Chances are, you’re probably familiar with getting unwanted spam calls, texts and emails on your phone. These scams come from a variety of companies seeking to advertise these products. But new footage from a New York Times photographer captures the origin of some of these scams. The footage came from deep in the forests of Myanmar, a country in Asia that is currently in a civil war, in an office center called Shunda Park. 

The office center opened in 2024 and contained over 3,500 workers from around the world. It was owned by a Chinese gang that runs the company illegally. According to the journalists, the inside of the building contained huge open rooms with computers in them. Hundreds of SIM cards and discarded phones littered the ground. The decorations in the working spaces were largely fake, with books about business and modern art, meant to make the place look like it was focused on business and nothing else. 

But the scammers that the journalists spoke to uncovered the reality of the office park. Some of these people had come there by choice, but others had been captured by the criminals running the business. Their main job was to send scams to people in the US, using fake identities to trick people into revealing their confidential information. One man said that his one job for the entire year was to send messages saying “hello” to people’s social media accounts. 

Many of the workers bore marks from beatings and shackles on their bodies, and they described their life as a Sisyphean loop, or having to do hard work for a long period of time without any end or reward: “sleep, eat, scam, eat, sleep, scam.” Some workers were paid, but their compensation was typically not as much as they had been promised. Others worked for the fear of being physically punished–often in the porta-potty shaped “punishing chambers” that were put in the working spaces.

The business was an evil operation that actually brought $10 billion to its owners from people who had fallen to the scams in the US. Fortunately, it was shut down in November 2025 when the government discovered its cruelty. This scam company was not the only one of its kind, though. The Myanmar government still continues to fight the multi-billion dollar scam industry, which contains several other scam compounds that are stationed near the border between Myanmar and Thailand just like Shunda Park.

Cites –

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/briefing/where-scams-come-from.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/myanmar-has-declared-a-zero-tolerance-policy-for-cyberscams-but-the-fraud-goes-on

https://www.freeburmarangers.org/post/exposing-a-burma-scam-center-liberated-from-burma-army-proxy-forces