The golden triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) is a notorious hub for transnational crime, including drug trafficking, human trafficking, and scams. This region has seen a surge in methamphetamine trafficking, often managed by organized crime groups believed to be led by Chinese national Zhao Wei. The Zone is considered strategically significant due to its location at the heart of the golden triangle, bordering Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, making it an essential link for drug smuggling routes.

Zhao Wei, often portrayed as a legitimate businessman, has been implicated in numerous illegal activities, including money laundering through casinos within the GTSEZ. These activities are facilitated by the area's relative autonomy and Laos's close ties with China, which complicates international law enforcement efforts. Despite public denials from Zhao Wei, law enforcement and intelligence agencies continue to accuse him of overseeing a vast and profitable criminal empire that exploits numerous legal and political loopholes.

Takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. scam operations [skæm ˈɒpəˌreɪʃənz] - (noun) - Fraudulent or deceptive businesses or schemes that are designed to swindle people out of money. - Synonyms: (fraud, con, swindle)

The golden triangle Special Economic zone is an enormous center for criminal activity of all kinds, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and scam operations

2. transnational crime [ˌtrænzˈnæʃənl kraɪm] - (noun) - Offenses that have actual or potential effects across national borders and crimes within international law. - Synonyms: (cross-border crime, international crime, global crime)

One man allegedly controls this transnational crime hub.

3. methamphetamines [ˌmɛθˌæmˈfɛtəmiːnz] - (noun) - A powerful, highly addictive stimulant that affects the central nervous system. - Synonyms: (crystal meth, ice, speed)

Particularly methamphetamines.

4. golden triangle [ˈɡoʊldən ˈtraɪæŋɡl] - (noun) - An area of Southeast Asia that is notorious for its opium and heroin production. - Synonyms: (drug region, narcotics area, opioid hub)

82% of that came from the three countries that make up the golden triangle, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand.

5. money laundering [ˈmʌni ˌlɔːndərɪŋ] - (noun) - The process of concealing the origins of money obtained illegally, typically by transferring it through a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions. - Synonyms: (cleaning money, processing, cycling)

A lot of the drug money gets laundered through the casinos.

6. pig butchering scams [pɪɡ ˈbʊtʃərɪŋ skæmz] - (noun) - Fraud schemes where scammers build relationships with victims to con them out of money. - Synonyms: (relationship fraud, romance scam, trust scam)

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.

7. criminal syndicates [ˈkrɪmɪnəl ˈsɪndɪkəts] - (noun) - Groups or organizations of criminals working together to achieve illegal goals. - Synonyms: (crime rings, networks, gangs)

$64 billion per year were stolen by these chinese origin criminal syndicates operating both in Southeast Asia as well as elsewhere around the world.

8. sovereignty problem [ˈsɒvrənti ˈprɒbləm] - (noun) - Issues arising in international relations due to the inability of external governments to intervene in another country's matters. - Synonyms: (jurisdiction issue, authority conflict, governance problem)

What law enforcement, whether in the US or Thailand or anywhere else, keep running into is the sovereignty problem

9. illicit [ɪˈlɪsɪt] - (adjective) - Forbidden by law, rules, or custom. - Synonyms: (illegal, unlawful, illegitimate)

Casinos play an important role in capital flight and elicit financial transfers.

10. capital flight [ˈkæpɪtəl flaɪt] - (noun) - The large-scale exit of financial assets and capital from a nation due to events such as political or economic instability. - Synonyms: (financial exodus, asset expatriation, monetary outflow)

Casinos play an important role in capital flight and elicit financial transfers.

Inside the Dark World of the Golden Triangle

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. They keep my passport when I arrive in the last land. After that, they teach me how to become a scammer. I work here, this building. 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 Zhaoi. 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 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 with 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 GTS EZ 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 Jia Wei, who's 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. 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 human trafficking. 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 Gtscz is the king's Romans casino. Casinos play an important role in capital flight and elicit 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 Xiaowui denies any involvement with the drug business. Xiao 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 Xiao inaugurating a very lavish ceremony of the Tokyo International Airport being opened, and we see him rubbing shoulders with senior Laos government officials.

In 2007, he reached a deal with the Laos government to create the golden triangle Special economic zone. He was given a 99 year lease on about 39 sq mi 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 GTS EZ. It's like looking at the annual report of a Fortune 500 company. It's always from northern China. Originally, he spent a significant amount of time in the late nineties, early two thousands, 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 Mungla 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 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 Na Kam. He was extradited to China. China, and ultimately executed. The elimination of nocam kind of sets our way up for 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 GTSC and Zhao, they just find these denials laughable. In the view of law enforcement officials, the illegal activity absolutely continue and absolutely remain at the core of the enterprise.

I spoke to an indonesian woman who 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. They pay for everything until I arrived in Laos. After that, everything changed. 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, Badu, 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 GTSCZ. 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. I need to have sad story for me. The guy in online chatting, 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.

They have the application to give you profit like 1000, 2000. Then after that, you put more, more, more, until you put all of 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. Hundred thousand more is not on us hell anymore. It's on the boss. I've seen some videos and photographs of the inside of these scam centers. They look like totally normal officers. 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 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, keep 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 lao government's support for Zhao 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 GTSC, and that's China. Laos is effectively a chinese client state. There are huge amounts of development assistants 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. 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 Sidi, her nightmare is far from over. I'm still scared because last year, my friends say, like, they keep looking for me. Sadeena. Sadeena.

Criminal Activity, Drug Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Global, Economics, Technology