The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone is an enormous center for criminal activity of all kinds: drug trafficking, human trafficking, and scam operations. Victims have been mostly deceived by online ads promising career opportunities abroad with good pay. One man allegedly controls this transnational crime hub: Chinese national Zhao Wei. Zhao Wei is in charge. He sets the rules. And Chinese organized crime groups have become some of the most powerful criminal networks, both in Southeast Asia and beyond. Laos is a communist country with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. So, China has dramatically more influence in Laos than, say, the United States. The big question here is whether China eventually decides they want to put a stop to this or not. One of the mysteries here is China's attitude to Zhao Wei. They seem to be overall somewhat tolerant of him. So who is Zhao Wei? And why is an alleged crime boss allowed to run this place like his personal kingdom? So we’re here, near the Burmese border in far northern Thailand.

following a unit of the Thai army who are patrolling these woods, as they do frequently, looking for drug traffickers. The Thai army, they find large volumes of drugs coming over the border just about every week, particularly methamphetamines. In the videos that we received from the Thai military, we can see the army officers trying to secure the northern border of Thailand that it shares with Laos and Myanmar. Sometimes, during these patrols, they will have to confront drug traffickers. A record 169 tons of methamphetamines was seized in Southeast Asia last year. 82% of that came from the three countries that make up the Golden Triangle: Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. And at the very heart of it lies the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, also known as the GTSEZ. Meth trafficking has exploded across the region in recent years. It’s commonly packaged in tea packets, with the GTSEZ in Laos acting as a perfect location for storage and distribution.

If you do want to get large quantities of drugs out of Southeast Asia, you do often have to go through Thailand. It is the most internationally connected of the countries in mainland Southeast Asia. The Thai government, over the years, has tried to stop drug shipments coming over Thailand's borders, particularly with Myanmar and Laos. The self-governing GTSEZ was founded by Zhao Wei, who has been called out by US authorities for his alleged involvement in trafficking drugs from Myanmar. These criminal groups have focused on a full range of criminal markets that includes narcotics. It includes precursor chemicals. It includes human trafficking, as well as online scamming. These crypto slaves are spent working around the clock sending these spam text messages to you, and it turns out the messages are mainly sent by people in Southeast Asia who are themselves victims of trafficking. We have very clear public statements from law enforcement bodies, including the United States Treasury Department, which enforces sanctions, saying very emphatically that what is going on here is not legal.

What we saw, and what indeed the Thai military are able to do, is really a relatively small effort in the context of the overall drug trade. At the center of the GTSEZ is the Kings Romans Casino. These casinos play an important role in capital flight and illicit financial transfers. They are, according to tons of different law enforcement agencies, critical nodes for how criminal organizations launder the proceeds of illegal activities into the legitimate financial system. A lot of the drug money gets laundered through the casinos, and some argue that that is, in fact, one of the key reasons as to why the zone was established in the first place. This is something that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has documented over the years in quite some detail. But Zhao Wei denies any involvement with the drug business. Zhao Wei very much leans into the image and the role of a venerated leader in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. On the YouTube channels that are associated with the zone,

we see videos of Zhao inaugurating a very lavish ceremony of the Bokeo International Airport being opened. And we see him rubbing shoulders with senior Laos government officials. In 2007, he reached a deal with the Lao government to create the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. He was given a 99-year lease on about 39 square miles of territory, and the terms of the deal essentially put him in charge of this patch of the country. Ostensibly, it is a legitimate tourism and commercial project designed to bring development to this poor part of Laos. His companies publish these very glossy brochures for prospective investors in the GTSEZ. It's like looking at the annual report of a Fortune 500 company. Zhao Wei is from northern China originally. He spent a significant amount of time in the late 1990s, early 2000s, first in Macau and then in northern Myanmar. And his main focus there was the casino business,

later pivoting to align quite closely with an ethnic armed organization in northern Myanmar known as the National Democratic Alliance Army, or the Mong La Army. It's no coincidence that many of the labor, the security forces inside of the zone, also come from northern Myanmar. Something happened that really gave Zhao Wei a clear path to dominating this region. The Mekong murders were attacks in 2011 on two Chinese cargo vessels in the Mekong. 13 sailors were killed. There was this huge manhunt, supported by China, in the Golden Triangle which led ultimately to the arrest of a warlord. A local strongman named Naw Kham. He was extradited to China and ultimately executed. The elimination of Naw Kham kind of set Zhao Wei up for the enormous success that he's been able to achieve since. In his telling, he is a legitimate businessman who, if anything, has been driving drug trafficking out of the Golden Triangle. In a 2023 interview with Thai media,

he said the zone does not allow drug trafficking, human trafficking, and scam operations. He said the US sanctions against him are a geopolitical issue. But when you do speak to law enforcement officials who have investigated the GTSEZ and Zhao Wei, they just find these denials laughable. In the view of law enforcement officials, the illegal activity absolutely continues and absolutely remains at the core of the enterprise. I spoke to an Indonesian woman whom we're going to call “Siti” to protect her identity, and she had a story of being trafficked into the SEZ. So she saw a job ad on Facebook. She was promised a role working in graphics for computer games. Shortly after she arrived, her passport was taken away. She was in a building that was locked. You couldn't leave without a special access card, and her job was to hang out on dating apps: Tinder, Badoo, things like that. Befriend lonely American men, get them to trust her.

Around the pandemic, there started to be reports of the emergence of these scam centers. It wasn't just in the GTSEZ. There are a few other places around Asia that became known as scamming hubs. We identified $64 billion per year were stolen by these Chinese-origin criminal syndicates operating both in Southeast Asia as well as elsewhere around the world. You now have hundreds of industrial-scale compounds where people are engaged in very elaborate and sophisticated forms of online scamming that we would refer to as “pig butchering scams.” The scammer builds a relationship of trust with the victim. The perpetrator then tricks the individual into downloading some type of a cryptocurrency trading app, which is completely under the control of the scam syndicate. Once the perpetrator senses that the victim has really put everything in that they have... They'll go in and slaughter the victims. This is why it's called “pig butchering.” I've seen some videos and photographs of the inside of these scam centers.

They look like totally normal offices. This is a white-collar technology industry with a few important differences. One is that most of the workers are effectively prisoners. Another is that if you fail to hit your targets, you might be beaten up, or you might be locked in a room without food for a week, which is what happened to two people we spoke to for this story. The Thai locals we spoke to seem to have mixed feelings about the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. They can go there for legal gambling, which is not something that they can do in Thailand. What law enforcement, whether in the US or Thailand or anywhere else, keeps running into is the sovereignty problem. The basic rule of international relations is the FBI or the DEA, or the Thai police, or the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime cannot do anything in a country that doesn't want them doing it. The most evident example of the Lao government’s support for Zhao Wei

is the fact that they hold a 20% stake in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. There is one country that almost certainly could do a great deal to change how things happen in the GTSEZ, and that's China. Laos is effectively a Chinese client state. There are huge amounts of development assistance that come from China every year. This is an area that China views as strategic, and if criminal actors can be useful in those pursuits, China is perfectly willing to at least turn a blind eye to their activities, if not in some cases, partner with them. But that doesn't mean that if the tide shifts, or China views its interests as changing, it won't turn on Zhao Wei. So for now, this place is going to continue to expand, and from the perspective of law enforcement in Asia and beyond, it will continue to be a very big problem. Thousands of trafficked victims still remain trapped with no rescue in sight. As for Siti,

How One Man Rules in Asia’s Golden Triangle

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