Elon Musk filled the sky with satellites to deliver Internet to every corner of the globe, and the world has found all kinds of applications for the ubiquitous service. After the prison with clandestine antennas and the narcosubmarine connected to StarlinkMyanmar buildings covered in SpaceX satellite dishes arrive. Many of the scams that circulate on the Internet are coordinated within it, including the increasingly common romance frauds.
More than 2,000 Starlink antennas. Despite efforts by authorities in China and Thailand to root them out, Burmese “fraud factories” remain operational and are more technologically advanced than ever. Responsible for scamming billions of dollars from victims around the world, these guarded buildings near the Myanmar-Thailand border have their roofs covered in Starlink antennas.
According to a Australian Strategic Policy Institute reportoperators replaced ground connectivity with Starlink terminals after allegedly being dismantled by local militias. Satellite images from February 18, just two weeks after the raid, already showed more than 1,000 satellite Internet service antennas. By May, Thai intelligence estimated that the number exceeded 2,000 antennas.
What are these centers? In the February police operation, nearly 7,000 people were freed from a brutal system that forced them to run investment scams known as “pig butchering” and online romantic scams. A AFP investigation It tells what was experienced inside through a young Chinese man, Sun, freed after Beijing’s intervention. Lured by the false promise of a well-paying job in Thailand to support his family, Sun was kidnapped and sold to a scam center in Myawaddy, Myanmar for $20,000.
Their job was to send fraudulent messages to targets in the United States following a script. One of these documents, 25 pages long, instructed scammers to adopt the persona of “Abby,” a nonexistent 35-year-old Japanese woman, to build a romantic bond with the victim. Once the target took the bait, he passed the contact on to a more specialized scammer. Sun relates that workers were beaten with electric batons and whips if they did not comply with orders or worked slowly. High fences, watchtowers, and armed guards deterred any escape attempts.
Diesel generators and satellite Internet. These centers prospered in a border territory between Myanmar, Thailand, China and Laos that was already known as the golden triangle of drug trafficking and smuggling. Corruption and the power vacuum following the 2021 coup in Myanmar have allowed criminal syndicates to operate with almost total impunity and autonomy.
Starlink’s ubiquitous coverage, combined with diesel generatorshas allowed these centers to be incredibly self-sufficient. They no longer depend on Myanmar’s unstable power and telecommunications network. Now they can operate almost anywhere, which is making them difficult to eradicate. Although the permissiveness of the Burmese militias also helps.
What SpaceX says. Despite warnings from California prosecutors and alarm expressed by American politicians, SpaceX has not commented on the matter. The situation has escalated to the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress, which has launched an investigation.
SpaceX has already proven in Ukraine its ability to disable terminals in specific geographic areas, a technology known as geofencing. Applying a similar measure in the areas of Myanmar where these centers operate would have an immediate impact, and with global implications.
In the United States alone, losses from these types of scams amounted to $10 billion last year, an increase of 66% over the previous year. Starlink has played such an important role that the service, which is not officially licensed in Myanmar, has gone from not being on the country’s list of internet providers to being number one.
Image | ASPI
In Xataka | Facebook has become a drain for love scams: Morata’s crime is just the extreme example
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings