Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 106 posts

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#71

Post by v3ss0n »

pityJuke wrote: post #33

Interesting timing to post this, as the US stops funding efforts against human trafficking here [1]. [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/usaid-collapse-is-helping-crimin...

It depends on who US AID is sending Aids to. If they are sent to Junta , those goes into buying bombs to kill civilians. Miltiary Junta are part of the scam gangs. If it i send to KNU , it is the same , they will goes into pockets. KNU and Junta both of them have shares. Only way if they want to stop those shwe koko is by sending arms to Revolutin forces which never had happened. And US aids in Myanmar along with several NGO are as corrupted as hell. I once developed an APP for USAids and charge really cheap , but then they ask me to sign an invoice with 20x amount - which is going to charge back to US Tax Payers money.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#72

Post by bilbo0s »

alephnerd wrote: post #63
misantroop wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philippines is corrupt to the core as well, from courts to police to civilians. So the real reason why POGOs were thrown out of the country was that the didn't pay off the right people. Nothing gets done in Philippines without bribes.

> So the real reason why POGOs were thrown out of the country was that the didn't pay off the right people They did pay the right people. It's just that the "right people" lost the presidency in 2022.

Like any other nation, the right people changes every election. Especially in nations with poor leadership.

I guess Asia is lucky that the gangs haven’t learned that you have to pay everyone in power, and everyone who could come to power. As soon as your gangs and mafias learn that, you’ll be as hosed as we are in the US. And your gangs and mafias will all of a sudden become “corporations”.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#73

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #31

The Chinese investment into strategic spots around the South China Sea & Gulf of Thailand is really interesting to witness. I was at Sihanoukville (Cambodia) around 5 years ago and was surprised to find what was seemingly a Chinese city. There was a lot of dust, construction, and the city seemed like it was being raised out of the ground really quickly. Massive Chinese casinos and hotels were around and locals report…

90% of the businesses are Chinese owned and the city is a hub for crime and gambling

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/03/31/t...

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#74

Post by throwaway290 »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #50
feverzsj wrote: post #32

It's not just some scams. It's the darkest thing ever in the whole human history. After China banned using of death row organs around 2014, the world's largest organ black market has moved to southeast Asia. There are estimated more than 100k victims (mostly Chinese) annually. Some of them may be released, if their families can afford the ransom. The remaining victims are treated like livestock. They are forced into…

Please don't take this as a criticism but do you have a source documenting what you're describing? I'd really like to read up on it.

https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-cambodia-illegal-organ-...

https://hir.harvard.edu/for-sale-the-pervasive-organ-trade-i...

https://amp.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/32...

I bet crime by Chinese against Chinese in other countries is not very reported because local gov won't waste resources on non locals and because CCP won't want it in the news to protect their image

And a bonus for the dead comment saying "the idea China would allow it's own citizens be cut up for organs is racist as fuck"

https://thediplomat.com/2024/08/first-known-survivor-of-chin...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-the-fac...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6854896

https://www.news.com.au/world/asia/barbaric-torture-brainwas...

Welcome to the world

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#75

Post by expat_anon »

pityJuke wrote: post #33

Interesting timing to post this, as the US stops funding efforts against human trafficking here [1]. [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/usaid-collapse-is-helping-crimin...

I've spent a good amount of time in Myanmar.

In practice, the US prioritizes "stability" over everything. The situation became very bad in the last 4 years. Definitely a good amount of this funding was diverted to corrupt people over there.

People in Myanmar (and many other parts of the world) love talking to our embassies and "NGOs" and ripping them off, while doing their actual deals with China.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#76

Post by smcin »

lmm wrote: post #16
pjc50 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Las Vegas is not the only city with casinos.

No, but it's probably the most famous (at worst, second behind Monte Carlo).

No, Macau is. It's Western media bias that we talk about LV way more than Macau. (Also, LV still has the English-language entertainment acts, conventions, conferences.)

But for gambling revenue, Las Vegas was passed out by Macau back in 2007 already: https://www.reuters.com/article/macau-revenues/the-worlds-ca...

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#77

Post by smcin »

api wrote: post #69

For those who don't know -- Boca Raton, Florida is well known in the US as a major center of scams and borderline-scams like MLMs. Utah has a history of being a home for this stuff too, as well as a lot of quack supplement companies and self-help nonsense. Just pointing this out so we don't think this doesn't exist here.

Why Boca Raton in particular?

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#78

Post by bombcar »

rsynnott wrote: post #60
snapcaster wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow you're not kidding! looked this up and revenues are somewhere like 10x-20x of macau compared to vegas. That's pretty nuts, didn't realize there was that big of a gap

AIUI gambling is still pretty much entirely illegal in mainland China, so it pretty much has a captive market of 1.5bn people. Vegas has a much smaller _obligate_ market; gambling's far more (legally) available in the US than in China. Like, if you like on the American east coast, and enjoy gambling, Vegas may be a place that you'd like to go, but you have other closer options.

Vegas was much bigger before Indian casinos and others too off. It used to be Atlantic City and Vegas, and the name lives on even if the reality has changed.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#79

Post by wrfrmers »

bandrami wrote: post #41
k8sToGo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you didn't just describe RimWorld? Someone doing that in real life is truly disturbing

Remember that the universally recognized setting for a grim cyberpunk dystopia is not a theoretical prediction but a memory of an actual city just north of Hong Kong that was demolished 30 years ago

Cyberpunk has always been, "What if what happens to those people happened to us?" "Us" being the relatively affluent and stable first world, "those people" being the put-upon urban poor and working class (which I usually summarize as "black Americans" for American readers - to shake them out of their myopia regarding the social and racial politics of the genre - but, as you point out, should include people in Asia and elsewhere).

Its power has never been in its predictive ability, because so much of what defines cyberpunk is already happening. Instead, the consideration of, "That horrible thing can happen to me, too," opens the intellectual doorway (or third eye) to questions of self, cognizance, experience. The computers are just a light show, or a lens.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#80

Post by alephnerd »

v3ss0n wrote: post #64

I am from Myanmar and Shwe KoKo is the biggest scam hub of the world . Not just online scam they are operating all kind of illegal activities.Myanmar Junta is also part of that and china bordering Laukkai. Laukkai is now liberated and scammers arrested as revolution forces won. Shwe KoKo is last one to be eliminated . They advertise recruitment ads of 8000$ a month for working in IT so many youth went there , and for…

> The BGF Militia of Saw Chit Thu

They used to be militants against the Central Government right? Didn't they split off from the KNU originally?

> They are moving operartion more inside of Myanmar

As in deeper within periphery regions or actually within the "core" like Yangon/Bago/Irrawaddy/Magwe?

On that note, has a similar rise in transnational organized crime started in those regions as well?

-----------

I really hope the situation gets better in Myanmar. From the outside, it looked like there was some hope barely decade ago that stuff might get better

Post reply on HN