"Hannah Beech, a New York Times reporter, gained rare access to one of Myanmar's notorious cyberscam centers to see how Chinese criminals have been targeting Americans in the middle of a war zone. Holy moly. Look at these phones. The floor is just littered with SIM cards. We're in Myanmar. Only weeks after rebel fighters took control of a cyberscam center near the border with Thailand."
"For years, Chinese criminals have used ordinary office spaces like this in the middle of the jungle to target Americans in elaborate online fraud. OK, here we are, the nerve center of this multibillion-dollar industry that is scamming people all across the world. More than 3,000 people from dozens of countries were once employed here, joining an industry that has proliferated during Myanmar's civil war."
"Here are AT&T SIM cards. So you can just pretend that you're calling from the United States. The scammers would act like potential love interests and send messages to their targets on social media. They would target lonely hearts in the United States and pretend to be beautiful, young Asian women who were interested in just making a connection with somebody. As their relationships with their victims grew closer, the scammers would then move the conversation to a video call."
Chinese criminals operated large cyberscam centers in Myanmar that targeted Americans using elaborate romance and fraud schemes. One center employed more than 3,000 people from dozens of countries and proliferated during Myanmar's civil war. Workers used piles of electronic equipment and dozens of SIM cards, including AT&T cards, to spoof U.S. phone numbers and impersonate Americans. Scammers cultivated online relationships, then moved to video calls staged with fake backgrounds and props. Many workers fled after rebel fighters seized a center near the Thailand border, leaving documents, records and receipts that documented the scams.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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