How Myanmar Scam Centers Continue to Target Americans
Halfway across the world from Washington, inside makeshift structures in a forest in southern Myanmar’s Karen State, hundreds of young people log on to their computers as the sun sets.
Their task is to “hunt Americans.”
Despite intensifying U.S. law enforcement efforts, federal indictments and targeted sanctions, The Irrawaddy’s data analysis of scam recruitment advertisements reveals that American citizens remain heavily targeted by scam centers in Myanmar. An analysis of 9,322 ads collected over a three-month period shows that an overwhelming 83.7 percent—about 7,800 ads—targeted U.S. victims.
The recruitment data also exposes a glaring reality: far from slowing down, the scam industry targeting American citizens has simply adapted, establishing new operating sites like this one in Thitkate Village, ensuring that Main Street America remains targeted.
Tucked in the foothills of the Dawna Mountains, this scam site is a microcosm of the newly emerging transborder cyber fraud centers spreading across Karen State. This new type of scam operation has become increasingly common since the Myanmar regime launched crackdowns on Chinese-run industrial-scale scam complexes like KK Park and Shwe Kokko on the Thai-Myanmar border, and the U.S. government formed an anti-scam strike force late last year. The U.S. Department of Justice formed the interagency Scam Center Strike Force (SCSF) in November 2025 to crack down on Chinese transnational criminal organizations, which, according to U.S. officials, defraud Americans of US$10 billion annually from scam centers based in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
For three months starting in May—six months after the SCSF was launched—The Irrawaddy monitored three Telegram accounts that routinely post recruitment advertisements in Burmese for new scam centers in areas like Thitkate, Hpakalu, Shwe Kokko and Hpaya Thonezu in Karen State.
Targets in the U.S., EU and beyond
Each U.S.-focused ad clearly mentioned “U.S. Chatting”—scam recruitment jargon for the process by which chat platform operators establish fake romantic relationships or otherwise build trust with victims in the U.S. in order to defraud them through investment and other scams—and “U.S. Finding,” the preliminary process of scraping social media profiles and making initial contact with victims in the U.S.
A recent ad said “100 people (both male and female) are urgently needed” for a “new center” in “Thitkate” for “U.S. Chatting.” The monthly salary offered was 20,000 Thai baht (about $600).
The working hours were grueling: night shifts, mostly running from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 a.m. Yangon time, directly aligning workers’ schedules with daytime hours in the U.S.
“We are looking for people for U.S. Chatting,” an HR worker for a scam operation said when The Irrawaddy asked them about a recruitment ad for a new scam operation in Shwe Kokko. He said English-language proficiency is no longer an issue for anyone interested in the job.
“You can type in Burmese. The translation apps will do their job,” he said.
Jason Tower, a senior expert from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, told The Irrawaddy that recent analysis of recruitment advertisements as well as other “crime-as-a-service” offerings in multiple languages indicates that the U.S. remains one of the top targets of China-linked scam syndicates.
“Particularly concerning is that the scams are becoming more targeted, niche and customized, with scam syndicates developing deeper specialization in targeting very specific demographics in the United States,” he explained, referring to new scam syndicates in Karen State’s Hlaingbwe Township that target Americans of Indian descent who are active on online dating sites.
Although the ads The Irrawaddy monitored said “U.S. Chatting” or “Finding,” it’s believed that the fraudsters are targeting not only victims in the U.S., but those in Canada as well. According to information from Toronto’s Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC), which tracks and gathers data on fraud, cyber-enabled scams and identity theft, online scams accounted for 592.4 million Canadian dollars of the total C$704 million (US$502.9 million) loss to scams reported in Canada in 2025.
After the U.S., the European Union represents the second-largest concentration of target victims, accounting for 13.6 percent of the analyzed recruitment ads (1,268 postings). Similar to the American desks, chat platform operators targeting EU nations are tasked with establishing long-term trust before steering victims toward fraudulent trading platforms, according to former scam workers.
The remaining 2.7 percent of recruitment postings (255 ads) directed efforts toward other regions, highlighting a rapid expansion into Spanish-speaking populations across Central and South America. Operational desks now explicitly recruit workers fluent in Spanish to target citizens in Argentina, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras, demonstrating that Southeast Asian syndicates are aggressively tapping into emerging Western Hemisphere markets.
“Recently, I’ve noticed an increased push to hire people specifically targeting the EU. But what has become even more notable lately is the drive to target Spanish speakers,” a scammer working at a new site in Shwe Kokko told The Irrawaddy.
Assembly line of deception
Thousands of young Myanmar citizens—recruited from urban centers like Yangon and Mandalay—are lured into the scam industry through social media posts promising base salaries starting from 20,000 baht. When they arrive at the scam sites in militia-controlled areas, the recruits find themselves working in a multi-tier assembly line of deception.
The frontline floor is staffed by Tier 1 (M1 “Finding”) workers, who scrape social media profiles and make initial contact. Their leads are passed to Tier 2 (M2 “Reception”) chat operators, who can earn up to 30,000 baht, mostly to establish fake romantic relationships with victims.
“We chat with potential victims on WhatsApp. After some good chats, we invite them to join Telegram. Once they sign up on Telegram, we hand over their accounts to the M2 chatters,” said an employee of a scam site in Shwe Kokko.
When victims demand visual proof of identity, compounds deploy a “Real Model”—a young female facilitator who jumps on a brief, scripted video call to “verify” the fake persona. Once trust is established, Tier 3 (M3 “Killers”) execute the financial extraction, luring the victim into depositing funds into a fraudulent trading platform.
To attract domestic recruits amid widespread reports of human rights abuses inside border compounds, operators have actively altered their recruitment pitch.
A worker at a different scam compound described a distinct shift in how local staff are treated compared to foreign nationals. “To reassure local applicants, recruiters now explicitly advertise that there is ‘no physical pressure or abuse,’” the second worker revealed.
“When syndicates recruit foreign workers from other countries, failing to meet targets often results in severe physical torture and abuse. But we don’t typically see that kind of physical violence used against local Myanmar employees here. As long as a chatter can pull in around $3,000 a month for the compound, management is completely satisfied,” he added.
Performative crackdowns vs U.S. enforcement
Following high-profile incidents early last year, Myanmar’s military junta and its allied Karen Border Guard Force (BGF/KNA) launched highly publicized raids against industrial-scale complexes near the Thai border in Karen State.
Since October 2025, the junta has raided industrial-scale scam complexes like KK Park and Shwe Kokko, which housed centers operating various types of criminal enterprises including “romance scams” and fraudulent investment schemes, and were also notorious for human trafficking and forced labor.
As of mid-2026, the regime claimed to have dynamited 712 buildings and arrested over 14,000 low-level workers in those areas.
However, observers were largely unimpressed. Those arrested during the crackdowns were low-level staff rather than high-level bosses, who fled the areas ahead of the raids. Most analysts saw the regime’s crackdowns as merely a staged public-relations stunt, coordinated with the BGF/KNA and designed to mislead the international community into believing it is taking action against cybercrime. They say neither the junta nor its BGF have any real interest in dismantling a network of scam centers that brings in billions of dollars of illicit revenue each year.
Washington has stepped up its response. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned BGF/KNA leaders and those of another junta-allied Karen armed group, the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA), for harboring, protecting and profiting from industrial-scale cyber-scam compounds in Karen State. The Justice Department’s SCSF has seized hundreds of millions of dollars in Tether and other cryptocurrencies linked to wallets operating out of Myanmar and the broader region.
“Burma [Myanmar] continues also to be a focus for our strike force,” said Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, in April during a virtual press conference. She was responding to The Irrawaddy’s questions on what actions the strike force had taken so far against scam centers in Myanmar, and what its next steps would be.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia didn’t respond to The Irrawaddy’s question on the rise in the number of U.S. citizens targeted by Myanmar-based scammers.
New locations, business as usual
Rather than shut down, the scam syndicates near the Thai border in Karen State have responded to the Myanmar regime’s purported crackdown and the U.S. pressure by simply moving inland.
According to The Irrawaddy’s interviews with local residents and people who witnessed the operations, some scam centers have relocated to remote mountain villages like Thitkate, controlled by the Myanmar regime-allied KNA’s Military Region 2. The KNA commander in this area, Saw Tin Win, has been sanctioned by the US in September 2025 for supporting and benefiting from scam compounds.
Others have moved to areas like Sone See Myaing and Hpalu, strongholds of the DKBA, while some are hiding in plain sight within Myawaddy and Shwe Kokko towns. After the massive compounds in Shwe Kokko were leveled by the regime, new, smaller centers sprang up inside the town’s hotels and residential wards, residents said. As of early September, The Irrawaddy has identified at least 18 such new sites, and the number is expected to rise as scam centers formerly based in other parts of Karen State move en masse to Sone See Myaing.
According to Tower, the fundamental barrier to eradicating the scam industry in Myanmar continues to be the military regime itself—or, more specifically, coup leader Min Aung Hlaing’s desire to maintain absolute control and dominance over the country at all costs.
“Until this changes, circumstances in the country will remain highly favorable to ongoing scam operations,” he said.
Tower said the online fraud industry had followed a visible evolution from “Scams 1.0,” referring to the border-based operations, to inland compounds, or “Scams 2.0,” and finally to “Scams 3.0”—jungle enclaves that can be located almost anywhere in areas controlled by the Myanmar military, KNA or DKBA.
“Military officials across these scam-enabling groups have incentives to establish ties with syndicate bosses to bring in new revenue streams—enabling them to take more land, recruit new troops and establish even more compounds,” he said.
“A vicious cycle has taken hold in the country.”
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