China sentences 11 members of Ming mafia family to death
www.bbc.com
They were one of four families who turned a Myanmar town into a hub for gambling, drugs and scam centres.
  • someguy3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    54·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2613·
    1 day ago

    Be careful corrupt Chinese politicians. You may not want a precedence of death penalty when it’s your turn.

    • CubitOom@infosec.pubEnglish
      332·
      1 day ago

      The CCP actually executes corrupt politicians quite often. It’s one of the few things I can agree with them on. The issue is, if they can be trusted to grant fair trials. And then you have to ask how much can you trust an authoritarian government on really anything.

      • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
        182·
        14 hours ago

        No country should ever enforce the death penalty.

        There’s never been a country with the death penalty that has not made mistakes, and it vests an incredible amount of power in the state to silence political enemies and rivals.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        177·
        1 day ago

        If you think a country exist where every trial is fair, you are naive.
        I bet trials in USA and China are about equally unfair, and both have death penalty.
        It’s better in EU, but any trial will always have potential problems of errors or bias or even corruption. But at least EU doesn’t have death penalty.
        Even political corruption shouldn’t have death penalty.

  • Nasan@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    21·
    1 day ago

    Interesting that a country in the midst of a civil war is still able to stamp out this complicated problem within their borders.

    • MrMakabar@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      It is the military taking away a financing source for rebels. They mostly are not able to deal with problems like these though. Myanmar has turned into the biggest source of drugs in the world due to the civil war.

  • dogbert@lemmy.zipEnglish
    924·
    1 day ago

    This is how it’s done. Take notes America. You’re watching a country hold the wealthy accountable.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      182·
      1 day ago

      This is how it’s done.

      I think the death penalty is a bad policy overall and particularly bad in a court system that’s largely a rubber stamp for the prosecutor.

      At the same time, it is hard to pull together sympathy for a cartel so casual in their cruelty and brutal in their oppression.

      I would like to believe there’s a world in which all these people get the Jack Ma treatment, with varying lengths of time doing rice farming to give them all a taste of humility, and then they come back to society older and wiser and more peaceful. It’s a shame we don’t live in that place.

      • MrMakabar@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        12 hours ago

        Jack Ma basically just shut up for months and then ended up in Tokyo. He had to pay a lot, but is still a billionaire.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          11 hours ago

          Ma is back in Alibaba HQ, ostensibly making executive decisions for the firm. That was all over the news a week or two ago and has been, in part, the reason for the stock’s resurgence in price.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          11 hours ago

          Ask anyone in an American prison what they think of work release relative to sitting in a filthy jail cell for months on end.

          Putting a cartel boss into a McDonald’s uniform is one of the kindest things you can do for them, under the modern criminal justice system.

        • Hadriscus@jlai.luEnglish
          1·
          14 hours ago

          “General Interest Work” (TIG) in France is an alternative/complement to incarceration for short sentences not exceeding 400 hours. It also requires consent from the defendant.
          I think in principle it’s fine, and it could be stretched for longer sentences. That’s quite a bit better than hanging people in my humble opinion. Sorry to quench your murderous fantasies. The US have something like that, but it’s exploitation for profit (their prisons are privately owned, it’s a subject in and of itself).