Besides the 11 members who received death sentences, another five received death sentences with two-year suspensions; 11 were jailed for life; and the rest were given jail sentences ranging from five to 24 years.

The court also found that the Ming family and other criminal groups were responsible for the deaths of several scam centre workers, including shooting workers in one incident to prevent them from returning to China.

It was seen as the engine-room of what the UN has dubbed the “scamdemic”, which has seen more than 100,000 foreign nationals, many of them Chinese, being lured to scam centres where they are effectively imprisoned and forced to work long hours, running sophisticated online fraud operations targeting victims all over the world.

The Ming family were once one of the most powerful in Myanmar’s Shan State, and ran scam centres in Laukkai which held at least 10,000 workers. The most notorious was a compound known as Crouching Tiger Villa, where workers were routinely beaten and tortured.

I’ve heard about these. They lure people in with job offers (I’ve heard from Philippines etc), take their passport, and basically imprison them.