AFP’s investigation into Myanmar’s scam centres has uncovered a global network of fraud affecting thousands of victims. The report revealed how Starlink internet service was exploited to power illicit operations, exposing the human and financial toll of the scam industry. By combining data journalism, multimedia reporting, and first-hand testimonies, AFP has shed light on a story that spans continents and challenges both authorities and corporations. The individuals who conducted this investigation — Fiachra Gibbons, Isabel Kua, Matthew Walsh and Nalini Lepetit-Chella — share their testimonies.
This aerial photo taken on September 17, 2025 shows the KK Park complex in Myanmar's eastern Myawaddy township, which has been blamed for scamming Chinese and American victims out of billions of dollars. © Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP
Looking back at a scoop
“I have rarely worked on a story which has had so many real-life consequences. From forcing Elon Musk’s Starlink to pull the plug on 2,500 of their satellite devices powering the Myanmar scam centres, to militias blowing up a large part of the biggest 'scam city' in an 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' attempt to prove they were cracking down on a business they allegedly control and profit from, it’s been a ride.
Add to that our scoop that a US congressional committee was investigating Starlink and could call Musk to explain why his satellite service was being used to defraud Americans. The story also broke through China’s so-called Great Firewall restricting foreign media, to become the top trending story on Weibo, with ordinary users posting translations of our story as fast as they could be taken down.
China has sharply stepped up its fight against scammers, with two of the alleged kingpins namechecked in our stories since extradited, the latest last week. Experts say the investigation also helped galvanise the US to set up the Scam Centre Strike Force in November, bringing together the FBI, the Secret Service and the Justice Department.”
Alleged scam centre workers and victims are pictured during a crackdown operation by the Karen Border Guard Force (BGF) on the KK Park complex in Myanmar's eastern Myawaddy township on February 26, 2025. Hundreds of foreigners were sent home from scam compounds, with many workers saying they were trafficked and forced to swindle people around the world. © AFP
Inside the scoop: a first testimony
Fiachra recounts: “All this began with an AFP reporter getting the phone number of a Chinese scam centre worker during a previous crackdown on the centres around Myawaddy on the Thailand-Myanmar border in February. He said he had been trafficked and tortured by his bosses. Isabel Kua in Beijing took that and ran with it, travelling to the other end of the country to talk to the man, whom we called Sun, in his mountain village. But attempts to delve further were frustrated by the local authorities, with her and our video journalist followed all the way. Even so, she and Matthew Walsh were able to build up a compelling picture of the slave-like conditions inside some of the centres, with Sun saying he was sold from one to another, and the enormous damage the scammers were doing in China and beyond, with the UN estimating the cost of the swindles at $37 billion.”
Matthew also uncovered the scam with the scam, where the families of people trafficked to the fraud factories were being conned into paying to extract them.
Chinese state media in February last year reported extensively on the hundreds of Chinese scam centre workers being repatriated home after a crackdown in Myanmar. The visuals were striking: dozens of them in handcuffs, escorted down a plane while flanked by police. My Beijing colleague Matthew Walsh and I knew we wanted to write a story about the scammers from China since the Chinese appeared to be involved at every level of the scamming ecosystem.
Chinese tycoon She Zhijiang (C) is escorted by Royal Thai Police officers out of the Suvarnabhumi Airport Police Station in Bangkok on November 12, 2025, before being extradited to China. He is accused of running a massive scam hub in Myanmar. © Chanakarn Laosarakham / AFP
Matthew started to dig into the industry of self-styled private “rescuers” – Chinese who claim to be able to broker releases of people trapped in the compounds – by reaching out to dozens of such fixers on domestic social media platforms. Meanwhile, at a holding camp in Mae Sot, Thailand, a colleague of ours obtained the contact number of a Chinese scam worker we refer to in our story as “Sun”, a pseudonym. I added Sun’s number on WeChat, the messaging app used by everyone in China. I reached his wife, who said Sun had been repatriated by Chinese authorities but had not returned to his home. She agreed to an interview but suddenly stopped replying. I accepted that I probably wouldn’t hear from her again. Then one day in late March, a message popped up on my phone: “Hello, I am Sun. I’ve returned home.” I couldn’t believe it.
This photo taken on April 3, 2025 shows a man referred to as Sun, a pseudonym AFP is using to protect his identity, who was one of thousands of Chinese people swallowed up by Myanmar scam centres. He was sent back to his village in China after the crackdown in February 2025. © Greg Baker / AFP
That evening, I spoke with him at length over the phone from our Beijing office about how he ended up in the scam centres in Myanmar and the violence he endured at the hands of his managers. He provided rare insights into the inner workings of the scam operations. AFP remains one of the few international outlets that have been able to interview a Chinese scam worker.
Sun told me he stayed in a village in southwest China’s Yunnan province, near the border with Myanmar. Matthew and our visual colleagues flew to Yunnan and drove for hours for a further interview at his modest farmhouse in the remote mountains of Lincang. But minutes after they arrived, a group of people who said they were from the local government led Sun away. When he returned half an hour later, he declined to speak further. As reporters in China, we are frequently followed by unmarked cars on reporting assignments outside of Beijing. Sometimes we even have our interviews cut short by minders, and our sources can face harassment from them. We’ve often thought about how much we could have learnt from Sun if our team in Yunnan had not been hindered by the authorities. But this is the reality of reporting in China, where foreign media are often viewed with suspicion.
For Sun’s safety, we haven't been in contact with him since that encounter. Back in Beijing, Matthew and I trawled through social media, finding and talking to various people impacted by the scam industry. This included Chinese families searching for their loved ones who vanished and were believed to have been trafficked into the Myanmar scam centres, experts, and the so-called rescuers. What we found was a murky industry. We were struck by how so many people in this industry had multiple identities: an online acquaintance could trick you into a scam compound, and those same traffickers could hold the key to getting you out or demanding random money from your family. Many of our interviewees were also initially sceptical of us, fearing we were scammers ourselves too.
With all the reporting we did from China, we collaborated with our colleagues in Paris – mainly editor Fiachra Gibbons and graphics colleague Nalini Lepetit-Chella – to analyse satellite imagery. They revealed the proliferation of these scam centres despite repeated crackdowns. These satellite imagery and photos taken from Mae Sot by our Thailand bureau colleagues also showed that Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service had played a significant role in powering operations at these centres.
Using Data to Track Scams
Fiachra explains further: “With some questions still unanswered, we needed another way in and that came from painstakingly poring over satellite images of Myawaddy, which is often swathed in mist or low monsoon cloud. On the days when the fog cleared, Dataviz journalist Nalini Lepetit-Chella and I were gobsmacked to find a staggering number of new buildings going up in the scam centres since the last crackdown in February. We also spotted what appeared to be forests of Starlink satellite dishes that had not been there before. We went drilling down into regional internet registry data and found that Starlink had come from nowhere to become Myanmar’s biggest internet provider since the crackdown, when internet cables linking the centres to Thailand were cut. A multimedia team, including the reporter who got that initial telephone number, were dispatched from Bangkok and their drone images taken from high above the border confirmed what we suspected.”
“On September 10, 2025, AFP’s Features and Blogs Editor Fiachra Gibbons approached our Visual and Data Journalism Department in Paris to confirm a hypothesis: there were still ongoing activities and developments in several scam centres on the Myanmar-Thai border, despite the commitment of authorities in February 2025 to eradicate them.
Together, we started searching for and analysing satellite images. We identified clear developments in half a dozen centres using different and highly technical Earth-observation techniques. The biggest developments appeared to have taken place in KK Park. AFP tasked a satellite image provider to take a more recent high-resolution image of the compound, which was then used to document and prove that several dozens of buildings had been constructed between March and mid-September, as well as some roads and a roundabout. Other satellite images also showed Starlink antennas on the building roofs.
An AFP mission comprising a videojournalist and a photographer from Bangkok was deployed to Mae Sot, on the Thai side of the border, to confirm and document that construction was still ongoing at the time. Their mission corroborated the findings on the satellite images, including the presence of Starlink antennas, reorienting and bringing more depth to the investigation of scam centres in the area.
The Visual and Data Journalism Department also analysed data from the regional internet register Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), that showed a massive increase in the use of Starlink as internet provider in Myanmar between April and the summer of 2025.
Reporting from inside the scam centres in Myanmar was not easy nor safe, given the political context and the groups that run the centres. Using satellite images enabled us to see and document structural developments to confirm our initial hypothesis without having to do so at first. It helped us prove that activity had continued after the crackdown in February 2025 and to document quite precisely the building and it's speed.
Infographic with a satellite image from Planet Labs PBC showing the scam centre KK Park in Myanmar, near the border with Thailand, and highlighting new buildings between March 2, 2025, and September 18, 2025. © Sabrina Blanchard / PLANET LABS PBC / AFP
Nevertheless, it was monsoon season in September in Myanmar, so it was cloudy most of the time, making it more complicated to get clear optical satellite images of the scam centres. We managed to get one by tasking a satellite to get a high-resolution image of KK Park. Planet Labs PBC satellite had to go over the area twice, on September 11 and 15, before being able to take a clear enough image, the third time, on September 18.
Another obstacle was a methodological change in APNIC data on internet providers in Myanmar. It occurred between the moment when the data was identified as interesting, the methodology was checked, and the data collected, and the moment when the investigation was published. At the end of a blog post on September 30, the chief scientist of APNIC indicated that the NGO had "decided to override the Starlink geolocation data that refers to the 20 economies listed above", including Myanmar, and instead assign it an 'unclassified' designation.
This note only came to our attention after the publication of the investigation. In the data, it appeared as a decrease in Starlink use in Myanmar starting at the very end of September, because the data was smoothed on 60 days by the APNIC. We then amended a follow-up article highlighting that methodological change due to APNIC's fear of a possible overestimation of the level of usage of the satellite internet service provider. We also killed another follow-up article focused on the fall in the data.
A week after that clarification, the NGO decided to restore the data related to Starlink use with their "original geo-located countries". They added that "it was unwise to arbitrarily reclassify this Starlink data for these 20 countries into the "unclassified" designation".
A widely acclaimed investigation
January 25, 2026
To the Pulitzer Prize Jury,
[…] This reporting is exactly what public-service journalism is supposed to look like: rigorous, original, fearless, and impossible to ignore.
[…] What makes this work exceptional is its clarity. The team connects dots most people never see at the same time: transnational organised crime, human trafficking, financial secrecy, weak enforcement, and the role of global technology providers. There is no sensationalism here. Just facts, laid out methodically, and allowed to speak for themselves. The result is devastating. The article also refuses to lose sight of the human cost.
[…]. This reporting treats both groups with the seriousness they deserve. As someone who has spent years working scam cases, I can say plainly: this investigation captures the scale, sophistication, and cruelty of the modern scam ecosystem better than almost anything I’ve seen. […] That is why this piece matters.
And that is why it deserves Pulitzer recognition.
Respectfully,
Erin West
Retired Prosecutor
Founder, Operation Shamrock
“I am impressed with this story - it is a great instance of journalism. […] I had assumed that the extensive use of Starlink in Myanmar was a data error, and I was looking for other plausible explanations. Your story provided a different interpretation: that the data was indeed correct, and while it would normally be difficult for a poor country like Myanmar to afford such a large collection of Starlink services, the abuse of the entire system by scam centres, as your story exposed provided an explanation of data that I was gathering.”
Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist, APNIC ( (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre)
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