A Chinese court has sentenced three members of a criminal gang to death for operating a network of brutal scam centres in Myanmar’s Kokang region on the border with China, while jailing dozens more.
China has stepped up cooperation with South-East Asian nations to crack down on a vast industry that has flourished in the region in recent years to fleece people out of billions of dollars.
Those conducting the online scams are sometimes willing con artists, and other times trafficked foreign nationals – many Chinese – tricked into work and held in prison-like compounds.
Quanzhou Intermediate People’s Court said on Tuesday that it had sentenced Wei Huairen, Chen Dawei and Liao Jingfang to death for their involvement in the “Wei family criminal gang”.
The gang was involved in crimes including drug trafficking, organising prostitution, operating illegal casinos, telecommunications fraud and the murder of at least two Chinese citizens, the court said in a statement.
Wei was identified as one of the group’s leaders and found guilty of several crimes including murder, the court said.
The gang’s operations netted more than 12.2 billion yuan (RM7.45bil).
Three other gang members were handed life sentences, while 55 more were given prison terms ranging from 24 years to three years and three months, the court said.
Analysts describe the Wei clan as one of the “four families” running crime syndicates in Kokang.
China’s state broadcaster CCTV on Tuesday called them the “most violent criminal force in northern Myanmar”, having created an “iron triangle of political, military and business criminal activities”.
It described the gang as operating 14 “large-scale” scam compounds and luring “large numbers” of Chinese to Myanmar through fake promises of high wages. — AFP
