 Today, we're here speaking to Jason Tower, the Country Director for the United States Institute of Peace, Myanmar program. Welcome, Jason. Thank you for coming today. Thanks for having me on, Andrew. We're here to talk about your extensive work in uncovering the transnational crime networks emanating from Southeast Asia. More and more, we're hearing about how these are security threats in the region. Can you please explain how these transnational criminal networks are operating in Southeast Asia? Yeah, we've particularly seen since the pandemic and since the military coup in Myanmar that we're facing a global security crisis generated by the influence and presence of these criminal groups across Southeast Asia, but first and foremost in Myanmar where conditions created by the coup and the complete destruction of the country's police force, the country's civil society and media, other types of factors that would have otherwise made this society resilient to incursions from transnational crime have been almost completely eliminated. So what we've seen happen since the pandemic is that transnational criminal networks, largely relocating out of the People's Republic of China, have built a web of influence across the region with countries like Cambodia, Myanmar being hit the hardest, but also with these networks having tentacles in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and several other countries in the region. During the pandemic, when China locked down, you saw a pretty dramatic shift away from the Chinese market and away from casino-based crimes to just outright fraud and scams. And what was particularly worrisome was a trend towards the use of forced labor in these different types of scams that are now being perpetrated across the region, but especially in Myanmar. You have these structures that have been created that look very much like penal colonies on the outside. And effectively what happens is that criminal actors put out fraudulent advertisements on social media, sometimes even setting up fraudulent recruitment companies, employment companies, and they'll target a global population. People will be applying for what they think is a tech job or maybe a service industry job will fly into a place like Thailand, which is one of the common transit countries, and then they'll be trafficked across the border into Myanmar, really never to be heard from again once they've been brought into one of these penal colony-style criminal enclaves where scams are being perpetrated. Using some very technologically advanced types of fraud that often involve what is known as pig butchering, which is a type of criminal activity which involves, really it starts with someone reaching out to a victim on WhatsApp, maybe just sending along a message, hi, how are you? The individual receives the message, maybe they'll click to try to figure out who it is that's messaging them and they'll see a picture of an attractive looking person potentially of the opposite gender. And then from there over a course of months, usually the perpetrator, who often is also a victim because again this is forced labor, will build a romantic relationship or a deep relationship of trust with the victim. Once that relationship is established, there will be an effort to introduce some type of investment opportunity. And usually the victims at that point will begin putting funds in and they'll see returns. The platforms will show returns, often the perpetrators will even transfer small amounts of money to the victims to sort of build that trust further. And the reason it's called pig butchering is because at that point you've essentially fattened the pig and prepared the pig for slaughter. And it's usually once the perpetrator has more or less detected that the victim is fully in for all they're able to put in in terms of their assets into that investment opportunity that they'll slaughter the pig, they'll take the platform offline and they'll escape inflicting both financial but also emotional damage on the victim. This is happening already to the tune of several billion U.S. dollars here in the United States but it's happening around the world. And you've spoken about how many Chinese people and Chinese population have been victim and originally were the main targets but it's grown. Are there any other connections to the Chinese government or to other Chinese informal institutions that can be traced to both the criminals themselves and the response that may or may not be happening? I think what's fascinating about this is that the criminal actors themselves are largely from China. The term pig butchering actually is from the Chinese, Sazupan, it originated in China, it was perfected in China. But a lot of the criminal networks were chased out of China by Chinese police. And I think where you're seeing some very interesting dynamics at play is that they're getting deeply intertwined with overseas Chinese networks, with the Chinese Communist Party's United Front, with overseas Chinese associations, with affiliations to either the party or government. There's deep ties there between a lot of these criminal networks and those many different organizations because these networks are in many ways poly-criminal. They operate in kind of an illicit area more broadly, building tremendous influence with political elites across Southeast Asia. And so often when the Chinese government is approaching different political issues, it will turn to the overseas Chinese community for support. And some of the key influencers there actually are affiliated with these criminal networks. Many of the victims have also been Chinese and China has seen massive amounts of capital outflow as a result of many of these scams. And so you have seen the Chinese government try to crack down to some extent. But the focus of the crackdown has really been more on the lower-level aspects of the industry, not on the higher-level players. And so you'll see where China has put in place stronger and stronger banking restrictions to prevent financial flows from Southeast Asia. It's gone after some of the money mules, often who are even older people who've been tricked into opening up a large number of bank accounts and then selling those bank accounts onto criminal actors who will help move money, right? So the Chinese response has really focused on the lowest level of some of the players involved in what is a massive industrial-scale criminal operation. Your day-to-day work for a long time has been on and in Myanmar. How has the coup in 2021 and the ensuing crisis and conflict and ongoing conflict, how has that, if it has exacerbated this problem and played into this problem of the transnational criminal networks? Yeah, in a major way, because prior to the coup, this trend of these transnational criminal actors co-opting elites across the region, this has been going on for now roughly two decades. It's not new, but what was new for Myanmar is that criminal actors were targeting more and more geographical spaces across the country, right? A lot of the earlier networks focused on the China-Myanmar border, but more recently, around 2017, criminals really focused on the Thai-Myanmar border area. And that was something new and something that I think the National League for Democracy government at the time was very concerned about. And so you saw the NLD after some of these criminal networks created this Shui Koko Yatai New City illicit gambling zone on the Thai-Myanmar borderland in cooperation with, interestingly, Chinese state-owned enterprises. You saw the NLD begin some investigation, trying to find out what exactly was going on there. Was this a BRI project or was this something else? And as they dug deeper, they started to discover that actually this was an enclave that by design was being created to house illicit gambling and scam operations. And so because of a lot of the propaganda around it, because of the fact that the Chinese government and many government agencies had been co-opted into signing ceremonies around the project, have been co-opted into some of the public narratives around the project, the NLD had to take some pretty considerable risks in approaching China about this. But they did do that. They approached China. They pushed back a bit. And in the end, the Chinese government came out and it publicly acknowledged that this was not a part of its BRI, disassociated with the project, and it pledged to help the NLD crack down. And after that happened, you saw the NLD turn around and begin to put pressure on the Myanmar army, because the Myanmar army was actually the main actor involved in encouraging this type of investment. It was the border guard force of the Myanmar army, the Karan border guard force unit that was set up by the army in 2009 that initiated this in partnership with the criminal networks. And so because the NLD put all this pressure on the military and had China also putting some pressure, public pressure there. You saw an effective crackdown. The city was effectively taken offline in December of 2020, just a couple of months before the coup. After the coup and after the military started going about the process of systematically dismantling the NLD government and prisoning its leadership, going and crushing civil society and a lot of the other actors that were working along with the NLD to try to crack down on this criminal activity. You saw that enclave reopen and you saw many copycats start to really scale up their operations in this space. So many more scam syndicates and criminal networks following the coup have come in and you no longer really have any major elements in Myanmar that are willing to do anything about this problem. Quite to the contrary, the military and its border guard forces are some of the key beneficiaries of the activity. Well, that leads me right to my next question. I mean, you've talked about how this sort of was a concentrated crime and it was mostly targeting the Chinese and then sort of the region, but now it's a global threat. How does the U.S. implicated? I mean, what does this mean for the U.S. national security? You saw in May of this year that the FBI put out a warning, warning Americans of the risks of being trafficked through employment fraud, these forms of fake job advertisements. This is going to impact I think a lot of job seekers moving forward because there's just less certainty now around jobs overseas and how to ensure that the jobs are legitimate. So there's I think some very serious security threats here. Interpol has also released a warning, it's a global warning, which warns of the threat of this form of trafficking. And in the warning, the language that's used to describe the threat is that basically anyone anywhere can now be a target of human trafficking. What should be done going forward to help both by the U.S. and our partners? I think one of the key needs is for the U.S. to begin asserting more leadership around the world on dealing with this, given that it is something that's impacting U.S. security, impacting U.S. nationals. Plus it's impacting people from many of our partner countries and from people from countries that we have alliances with. So I think that there's ways to build on U.S. partnerships to begin putting more resources and effort into having a coordinated crackdown, which could really focus on the Southeast Asia region because I think that that's the epicenter of this. Dealing with the problem in Myanmar is going to be extremely difficult because of the fact that you have this ongoing crisis generated by the Myanmar army, which is one of the key beneficiaries of this behavior. But I think within other parts of the region, the U.S. could be working with countries in the Mekong region, countries across ASEAN at strengthening governance, closing some of the governance gaps in the banking sector, closing some of the gaps in terms of how criminals are able to access fintech or deploy fintech to move money around. I think there's a lot that could be done with U.S. leadership on strengthening governance and in closing off the ability of these criminal networks to continue advancing this form of activity and impunity. Thank you, Jason. Thank you for all the work you've been doing in your team on uncovering these issues and we look forward to your continued analysis. And thank you for being with us today. Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me.