Nobody is playing football at Myawaddy’s municipal stadium these days. As the joint crackdown by China, Myanmar, and Thailand gathers steam, notorious scam hubs like KK Park and Shwe Kokko are being raided and dismantled. Karen armed groups, including the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, alongside Myanmar military and police, have rounded up hundreds of foreign scam suspects and funneled them straight into the stadium grounds.
The sports complex has essentially turned into a makeshift detention and transit facility. Armed guards patrol the perimeter while the stands and field are packed. While Chinese nationals make up the vast majority, the crowd also includes workers from India, Malaysia, and Vietnam who pulled shift work in the border region’s telecom fraud and online gambling syndicates.
Inside, officers are running identity checks and registering detainees to prepare them for deportation in batches. High-level representatives from China’s Ministry of Public Security and the trilateral joint task force have even visited the stadium in person, speaking with detainees to try and speed up the handovers. Under the oppressive heat, hundreds sit crammed together in the stands and under temporary shelters, waiting anxiously for their paperwork to clear so they can finally get out of the border area.
Keeping order in Myawaddy, however, is never simple, and the long deportation queues are opening up dangerous loopholes. Local media and reports from the ground warn that without tight international oversight, some low-level local officers are trying to turn a quick profit. There are growing concerns that corrupt officials have quietly tried to sell stranded detainees back to smaller, remote scam parks that have managed to dodge the crackdowns so far. On the streets, locals whisper that even while sitting in a stadium waiting to go home, nothing in Myawaddy is guaranteed.
