The U.S. government has sanctioned a major militia in eastern Myanmar, describing it as “a key enabler” of online fraud operations that are costing Americans billions of dollars per year.
In a statement, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said that it had sanctioned the Karen National Army (KNA), along with the group’s leader Col. Saw Chit Thu, and his two sons, Saw Htoo Eh Moo and Saw Chit Chit, “for their role in facilitating cyber scams that harm U.S. citizens, human trafficking, and cross-border smuggling.”
Over the past five years, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia have become hosts to parasitic cyber scam operations of immense scale. Perpetrated mostly by Chinese criminal syndicates, these operations rely on a large indentured workforce – mostly ordinary people who have been attracted by promises of employment, only to be kept imprisoned and forced to operate various types of digital scams, often on pain of beatings, mistreatment, and torture.
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