The Economist has an excellent and heartbreaking podcast about this scam industry that they estimate at $500bn annually, but it's available to subscribers only I believe.
Crypto use cases:
1. Financing North Korea's nuclear missile program
2. Harrowing scams
Is it this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUg-cLVhv-4
3 is "doing anything the government doesn't like", which includes, for example, buying drugs, or funding protests against mass murder.
It's much better at scamming and funding weapons programs than protest or disobedience because crypto transactions are non reversable but tend to leave a lot of tracks behind. If persons involved are anywhere that they can be arrested or intimidated they will be.
I swear, have y'all bought drugs? You don't need crypto to do it, dealers take Venmo.
Hell, the lady I get very much not legal shrooms from has a Shopify site. I get a receipt in my email, a tracking number, and she asks to rate her shop 5 stars.
Saying that this is a use-case for crypto implies a level of drug enforcement that simply doesn't exist.
Dark web vendors do not take any form of payment other than cryptocurrency.
You don't need dark web vendors. Normal web has plenty.
Well yeah, vegetarians only accept food without meat. You've already limited yourself to a subset of dealers who are privacy and tech nerds, of course they only take crypto.
You can use crypto to buy drugs on the "dark web" but like all crypto things it's not a system for the masses. I had to explain E2EE one of my friends who thought Snapchat was better than iMessage for buying drugs because it "deletes" the message. There's no universe she's gonna figure out crypto.
Yes, it's true that crime is a third major category of use cases.
Number Go Up book also has couple of chapters on those and how they are tied into the whole crypto business[0].
That happened 17 days ago (24 points, 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962545
Feb 20, https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-online-scam-centers-myawa...
> An airlift carrying more than 1,000 Chinese nationals who had worked at online scam centers in eastern Myanmar began Thursday.. Thailand, China and Myanmar have coordinated efforts over the past month to shut down the scam centers that bilked victims around the world out of billions of dollars through false romantic ploys, bogus investment pitches and illegal gambling schemes. Thai officials said recently that as many as 10,000 people may be repatriated from Myanmar.. Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra on a visit to Beijing earlier this month told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that Thailand would crack down on the scam networks. Just ahead of her visit, Thailand cut off electricity, internet and gas supplies to several areas in Myanmar.. An earlier crackdown on scam centers in Myanmar happened in late 2023.. Ethnic guerrilla groups with close ties to Beijing shut down many operations
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149372
> This all happened because they kidnapped a Chinese actor, maybe fake casting call ads are not the wisest idea - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Wang_Xing
On January 3, 2025, Wang Xing (stage name "Xingxing"), a Chinese actor, was deceived into a scam center in Myanmar by a fraud group under the pretext of "going to Thailand for filming work". After Wang Xing lost contact, his girlfriend Jiajia posted a message for help through social media and actively contacted relevant authorities. This incident attracted the attention of the Chinese film industry. Many actors posted about this matter, prompting the Chinese Embassy in Thailand, the Chinese Consulate General in Chiang Mai and the Thai police to intervene in the investigation and search and rescue.
> Thailand wants to cooperate with China since reports about scam workers being trafficked through Thailand have circulated widely on Chinese social media. The Thai government and others fear it will discourage the lucrative market of inbound Chinese tourists.
These illegal scam prisons are run by Chinese nationals and almost certainly backed by CCP. It's very cute for the Chinese government to pretend they don't have a direct hand in this scourge.
From the AP article:
> about 200 Chinese citizens “suspected of involvement in fraud” were flown to an airport in the city of Nanjing, China’s official Xinhua news agency said.
Exactly what I'm talking about. CCP are now pretending they didn't know / fund these people from the beginning.
Icarus always flies too close to the sun.
I wonder if things deteriorate into a failed state China will intervene. They did that in the 1970s with Cambodia. But who knows America and India will probably go ape shit.
Deteriorate? Myanmar has been a failed state for 60 years. To give you an idea of what I mean, their current and previous dictators consult witch doctors for their decisions, and the largest city of 5 million doesn’t have continuous electricity. One of the many ongoing wars in Myanmar, The Karen conflict, is one of the longest-running armed conflicts in the world. Myanmar has been a total mess since end of WWII.
Meh, witch doctors or pastors, pick your poison.
Don't worry.
Plenty of the rebel groups consult with Southern Baptist pastors - especially in Chin State and Saigang.
> They did that in the 1970s with Cambodia.
You mean the Third Indochina War? It wasn't really about Cambodia being a failed state but a far consequence of a Sino-Soviet split.
That overstates the Soviet aspect and severely understates the Vietnamese aspect.
For Vietnam, Cambodia is their near abroad. Saigon is barely 20 miles away from Cambodia, and the Mekong is the lifeblood of Southern Vietnam, and Cambodian factions (the same ones the Chinese backed in the 1970s) had supported anti-Vietnamese insurgencies in Gia Lai.
Cambodia and Laos became a buffer state for China+Thailand and Vietnam the same way Myanmar has become one for China, Thailand, and India.
> I wonder if things deteriorate into a failed state
Myanmar is basically a Southeast Asian version of Congo.
All the neighboring countries (China, India, Thailand) have already de facto intervened by maintaining relations with and arming regional warlords, and "their" guys in the Tatmadaw.
For example,
- China and the MDNAA [0] and the Wa State [1], and their "Goma" is Muse and Mongla
- India and the ethnic Chin opposition [2][3] and the Arakan Army [4] (the guys who did the Rohingya Genocide - they flipped from China to India in 23-24), and their "Goma" is Tamu and Sittwe.
- Thailand's Military Government's continued support of the Myanmar Tatmadaw [5], and their "Goma" is Myawaddy, Payathonzhu, Shwekoko (the city mentioned above), and Mawdaung.
China, India, and Thailand are all enabling the worst actors in Myanmar's civil war, and it's the civilians that lose.
> They did that in the 1970s with Cambodia
Which sparked a regional war with Vietnam in 1979, and multiple coups and counter-coups by Chinese and Vietnamese backed factions in Cambodia and Laos.
If Cambodia and Laos was chaotic, Myanmar will be 1,000 times worse, because several ethnic groups in Myanmar have large (1mil+) populations in both China and India, so the risk of regional contagion is massive, and has already started in Manipur [6].
[0] - https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/08/myanmars-junta-los...
[1] - https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/ethnic-issues/wa-state-aims-t...
[2] - https://www.bnionline.net/en/news/chinland-council-and-chin-...
[3] - https://theprint.in/india/chin-rebel-leader-lauds-indias-hel...
[4] - https://thediplomat.com/2024/03/is-india-finally-waking-up-t...
[5] - https://r2pasiapacific.org/files/8231/2022_Thai_response_mya...
[6] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/fighters-myanmar-civil-w...
I'd bet any money that while China might not go in overtly, they'd be the main silent-backers of Thai forces that could go in overtly with fewer objections from abroad. (Or, maybe it'd be more accurate to say that, the Thais wouldn't care as much about the objections from abroad as the Chinese would?)
It could even be that everyone is misjudging the asians entirely? And it's bad enough that at even the slightest provocation from the warlords, we'll see Thai and Chinese troops flood in. Consequences be damned. This would be the worst outcome for the rest of the world, but probably the best outcome for the people currently being terrorized and held hostage by these thugs. I just hope it doesn't get to that point.
Thailand is not invading Myanmar for China, they are pretty conservative when it comes to such politics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43150897
> Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra on a visit to Beijing earlier this month told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that Thailand would crack down on the scam networks. Just ahead of her visit, Thailand cut off electricity, internet and gas supplies to several areas in Myanmar.. Thailand wants to cooperate with China since reports about scam workers being trafficked through Thailand have circulated widely on Chinese social media. The Thai government and others fear it will discourage the lucrative market of inbound Chinese tourists.
> the Thais wouldn't care as much about the objections from abroad as the Chinese
That is absolutely not how Thailand works. If Thailand does anything, it’ll be exclusively on the Thai side of the border.
If China does anything it will be in support of the Tatmadaw, either overtly or covertly.
The Tatmadaw isn't a unified force either anymore.
It's got it's own factions, and mid-level leadership (especially the farther out you get from Naypyidaw) allies with China, Thailand, or India.
That's interesting, do you have any links to the different factions in the Tat right now?
Sadly, not off the top of my head.
(Edit: here you go. An overview from 2021 by the Tea Circle group formerly at St Anthony's College, Oxford but now at UToronto Munk - https://teacircleoxford.com/politics/peering-under-the-hood-...)
A lot of this came up in a meetup I participated in a couple years ago at HKS.
But at a high level, you'll see Chinese weapon sales [0] happen at the same time as Indian weapon sales [1] to the Tatmadaw, despite both China and India directly competing with each other.
Sadly, Myanmar was always a basket case because the British ignored it when it was British India and later British Burma, so outside the Bamar core, the state never truly existed on the ground.
And after the 2020 China-India standoff, Myanmar became even more of a conflict zone because at it's shortest it's a 40 mile buffer zone between Assam and Yunnan.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/un-expert-says-russia-china-se...
[1] - https://amp.dw.com/en/how-india-is-supporting-myanmars-milit...
Good luck to the people being held prisoner in these hubs. Hopefully they can escape the abuse and violence, and not just be trafficked to another hub.
it's a grim situation... i hope there are resources available to help those who manage to escape, and that more is done to prevent these hubs from operating in the first place.
What a horrible fate to be abducted to one of these hellholes.
Who would have guessed - that this is what the singularity boiled down to- AI scaming and hacking humans - which thus regresses into tribal factions. What a letdown!
Gut Ding will Kurzweil haben.
I mean isn't that what a lot of cyberpunk predicted?
Old news, they turned on diesel generators and Starlink and shifted around.
They obviously would have taken a hit and Thailand has already shut down cell towers on the Cambodia border near Poi Pet where they moved some operations.
They should have been reading HN and how solar is cheaper than anything else, silly criminals doing real world stuff.
This all happened because they kidnapped a Chinese actor, maybe fake casting call ads are not the wisest idea - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Wang_Xing
Tbh I feel like the people didn't care much about it because the people who got kidnapped there were mostly attracted by job offers that were known to be shady (quick money), so there wasn't much discussion around this. The actor getting kidnapped is different: People suddenly found that you can be kidnapped even when the offer seems legit and only staying in Thailand. This forced the government (both China and Thailand) to take action to address the concerns.
But I think this will come back again. This kidnapping thing is not new, and it caught media attention a few years ago as well, they just go silent for a period of time and continue their operation later.
it's very odd that China doesn't really care about an estimated 100K of its citizens getting trafficked in this manner.
It's such an open secret that there was a $500MM box office movie about it last year, and media censorship is so heavy in China that I wonder what admitting this even means.
> 100K of its citizens getting trafficked
Is there public data on their demographics, e.g. occupation, income, age, credit score, region of China?