 My name is Lise Grande and I'm the head of the United States Institute of Peace. It was established by the U.S. Congress in 1984 as a national nonpartisan public institution focused on helping to prevent and mitigate violent conflict abroad. We're very pleased to welcome everyone to today's discussion on transnational crime in Southeast Asia and most particularly to welcome Cindy Dyer, fellow Texan and the ambassador at large to monitor and trafficking in persons. What we hope to do today is to learn more about what's going on with transnational crime in Southeast Asia, one of the epicenters for criminal networks in the world. We want to learn more about what the risks are to people in the region and ordinary citizens here in the U.S. because of this crime and how we can work better together to counter this phenomenon more effectively. Transnational crime, as I think we all know, is emerging as a major threat to regional and global security. It threatens international trade and governance. It puts millions of hardworking vulnerable people at very grave risk. And it's deeply worrying that there is increasing evidence that many of these criminal networks and enterprises are affiliated with one of our competitors, our sometime adversary with China. Last month, Ambassador Dyer's office released the 2023 report on human trafficking. It's a deeply disturbing report that describes nutrients and transnational crime in Southeast Asia, including the growing number of China-affiliated networks that use sophisticated technology to traffic victims into compounds where they are forced to defraud and trap people into the unregulated world of crypto-scams and schemes. USIP is an institute first began investigating these trends under Jason Tower in Myanmar two years before the 2021 military coup. Since then, these networks have become entrenched in several Mekong countries aided by the junta. No Asian country is unaffected by this crisis and the tentacles of these criminal enterprises have reached as far as Nigeria, Brazil and the US. This is an important topic and we look forward to an interesting discussion with leading experts. Ambassador, may we invite you to the floor. Thank you so much. Good morning and thank you especially to Lee Scrande, my fellow Texan and to USIP for the kind invitation to be here today. I am happy to participate in this event to raise public awareness of cyber-enabled transnational crime in Southeast Asia. I want to recognize the outstanding work that USIP has done in this area. Cyber-enabled human trafficking in particular is an issue that has been a focus of my office and one that needs broader public awareness in countries around the world. As ambassador at large, I am honored to lead the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, also known as the TIP Office. The TIP Office leads the State Department's global efforts to combat human trafficking, which includes both sex trafficking and forced labor, by objectively analyzing government efforts and identifying global trends, engaging in strategic bilateral and multilateral diplomacy with foreign government and counterparts, targeted foreign assistance to build the capacity of governments and civil society to combat trafficking and advancing the coordination of federal anti-trafficking policies across US government agencies. The TIP Office also produces, as Lee's mentioned, the Department of State's annual Trafficking in Persons report, or the TIP report, which examines government's efforts to meet the minimum standards included in the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act to combat human trafficking across a 3-P framework of protecting victims, prosecuting traffickers, and preventing this crime by dismantling the systems that make it easier for traffickers to operate. Now, in its 23rd year, the report reflects the US government's commitment to global leadership on this key human rights, law enforcement, and national security issue. On June 15th, Secretary Blinken released the 2023 TIP report. One key takeaway from this year's report is that there were increases in global data points to include prosecutions, convictions, and victims identified as compared with the totals in the 2022 report. Globally, criminal prosecutions and convictions were higher in the years during and immediately after the pandemic, and victim identifications increased by nearly 25,000, although none were back to the pre-pandemic levels. Globally, efforts to prosecute and convict labor traffickers and identify labor trafficking victims were also notably higher than prior years, which we attribute both to ongoing improvements in government efforts in this area, as well as better government data collection and reporting. In the East Asian and Pacific region as a whole, there was an increase in the number of traffickers prosecuted, convictions of traffickers, and victims of trafficking identified. These data points documenting tangible government efforts at a time, at many times, in partnership with NGOs, IOs, and other stakeholders are among the critical criteria used in TIP report country assessments. These increases are encouraging, but there remains much work to be done to address significant human trafficking problems in the region. There remain region-wide issues with labor trafficking among domestic workers, forced labor in the agricultural and fishing sectors, and official complicity in trafficking crimes, among other concerns. In addition and importantly, this year's report also focused on the rapidly growing and troubling trend of forced labor and forced criminality in cyber scam operations. While the TIP office reported on the issue of forced labor in cyber scam operations previously, we saw a marked increase in this crime over the past year. It is most prevalent in, but not exclusive to, Southeast Asia. Traffickers have leveraged pandemic-related economic hardships, global youth unemployment, and international travel restrictions to exploit thousands of adults and children in a multi-billion dollar industry over the last two years, where these people, these victims, often respond to job offers for what they think is work in IT, casinos, or other seemingly legitimate businesses. However, once the individuals arrive at the job site, the scam operators force them to run internet scams directed at international targets and subject them to a wide range of abuses and violations, including withholding travel and identity documents, imposing arbitrary debt, restricting access to food, water, medicine, communications, and movement, and threatening and physically abusing them. The scam operations include quota-based fraudulent sales, illegal online gambling and investment schemes, and romance scams, in which the victim is forced to enter into a fake online relationship with and extract money from unsuspecting targets. Traffickers force the victims to work up to 15 hours a day and, in some cases, resell victims to other scam operations or subject them to sex trafficking if they do not agree to fraudulently recruit additional members, or if the victims do not meet impossibly high revenue quotas. There are even reports of casino-based cyber scam operators brutally murdering workers who try to escape. In this year's report introduction, we outline a typical experience of a trafficking survivor who was 20 years old when traffickers recruited him from Central Asia to work in information technology in Southeast Asia. After arriving there, traffickers took him to a different country along with other victims and forced him to work in an organized crime ring scamming people on the internet. When he requested to leave, the traffickers gave him a condition, pay $3,000 for his freedom or continue working in the cyber scam operation. He borrowed money from acquaintances and paid the traffickers so that he could travel to another country. He ultimately contacted an international organization in his home country and it helped him to safely return home. This example is far from unique and represents an outcome much better than the experience of many trafficking victims of forced labor in these operations who cannot escape and do not receive help. To date, individuals from 40 countries and areas including the United States have been identified as victims of forced labor in cyber scam operations. These include nationals of countries all over the world including North America, Africa, Central Asia, and Europe, as well as East and Southeast Asia. Cyber scam operations, many as least said, run by locally operating PRC national organized crime syndicates have been found in Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia and we continue to monitor for reports of new locations as operations spread. Unfortunately, trafficking survivors who escape with their lives are often met with administrative or criminal charges for immigration violations or forced criminality at home in the countries and in areas in which they were exploited or in the countries to which they fled rather than being identified as trafficking victims and having the opportunity to access and benefit from protection services. Some governments and authorities in the region have taken steps to assist victims and have begun to coordinate responses through the Bali process and ASEAN. Taiwan, for example, increased efforts to screen for victims in forced labor in cyber scam operations and provide immunity in cases of forced criminality. Laos cooperated with international authorities to recover Laos victims from the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Bokeo and Hong Kong created a web-based application for victims and family members to report cases of cyber scam operations and receive information. However, governments and authorities around the world need to increase efforts to train their diplomats and representatives, law enforcement officers, and border and judicial officials on how to detect and assist in these cases domestically and abroad to ensure victims are identified and provided access to robust protection services rather than penalized solely for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked. Governments and authorities should also increase awareness among vulnerable communities and collect and share widely available information on known fraudulent recruitment channels and governments should investigate and prosecute the traffickers exploiting these victims. No government or authorities can do this alone. Governments and authorities around the world must foster, cooperate with, and enhance their support to a free and healthy civil society rather than restricting space for NGOs and complicating their ability to benefit from international donor activity. For the part of the U.S. government, we will continue to urge governments and authorities to proactively identify and assist victims and protect people from fraudulent recruitment schemes like these. And we will continue to raise awareness of this issue. We will continue to leverage and expand bilateral and multilateral diplomacy across the region to strengthen coordination in support of concrete solutions for victims of forced labor and forced criminality in cyber scam operations. We deeply appreciate the efforts of USIP and the other speakers in this event to make the public aware of this criminal activity affecting the peace and security of people all over the world. Thank you again for the opportunity to speak today and I look forward to hearing and learning from the other experts gathered here. Is the microphone working? Yes, I can hear it. It is good. Well, we're very privileged today to have with us some of the best experts from the Southeast Asia region in development of the criminal networks in that area. Let me just give you a brief bio on each of them. I have to wear my glasses. Jacob Sims in the middle is with the international justice mission and he's a senior technical advisor on forced criminality spearheading IGM's global pursuit of accountability at the nexus of human trafficking and transnational organized crime. He was previously IGM's country director for Cambodia mounting one of the earliest programmatic responses to the human trafficking epidemic emerging in scamming compounds in Cambodia. His analysis has been featured most recently in publications by UNODC, the UN office of drug trafficking, drug trafficking. I deal with it all the time and I don't know what it means. US Department of State, the Economist, the Guardian, LA Times, Al Jazeera, Sydney Morning Herald and many others and then we have Dr. Alvin Kamba at the end here. He's assistant professor at the Joseph Corbell School of International Studies at the University of Denver with a PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University. He is part of the Corbell School's responsible public engagement project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy and the Climate Policy Lab, that's a long name, at Tufts University Fletcher School. His research has been awarded high honors for several academic networks, published in top development and political economy journals and incorporated in several widely circulated think tank policy papers on China's activities in Southeast Asia. He is frequently quoted in articles that by top news outlets. With a focus on maritime Southeast Asia, Dr. Kamba explores themes such as inter-elite competition, institutional change, social conflicts, ecological ramifications and growth strategies. Most recently, he has turned to Chinese illicit capitals relationship with transnational crime and the United Front's propaganda and disinformation strategies. And last but not least is our very own Jason Tower, who is the head of the USIP Myanmar program. He is our country director of the Burma program, with over 20 years of experience working on conflict and security issues in China and Southeast Asia. From 2009 to 2017, he established a Beijing office of the American Friends Service Committee and initiated programming across North and Southeast Asia on the impact of conflict, the impact on conflict by cross-border investments, while also working extensively in Burma on peace and security issues. He received his undergraduate degree in international and economic studies from St. Louis University and his graduate degree in his master's in political science from the University of Michigan. He's received a number of prestigious fellowships and Jason is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, which we depend on vitally in our program here. So I would like to turn, first of all, to Jacob. You have been on the front lines of the development of this kind of trafficking and scam operations in Cambodia. Can you tell us something about how it has developed in recent years, because it's really exploded in the last couple of years? Sure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here with this really excellent panel. So labor trafficking has been a major issue in Cambodia for a very, very long time, but it's also followed a fairly consistent pattern for a long time. Cambodians suffer from some of the lowest wages, worst economic opportunities, highest rates of landlessness and indebtedness anywhere in the region, and some combination of these factors have conspired for a very long time to push Cambodians into high risk employment opportunities overseas. But what we've seen at the start of the pandemic, these very significant push factors were actually disrupted by the lockdowns, which impacted a lot of these industries. We also saw new vulnerabilities arise with the beginning of the scamming industry. So almost overnight, using some of the mechanisms that Ambassador Dyer described, we started to see thousands, eventually tens of thousands of foreign nationals coming to Cambodia, finding themselves in hotels, casinos, apartment complexes, and forced to conduct scams. This is a massive, violent, unchecked criminal industry. And with the emergence of that industry, we've actually seen the entire paradigm for human trafficking in Cambodia, but not just Cambodia around the region really turned on its head. And some of those shifts imply a very different response that is needed if we have any hope of protecting some of those people. And I've already alluded to those migration patterns have shifted, but we've also seen a huge shift in demographic as well. While human trafficking can impact anybody, the rural, poorly educated, extremely impoverished within Cambodia, where you're typical victim of human trafficking, but today you're seeing more urban, young, technologically savvy, highly educated, multi-lingual people also falling victim to this. And they're being exploited through different mechanisms as well. This is not typically your community-based and formal brokers that have dominated the trafficking space in Cambodia for a long time. These are more organized, sophisticated, transnational groups, largely operating online over social media. So when you're developing an effective prevention campaign, your target population of interest has changed, your geographic coverage has expanded dramatically, and the channel that you're hoping to reach people has also changed. But there have also been significant shifts in how we need to protect people. So for example, embassies, as Ambassador Dyer alluded, play a vital role in every form of cross-border labor exploitation, but now you have large numbers of embassies from these sending countries that have never or at least very seldom dealt with citizens from their own countries getting caught up in a situation of human trafficking in a place like Cambodia. So we need to invest heavily in providing the resources and capacities to those embassies and other duty bearers that aren't used to dealing with these sorts of issues to respond effectively. I also say prosecution needs have changed. So this issue is far more transnational than anything the human trafficking community has experienced in the past. And so you have broker networks in source countries, you have traffickers, complicit immigration officials in transit countries, and obviously you have the compound owners, the operational masterminds, and their co-conspirators in the destination countries like Cambodia that to address an issue like this in Cambodia, all of those actors need criminal accountability. But this is also far more sophisticated. So the need for local and regional and international law enforcement collaboration has never been greater. And then lastly, I'll say the human trafficking community in Cambodia needs a very different set of partners today. So the platforms of major social media companies and financial institutions and telecoms providers are all being profoundly instrumentalized and are playing a significant role in facilitating the growth and continuation of this industry. And so those private sector actors are also going to need to be heavily engaged if we're going to hope to see anything like an effective response. And I think my main points are just in closing are to respond to this in Cambodia is no longer a Cambodia-centric response. It's not even a regional response, as Ambassador Dyer said, over 40 countries where victims are coming from. But then this is a billions, if not tens of billions, large industry that is impacting countries all over the world. And so this industry is growing. It is not going anywhere. And if we're going to have any hope at addressing it in a place like Cambodia, we're going to need a global response. Thank you very much. Burma, Cambodia, and Laos are the heart of the problem in mainland Southeast Asia. But there's also a lot of it in maritime Southeast Asia. Dr. Canva, can you tell us something about the patterns that we're seeing in maritime Southeast Asia? Well, first, thank you very much for having me in this panel. It's an absolute honor to be here. So I'll answer this in three different ways. I'll focus on the second answer much more. So I'll talk about the maritime Southeast Asian countries. First, I'll talk about the Philippine case mostly, where I've done my research and where I'm from, and I'm going to talk about what has happened since the pandemic. Now, generally speaking, maritime Southeast Asian states have better levels of governance, better rule of law, more stable democracies than I would say in many indicators than most countries, at least in mainland Southeast Asia. Historically speaking, trafficking wasn't really a problem in these countries, with the exception of, let's say, Filipinos and Indonesians being trafficking in the Middle East and dealing with labor exploitation, et cetera. Now, given this difference, when we think about trafficking, it goes through sort of like maritime routes rather than let's say land borders and people crossing from one area to another. So there are distinct barriers, let's say, trafficking in this region. Now, for trafficking to happen in maritime Southeast Asia, governments have to be involved. And this is where I talk about the Philippine case much more. And where the Philippines is a good case, not of Filipinos being trafficked into these industries, but rather the Philippines became the home for Chinese citizens being trafficked in online gambling scam hubs or online gambling centers back in 2016, during the time of Rodrigo III. And I'll talk about this case as my second point. Now, online gambling has historically been an industry for the Philippines, earning millions of dollars for the Philippine government. Since 2016, the industry exploded. We're talking about 500 million dollars of that access being paid to the Philippine government, more than 120 online gambling firms, largely coming from the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, all this like offshore financial centers going into the Philippines. And we're talking about 500,000 Chinese citizens trafficked and legal semi-legal status going into Metro Manila and working in these industries. And this was facilitated by none other than the former Philippine president, Rodrigo III. We all know him as a pro-China like individual. He gave us out the West Philippine seat when he became president. That's not the only thing he did. One of the things he did when he became president as early as 2016 in October was to centralize online gambling under the Philippine Amusement Gaming Corporation, which is the Philippine agency in charge of gambling. And what he did was he took the Philippine police and he strong armed the online gambling firms in the special economic zones under, which was controlled by Makawan gambling, I don't know how to name him, gambling investor Jack Lam. And he took the police. He basically cut down that particular like this group. And so that's what he did with one group of online gambling firms. And the other online gambling firm, which is controlled by, this is a very Philippine-centric story, by Philippine oligarch Roberto Ongpien. He did not renew the license of Roberto Ongpien's firms and eventually he sort of controlled and centralized online gambling under his administration and this in turn helped his sponsor by the name of Michael Yang. This is all in public documents. The Philippine government is now looking for Michael Yang, so there's an issue there. So online gambling became a thing in the Philippines. Criminality went up from sex work to drugs to Chinese triads and mafias operating openly in Metro Manila. Funny enough, the Chinese government actually demanded many of these people to be extradited back to China and the Philippine government in the 30 actually refused extraditing many of these people, which is a very interesting, interesting dynamic when we think about the relationship of China and transnational crime in the Philippine government. Now fast forward in 2020, 2021 when the pandemic happened, China shot off its borders. Laborers could not get into the Philippines. Financial transfers became much more difficult to do and many of these firms left the Philippines and went to Myanmar, went to Cambodia and went to many of these places that Jason and Jacob of course know better. And the tides have turned in the Philippine government right now. The Marcos administration is by and large against online gambling and because of that, there's public clamor right now to shut down online gambling in the Philippines despite the supposed economic benefits it brings to the country. Thank you very much. Jason, the heart of the problem right now seems to be in Burma, Myanmar, particularly since the coup of 2021. It has really mushroomed in the lawless environment that now exists in the country. Can you tell us a bit about that? And also you have been looking regionally and internationally at the development of this scamming. So we appreciate your thoughts on that as well. Thanks. Thanks, Priscilla. Yes, I'd agree largely with that characterization that Myanmar has become an epicenter of this form of criminality that I believe already the earlier speakers and Ambassador Dyer have laid out in terms of some of the very disturbing trends that we're seeing. I wanted to highlight in terms of how we've gotten here from Myanmar really two trends that we've seen that have been accelerated by the military coup. One is that all of the different forces within society that had been working to try to check the expansion of criminal activity. So for example, the NLD government prior to the coup had been looking at the formation of some of these large-scale criminal enclaves on the Myanmar-Tai border, which started to rise around 2017 as many of the Chinese criminal groups relocating from Cambodia or from the Philippines started to target that particular area. The NLD government worked to crack down. It pushed back when largely PRC affiliated criminal groups tried to associate the criminal enclave that they were developing there to house illicit online gambling and other forms of scams such as the pig butchering scams. The NLD government, when they saw these criminal actors start to tie the project to China's Belt and Road Initiative, when they saw state owned enterprises being brought in to develop a lot of that infrastructure, they pushed back. And you saw the Chinese government actually have to take the step of disassociating themselves publicly with some of that criminal activity. And then you also saw the Myanmar military be cornered into having to start cracking down on some of the criminal activity that was taking place there after the NLD formed a committee and worked on trying to publicly really embarrass and push the military to deal with a border guard force entity that was directly under its own command, which was one of the key enablers of the criminal activity there. Since the coup, what we've seen happen is all of those efforts to try to address the expansion of this crime basically be erased. The political parties that were involved in pushing some of the efforts to crack down, their leadership has either been detained or brought underground. You've seen the media space completely undermined in Burma with all of the free media that developed over the decade before the coup, either being pushed out of the country, forced to go underground, or being replaced by pro-military media, which of course is putting out very different messaging around what is happening in country today. So media access has more or less disappeared as a result of the coup. Civil society has also been forced to either go underground, been detained, been undermined by the ongoing chaos that has ensued since the military coup as well, but then other factors. The Myanmar military has redeployed the country's police to crack down on and crush any form of opposition across the country. You've seen many members of the police force actually defect, go underground as well. So what this has done is it's dismantled the police. You've also seen the military in terms of just the economic malaise that has followed the coup with many of the legitimate business actors either exiting the country or stopping any plans to expand any further economic plans. It's really opened its arms much more to these transnational criminal players who've developed rapidly growing influence across the country, causing many of these enclaves that were initially on a trajectory of being cracked down on before the coup to be able to flourish. So looking at just some of the enclaves, these criminal enclaves were the online, the cyber scams, the pig butchering scams, the crypto-based scams are taking place in the Thai Myanmar borderlands. One zone in particular that we've done some research on called the KK zone had a roughly 25 structures where people were being in these forced labor forms of circumstances forced to perpetrate these online crimes which are now extending into the United States as well as a wide range of countries around the world. These 25 structures before the coup expanded to more than 76 structures after. And this is a pattern that you've seen across all of the 35 plus enclaves that have formed in the country. Most of them controlled by alliances between PRC affiliated crime groups and the military's own border guard forces that are now involved in perpetrating these crimes. Another very disturbing trend that you're seeing in Myanmar is the growing influence and power of this nexus between transnational crime groups, again most of these being PRC affiliated groups and militias more broadly. As once these malign actors have their tentacles into the country they're even working to try to co-op some of the pro-democracy resistance actors and some of the different resistance groups that are countering the military into their networks. So you've seen pro-democracy actors also some of their areas targeted some of their members co-opted by these transnational criminal groups bringing them also into this type of illicit activity and providing support and protection to the criminal networks. I think a case that really highlights just how deeply involved the Myanmar is in all of this activity is the case of the Shweikoko Yatai New City project. The proponent of which actually is now sitting in a prison in Thailand awaiting a decision as to which country he'll be extradited to because he managed to obtain passports illegally from multiple countries leaving us with a situation where law enforcement there in Thailand isn't sure exactly where he is extradited. He is Chinese as the name would would would indicate but what happened around this case was the activity continued to spread at such an alarming pace that some of the resistance forces actually decided to initiate in April of this year a military operation against this particular enclave. The Myanmar army while you were seeing all sorts of war fighting other sorts of incidents across the country immediately deployed troops as well as overwhelming force to crush that effort to try to liberate this crime city in April of 2023. That actually was successful so the military successfully fought off this effort to try to you know forcibly go into this criminal enclave where there are estimates that are as many as 10,000 people are now being held in these forms of forced labor circumstances. So you know until now these problems continue to proliferate we're hearing about the expansion and construction of new zones all across the country and while these problems of course do remain very serious in other Southeast Asian countries I think Myanmar is the place where you're seeing more than anywhere else in the world. The growing construction of new criminal enclaves specifically for this activity on an industrial scale really across the borderlands but now also there's evidence of this happening even in the country's heartland in cities like Mandalay and Ghan and beyond. The last thing just tying this issue back to the theme of why this is so critical for US security. Interpol also put out an orange alert earlier this year indicating that basically at any time anywhere in the world people could be victimized by both the forms of human trafficking that you're seeing now online where you're having a lot of trafficking that is deploying these human resource scams or other sorts of employment scams often offering victims jobs in neighboring countries to Myanmar or to Cambodia or other places. Really anyone anywhere can be targeted by this activity including in the United States. So this is an issue I think as Ambassador Dwyer has already pointed out that really warrants strong US attention and leadership in trying to address. Thank you very much. I could add one more detail to this that these criminal networks that are being built in Burma and elsewhere are purpose built. They're not just buildings that existed they're purpose built for what they're being used for and they're built like more and more like penal colonies like prisons. They are the people inside are guarded by armed Chinese gangs and in the case of Burma on the outside the security is provided by the border guard forces by the Burmese border guard forces armed. So it's a very, very serious criminal operation and they're using the latest information and financial technology to run all these scams. That's a very important element of the whole thing very important and tackling it is going to require getting at the technology involved somehow which is not easy. Thank you very much. Now do we have questions coming in? I don't think it's for you. Can you hear me? Thank you. So what steps have been taken to mitigate and combat cyber-enabled human trafficking either domestically in each of the countries that you've discussed or in cooperation with regional neighbors such as Thailand and what impacts have they had if any? Would you like to start us with that? Sure. Sure. Just very briefly thank you for that question. Sort of there's a range of responses from rescue efforts to prevention efforts as I alluded earlier now being targeted predominantly on social media. New efforts to reduce the level of law enforcement capacity gaps that are largely addressing this and also increasing numbers of international task forces with regional and international law enforcement bringing their capacity and their greater distance and independence to bear on some of these issues. I'd also like to point out that there have been significant efforts to do robust raids and criminal prosecutions in both the Philippines and Indonesia. Philippines actually on the compounds themselves. The Indonesian government has played a strong leadership role in trying to knock out some of these broker networks. Oftentimes their citizens are being exploited in other countries but the Indonesian government has taken some very strong steps to make sure that they are conducting robust victim screening processes and through those processes learning about and gathering evidence about these cases and working to to disassimilate some of these broker networks. These are early stage efforts. Much greater work is going to need to be done on prevention, protection, prosecution but those are some I guess some of the initial examples. Maybe just to add I think there's also a very strong crackdown taking place cross-border in Thailand so you've seen the Thai law enforcement begin a series of campaigns targeting a lot of the illicit business networks that are now also deeply embedded in Thailand using Thailand as a bit of a landing ground to be able to operate the cross-border scams into Burma. They're trying to crack down on some of the trafficking that's taking place although it's difficult because largely the victims are arriving in Thailand legally right so many of them are being flown in on commercial flights escorted into VIP vans and never heard again you know after they they do arrive in Thailand but there's been some efforts in Thailand to try to crack down. There's also been the involvement of some multilateral organizations both with ASEAN looking at some of these issues increasingly and then also the Bali process which I think was mentioned earlier mobilizing to play a role in trying at least to get a better sense of just what the scale of this activity is and what some of the threats are. I think the point really to emphasize though is that the pace at which this activity is expanding is much faster than the pace at which law enforcement is coming together and working on coordinating to devise an effective response to a lot of the malign activity. The other aspect of this being that many of the PRC affiliated criminal networks have been also investing a lot of this illicit funding into cutting-edge technologies making it more and more difficult to both identify the criminals themselves but also making their efforts to to scam and to fraud much more efficient so I think that's another very disturbing trend the use of artificial intelligence the use of blockchain the use of fintech and and cryptocurrencies by a lot of these criminal groups. Something quick on like the Philippine case so one of the reasons why the new government became so adamant on criminalizing many of these firms are sort of like stopping the growth of like online gambling in the Philippines was because of public glamour a lot of Filipinos simply experience like too too many problems that emerge from on the online gambling sector from you know you know metromedalize a city of 12 million people then you add like half a million like Chinese or people in Southeast Asia in the city that that creates like so many problems from transportation to drugs crimes etc so at the end of the 30 government many Filipinos were so unhappy with like online gambling when Marcus came in he knew he could take this as a political initiative to garner capital in in terms of like stopping the growth of this industry at the same time this is associating himself from the industry as a whole I do want to highlight one more thing that many governments can do in or in in order to like stop these activities and I believe that not all governments can do this of course I think better data gathering capacity is super important in terms of like trying to like understand these sectors and trying to like get at like you know sort of like what are like the what are the roots and what are like the what's a what's a data point behind many of these like firms so for instance in the Philippine case one of the things we did me and my research assistants was we gathered shareholder data on all the online gambling firms going into the Philippines and we were able to locate the names of these people who their partners are how much money they've put in etc and because of that we were able to sort of gather many of these firms and we were able to like provide data to the office of senator honte veros in the Philippines who actually like actively like work against this like the sectors at the same time we recognize the limits of our data gathering capacity the Philippine government does not unfortunately does not list the shareholders of the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands and we it's anonymous and if they were if they only required many of this like you know firms to sort of like be transparent then maybe we could have we could have had better data thank you next question hello thank you my name is Paul Lee I'm a filmmaker and I've listened that you highlighted many Chinese criminal syndicate and loosely Chinese government involvement I wonder have you found any indication that the Chinese state security apparatus and its extensive network of agents and collaborators throughout all of Asia in the world actually helping to coordinate if not support these criminal activities and I postulate if they are actually doing so they do so for two reasons one is to financial gains secondly is to destabilize these emerging countries to stop its democratic advancements so just want to get your perspective on that thank you let me start the response to that because this these are the kinds of questions that have also come to mind with me the connection let's say the official connection between China and these operations is not clear you can trace it back through multiple organizations in China that are that have official status but that doesn't mean the government itself is involved it does follow a pattern of the Belt and Road Initiative many of the countries that have become victims are on the Belt and Road pattern and the other thing you have to bear in mind is that the chief victim of this is Chinese most of the people that are being scammed from the beginning and even today are Chinese whether they're in China or overseas Chinese because in Southeast Asia and and even in most of the world there's a large Chinese diaspora and it preys on that diaspora as well so it's all mixed in it's it's so intertwined that it would be difficult to separate them out and say yes this has caused an effect but yes it does raise these kinds of questions Jason what are your thoughts on that maybe I'll just add a couple of points on this that's a really important question I think first of all I think it's important to recognize how many of these transnational syndicates got to Southeast Asia in the first place right I mean Chinese law enforcement started cracking down on criminal actors domestically and they started shifting overseas shifting their operations overseas once there of course they began to co-opt elites across the region building protection in some of the countries that we've been discussing this pattern as I think very much followed in Cambodia in the Philippines and certainly in Burma but you know so you saw as this elite capture continued that many of the criminal networks were also very quick to take a posture politically that was very pro-prc very pro-communist party on a wide range of issues so some of the different criminal networks that we've investigated you know for example broken tooth the the former head of the 14k cartel who is involved in these operations in all three countries that we've been looking at here in this panel he has set up an association that was explicitly patriotic explicitly meant to organize overseas Chinese to adopt a posture that was friendly to the communist party on issues like Taiwan on human rights issues on on issues around Hong Kong right so you've seen broken tooth be able in impunity to advance these large-scale industrial criminal activities the name of his zone in in Myanmar is called the Dome zone it's right on the time in our border and he's living in China he's posting things on Chinese social media on almost a daily basis and it would seem that a lot of the illicit wealth is being filtered back into China he's been sanctioned of course by the US government and I think it's important to look at you know steps that can be taken like sanctions to deal with some of these activities but I think it highlights one of the ways in which these these networks are are operating of course the other side of this is that China has continued something of a crackdown but you're not really seeing the crackdown target many of these high-level players there are a few exceptions but most of these higher level players in these networks are protected by local elites or have very close contacts to the united front or to other aspects of the Chinese government or quasi-governmental associations and so I think that that makes Chinese efforts to crack down on them both extremely difficult and in some cases really even against China's broader broader interests lastly I think the other thing that the Chinese response has done is that it's targeted a lot of the foot soldiers that are you know occupying this this industry targeting you know the ability of Chinese to travel to other countries for example or targeting freedoms of Chinese to go across borders maybe for otherwise legitimate purposes but what it's also done is cost played a role in the shift of some of the patterns with these networks now focusing more on an international population rather than on a Chinese population because it's harder to get a hold of Chinese labor as a result of some of these trends and I'll just add not much to add on the direct relationship but certainly the impact that you're suggesting a massive amount of revenue and the destabilizing of governance and democracy in these countries is absolutely the end result of that and regardless of where that's coming from that's extremely concerning these are this is a proven model at this point yes it's it's a prc originating dominant criminal industry but in Cambodia there's also significant evidence of Thai criminal gangs Taiwanese based Vietnamese based and so they have a model that they're working from it's proven to be highly lucrative extremely straightforward to run and operate with high profit margins even extremely unstable context like Myanmar and so when you do see what is effective seeding of sovereignty across the region to opaque criminal groups that's something for concern regardless of for those groups loyalties lie so as an academic I will argue that we don't have enough data to base to answer this directly right I will tell you however the data set we created and over two to three hundred companies go that went to the Philippines you can actually find I would say 60 70 percent of them have Chinese investors in them like prc citizen investors even though once in the Cayman Islands you don't see the investors but you see the managers and you see the managers by and large are like Chinese citizens with a significant amount of money that means they have economic capacity in China to invest in countries like the Philippines and that means political ties as well etc that said it's really hard to say you find a bit of both you find a Chinese government criminalizing you know groups and low-level like actors on the one on the other you find them like I would say supporting or even like condoning some of these activities even the Philippine case is complicated I mean Jack Lam was a Macauan based Chinese like I don't know what this Ellen gambler or a capitalist right Michael Young was also like you know was also like another like capitalist but they you know Michael Young seems to have strong ties with strong ties with the Fujian government and up until now he's fine and Jack Lam is now on the run somewhere um but that being said a response to this should not be aimed at China or say it would be better particularly if you think that it has political implications for democracies it would be better for democracies the leadership of democracies join forces in a as the TIP report says in a strategic multi-dimensional partnership with civil civil society law enforcement international organizations governments to put together a strategy for protecting democracies against this kind of well disease I suppose and just cutting it off preventive rather than trying to place the blame on one country or another um except for the countries that are hosting it do we have we we have a couple minutes left so maybe time for one more sure um perhaps for our audience who is less familiar with this phenomenon could you explain what the pig butchering scam is and what are your best estimates for how many cybercrime compounds there are in each of the countries you've spoken about um maybe just very quickly on the pig butchering scam um it's it's basically it could be romance based but it's basically it starts with an anonymous message on on whatsapp someone reaches out and says hi someone there's one case where it was someone sent a message to another person asking when his piano was going to be delivered usually the persons receiving these messages have been targeted using some form of AI so they're looking for particular vulnerable populations and what happens in these scams is that for maybe one or two months the the perpetrator who again the perpetrator may also be a victim in many of these cases because they're in being held in one of these forced labor compounds but the perpetrator will send you know series of messages building trust with the person establishing in a romantic relationship with the person and once that trust is established um you'll see them introduce some type of investment opportunity maybe even linked to some kind of a shared future that maybe the perpetrator aims to have with the victim and why it's called pig butchering is because you kind of are then at that point beginning to fatten up the the victim the victim puts money into that sees an instant return puts more money in now has both maybe a very close trusting relationship with the perpetrator and it continues up until the point where the perpetrator has detected that more or less this person is in for their net worth or for the maximum amount that they're able to defraud and then whatever platform it is whether it's a crypto platform or some other form of online investment scheme is taken down the wealth disappears and the victim is really butchered on two levels the emotional psychological level of someone who they deeply trusted maybe had a romantic relationship with um harming them and then on another level of course the financial loss so that I think briefly is is um the the pig butchering scam in terms of Myanmar the number of these types of large-scale enclaves um there's at least 35 of them spread across um current states uh shan states and kichin states uh but again there are also many smaller compounds where this form of activity is taking and other plate parts of the country so I think again looking at the research that is necessary right this is something that's evolving on a on a day-to-day basis with more and more um I think uh scam networks and syndicates moving into this industry from a growing number of of sources so um I think it's something that warrants very careful and close monitoring and analysis um uh in addition to of course a very strong response yeah just very quickly in Cambodia again this is very difficult to assess measure estimate uh ijm's dealt with uh people who we believe to be victims coming out of several dozen of these compounds and through our work several other organizations public domain uh there there are certainly hundreds of compounds in Cambodia uh but that number is probably shifting uh at any given time unlike in Myanmar where these compounds are existing um in sort of contested fragmented areas of areas of fragmented sovereignty or in Laos where they're occurring predominantly in special economic zones uh this space in Cambodia is actually defined differently uh that they are everywhere uh they're uh in apartment buildings some yes purpose built but some actually just repurposed apartment buildings uh hotels casinos all over the country uh there were several uh within a two block radius of my home in Phnom Penh and so the the number is shifting constantly and it's uh yes it's very uh in the water uh so to speak in the Philippines in 2019 at the height of it it was 314 uh but that's an that's um under that's an under underestimating the numbers because the way many of this this firm's work is they do have one big company and they host tens and dozens and hundreds of like micro gaming companies inside the company so there's there's like a more complicated structure right now in 2022 since the Marcus government um it's now down to 34 so officially at least so hard to say for real thank you well I think we've reached our time limit now and I'd like to thank all of the wonderful participants ambassador dire jason um jacob and alvin it's been very very rewarding today to hear from you thank you very much thank you