China executes 4 members of Myanmar 'crime family' over scam centers

by · UPI

Feb. 2 (UPI) -- China executed another four people Monday for murder, kidnapping and drugs and sex trafficking offenses as part of a campaign tackling online scam centers in neighboring Myanmar manned by a captive workforce of modern-day slaves, including thousands of Chinese citizens.

The four, all leading members of the Bai mafia gang, were executed Monday in Guangdong after the province's High People's Court and Supreme People's Court rejected their appeal against death sentences handed down in November, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.

The Supreme Court ruled the sentences were commensurate with the "extremely egregious nature" of the $4.2 billion wire fraud and illegal gambling empire they ran out of dozens of compounds in Myanmar's Kokang province that caused the deaths of six Chinese citizens and injured several others.

Bai Yingcang, Yang Liqiang, Hu Xiaojiang and Chen Guangyi were convicted of homicide, assault, extortion and forcing people into organized prostitution alongside Bai Suocheng, the Godfather of the group, who had died of natural causes in the meantime.

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Another 17 Bai family members and their associates were also found guilty at the trial.

Bai Yingcang was also convicted of conspiring with others to manufacture and traffic around 11 tons of methamphetamine, said Xinhua.

Monday's executions came four days after 11 members of the Ming family, another crime syndicate running scam centers, were executed in Zhejiang province in eastern China for their actions that resulted in 14 Chinese citizens being killed.

The sentences were imposed after they were convicted in September of homicide, false imprisonment, fraud and running illegal gambling operations out of several centers in Myanmar, amassing $1.4 billion in the process.

The Ming gang was found to have conspired with other groups running similar operations to kill, injure or enslave workers, leading to the 14 deaths.

Myanmar's border town of Laukkaing in Shan state was run by the Bais, Mings and other family crime syndicates, operating casinos, vice and cyberscam centers that mainly targeted people in China, with Chinese also making up the bulk of the forced labor.

The business was dominated by the Bais with 41 area compounds, brutal places where beatings and torture were daily occurrences.

The Bais reigned for 20 years, filling a vacuum created when the Mayanmar army drove out Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army rebels in a military operation led by Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, now head of Myanmar's military junta, who saw gangsters as preferable to insurgents.

The arrangement of convenience continued until 2023 when China intervened by covertly backing an ethnic insurgency that altered the course of the civil war and paved the way for its campaign against the scam centers.

The United Nations says the number of people trafficked or tricked into working in online scam centers in Myanmar and other countries in South East Asia -- mainly Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines and Malaysia -- runs into the hundreds of thousands.

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