- Myanmar passed the Anti-Online Scam Bill, introducing some of the world’s toughest penalties for scam crimes.
- The death penalty doesn’t apply to every online scam; only for the most severe cases.
- Online scams from Southeast Asia drained between $88.3B and $114.1B from victims.
Myanmar’s military-backed parliament has passed the Anti-Online Scam Bill, which brings in some of the toughest punishments in the world for crimes linked to online scam operations. The new law builds on a draft bill that was first proposed back in May, and its strictest rules were retained after the parliamentary debate.
Commenting on the bill, Aye Chan, a lower house member of parliament, said, “There were not many significant changes to the proposed draft bill. The important parts of the bill remained the same.”
The death penalty doesn’t apply to every online scam, as it’s only reserved for the most severe cases that involve violence or human trafficking.
According to the law, the death penalty can be handed down to anyone who uses violence, torture, illegal detention, or cruel treatment to force people into online scam centers, particularly where victims die as a result. Life in prison is given to those running scam compounds or pulling off major crypto fraud. Other sentences range from 10 years to life, depending on the person’s role and how serious the crime was.
Myanmar’s Crypto Scam Industry
This new law comes after years of outside pressure over the booming scam centers along Myanmar’s borders, especially around Myawaddy, near Thailand.
These compounds have become notorious for all sorts of crimes, including fake crypto investment offers, romance scams (so-called pig butchering fraud), phony investment sites, identity fraud, money laundering, and human trafficking.
Many of the people working in these centers didn’t choose to be there. Thousands of victims from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas have described being tricked by fake job ads, only to have their passports taken away and be forced into running online scams while threatened with violence.
Even though these operations run all kinds of scams, crypto has become one of their go-to ways to handle payments. Often, victims are told to buy Bitcoin or stablecoins, send USDT to wallets the scammers run, invest through fake crypto trading sites, or move money to decentralized wallets that are next to impossible to retrieve.
A new UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) report estimates that last year, online scams (particularly investment fraud) from Southeast Asia (largely Myanmar and Cambodia) resulted in between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion taken from victims.
In general, the FBI warned that crypto investment scams are still one of the biggest causes of financial loss from cybercrime around the world. Just last year, a loss of $11 billion was attributed to crypto scams in the US alone.
Related: Cambodia Law Targets Crypto Scam Kingpins with Life in Prison
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