Our reporting began rather inauspiciously. Day one involved Kate and I standing for hours atop a rocky, steep and shadeless wasteland beside the Mae Sot immigration facility, peering through long lenses and gaps in fencing for glimpses of the freed workers coming over the Friendship Bridge 2.
It was so hot that my phone shut down. Soon, we were meeting people breathing in their first minutes of freedom after months and even years as captives in Myanmar.
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One man, who asked to be known as Munra, told us how he’d gone to Bangkok to get an old leg injury fixed once and for all, only to be abducted at gunpoint by the man who was supposed to be taking him to the hospital. Instead of medical treatment, he was sent to the scamlands of Myanmar.
Was the story real? It’s impossible to say. But such things happen – there are no rules or decorum in the elaborate parallel universe of the scam gangsters. As if whiffing my scepticism, Munra retrieved his leg X-rays from his beaten-up backpack.
From Mae Sot, we wangled our way into an armoured convoy of Thai military men patrolling the border. They showed us the vast crime estates just over the Moei River, pointing out the white terminal dishes atop the compound rooftops: “Starlink”, they said, courtesy of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. They told us this was how the scammers in these remote borderlands stay connected to the global victim marketplace.
A Royal Thai Army soldier patrols the market located on a sandbar in the middle of the Moei River, that separates Thailand and Myanmar. Credit: Kate Geraghty
Our reporting branched into unexpected areas by way of conversations with the Karen, an ethnic group from eastern Myanmar. Meandering up and down the borderlands, passing through innumerable checkpoints where guards took our photos, in case we were trafficked ourselves, we visited a secret hospital treating wounded soldiers of the resistance in Myanmar’s brutal civil war.
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More driving, and we met with refugees and internally displaced people escaping the violence wrought by Myanmar’s ruling junta. One stony-faced group waded across the Moei to Thailand to tell us stories of their uncertain hell. Then we watched them wade back again.
