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.”