KUALA LUMPUR – A Chinese court has sentenced 11 members of the notorious Ming family to death for running massive scam centres in Myanmar, in one of the harshest crackdowns yet against cross-border criminal networks that Beijing has described as a national scourge.
State broadcaster CCTV reported that the sentences were handed down on Monday in the eastern city of Wenzhou, where 39 Ming family members stood trial.
Besides the death sentences, five others received death penalties with two-year suspensions, 11 were jailed for life, and the rest were given terms ranging from five to 24 years.
The court found that since 2015, the Ming family had been at the heart of a sprawling criminal empire in Laukkai, a remote town in Myanmar’s Shan State near the Chinese border.
Alongside other powerful clans, they transformed the once-sleepy town into a hub for illegal gambling, drug trafficking, prostitution, and telecommunications fraud.
Authorities said the syndicate’s operations generated more than 10 billion yuan (RM6.5 billion), with casinos alone estimated to be processing several billion dollars annually.
The verdict also detailed harrowing accounts of violence against scam workers, including cases where members of the Ming family shot labourers to prevent them from returning to China.
At its peak, the family controlled compounds that housed up to 10,000 people, many of them Chinese nationals lured with promises of legitimate jobs but instead forced into running online fraud schemes.
The most infamous site, Crouching Tiger Villa, became notorious for beatings and torture of trapped workers.
The UN has previously described Laukkai as the epicentre of a “scamdemic”, a wave of industrial-scale fraud operations that has ensnared more than 100,000 foreign nationals across Southeast Asia.
Initially developed to serve China’s appetite for gambling — outlawed on the mainland — Laukkai’s casinos provided the perfect front for money laundering and trafficking.
But in 2023, an alliance of ethnic armed groups launched an offensive in Shan State that ousted Myanmar’s military from the area. Beijing was widely believed to have tacitly backed the move, given its longstanding influence over local insurgent groups.
Amid the chaos, family patriarch Ming Xuechang reportedly took his own life, while dozens of relatives were arrested and extradited to China. Thousands of trafficked workers were also repatriated.
China’s sweeping punishments are seen as part of a broader effort to choke off the fraud industry that has flourished in lawless border zones. Earlier this year, Thai authorities also moved against scam compounds along their frontier with Myanmar following heavy pressure from Beijing.
Still, analysts warn the trade has proven adaptable, shifting operations to countries like Cambodia while remaining entrenched in parts of Myanmar. — September 30, 2025
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