. They exploit loneliness, aging, disconnection. In that sense, they reveal more about us than about their creators.
That should be the final warning.
This is not just about China, or Myanmar, or crypto. It is about a world that has left millions behind. And when connection is absent, anything that mimics it becomes powerful.
Marr might remind us that the slow collapse of order rarely announces itself with tanks. It seeps in through ungoverned spaces, brittle states and unseen markets. Stewart would note that the repair begins in relationships. In restoring trust, not just infrastructure. And Campbell would not waste time. He would say: act now, or be outplayed.
If we fail to confront this new reality, we will be scammed again. Not by a stranger named Mei. But by our own unwillingness to see what the crisis really is.
A test of what we protect, and who we choose to believe.
Reference for your convenience
Financial Impact of Cyber-Enabled Fraud (UNODC)
Transnational Organized Crime and the Convergence of Cyber-Enabled Fraud, Underground Banking and Technological Innovation in Southeast Asia: A Shifting Threat Landscape (2024)
This report estimates that cyber-enabled fraud operations in Southeast Asia generate between $27.4 billion to $36.5 billion annually, highlighting the significant financial impact of these illicit activities.
Human Trafficking in Scam Operations (International Justice Mission)
Forced Scamming (2025)
IJM reports that individuals are trafficked to Southeast Asia under false pretenses and coerced into conducting online scams for extensive hours under severe conditions, including threats and physical abuse. The Guardian+3IJM USA+3IJM USA+3
Scale of Online Scams (The Economist)
Online scams may already be as big a scourge as illegal drugs (2025)
This article discusses how online fraudsters have become rich and powerful enough to corrupt entire governments, turning whole countries into the cyber-scam equivalent of narco-states. IJM USA+3The Economist+3Time+3
China's Influence on Scam Crackdowns (United States Institute of Peace)
China Exploits Thailand's Crackdown on Scam Compounds to Grow Security Influence (2025)
The article examines how China uses crime-fighting efforts in Thailand to boost its local security influence, with scam gangs increasingly targeting Americans as China withholds intelligence needed for effective crackdowns.