Chinese court convicts 39 members of the Ming crime family tied to Myanmar’s Billion-Yuan Scam Empire, marking one of China’s harshest crackdowns.
Chinese court has sentenced 11 members of a notorious criminal family to death over their role in a vast network of scam operations based in northern Myanmar, state media reported Monday, in one of the country’s most sweeping crackdowns on cross-border crime.
The ruling, delivered by a court in the eastern city of Wenzhou, targeted members of the Ming family, long accused of running illicit businesses in the border town of Laukkaing — a hub for online fraud, gambling, and drug trafficking.
According to China’s state broadcaster CCTV, a total of 39 members of the family were convicted. Alongside the 11 death sentences, five received suspended death sentences, 11 were jailed for life, and the remaining defendants were handed prison terms ranging from five to 24 years.
The court found that, since 2015, the Mings had operated as part of a powerful criminal syndicate involved in telecommunications fraud, illegal casinos, narcotics trafficking, and prostitution. Their operations reportedly generated more than 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) in illegal profits.
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Authorities said the Ming network was linked to the deaths of several scam-center workers, including one incident in which victims were shot while attempting to flee Myanmar to return to China.
The Mings were one of four major families that dominated Laukkaing, a once-sleepy town in Myanmar’s Shan State near the Chinese border. What began as a gambling destination catering to Chinese tourists — gambling being outlawed in China — soon evolved into a sprawling criminal economy involving money laundering and human trafficking.
The town became infamous as a key hub of what the United Nations has described as a “Scamdemic” — a web of criminal operations forcing more than 100,000 people, many of them Chinese nationals, to work long hours in cyber fraud schemes that targeted victims worldwide.
Following a Myanmar military crackdown in 2023, dozens of the Ming family members were captured and extradited to China. The family patriarch, Ming Xuechang, reportedly took his own life before facing trial.
China’s latest verdict underscores Beijing’s determination to stamp out the booming scam industry along its border. The pressure has already prompted similar crackdowns in Thailand and other Southeast Asian nations, though much of the illicit trade has since shifted to Cambodia and parts of Myanmar still outside government control.
