Wired reports:

The plea for help arrived last summer. “I am in Myanmar and work for a fraud company,” a Chinese human-trafficking victim wrote in a short email sent from within the Tai Chang scam compound. Like thousands of others in the region, they were promised legitimate work only to find themselves tricked into modern slavery and forced to scam people online for hours every day. Tai Chang, which backs on to the Myanmar-Thailand border, has been linked to incidents of torture. “I’m not safe, I’m chatting with you secretly,” they said. Despite the risk, their first request wasn’t to be rescued.

Tai Chang’s internet connection had recently been cut off from Thailand, the person wrote in the messages to anti-scam group GASO in June 2024. Instead of scamming within the compound grinding to a halt, the organized criminals behind the operation found another way to stay online, they claimed. “Elon Musk’s Starlink is installed above all the buildings in the campus where we are now,” the individual wrote. “Now the fraud work is running normally. If the fraud network here is down, we can regain our freedom.”

Those messages soon landed on the desk of Erin West, then deputy district attorney for Santa Clara County, California. West, a longtime advocate for victims of so-called pig butchering and other types of cryptocurrency scams, wrote to a lawyer at SpaceX, the company behind Musk’s high-speed Starlink satellite internet system. Starlink connections appeared to be helping criminals at Tai Chang to “scam Americans” and “fuel their internet needs,” West alleged at the end of July 2024. She offered to share more information to help the company in “disrupting the work of bad actors.”

SpaceX and Starlink never replied, West claims.

Reports of the use of Starlink at Tai Chang are not a one-off—criminals running multibillion-dollar empires across Southeast Asia appear to be widely using the satellite internet network. At least eight scam compounds based around the Myanmar-Thailand border region are using Starlink devices, according to mobile phone connection data reviewed by WIRED. Between November 2024 and the start of February, hundreds of mobile phones logged their locations and use of Starlink at known scam compounds more than 40,000 times, according to the mobile phone data, which was collected by an online advertising industry tool. [Continue reading…]