A United States senator has urged SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to block Southeast Asia’s transnational criminal syndicates from using the company’s Starlink satellite internet service to run scams on American citizens.
According to a report by Reuters, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) wrote to Musk to alert him to recent reports that Starlink is being used by online scamming compounds based in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. Such syndicates “have apparently continued to use Starlink despite service rules permitting SpaceX to terminate access for fraudulent activity,” Hassan wrote in the letter to Musk, a copy of which was viewed by Reuters. She added that SpaceX “has a responsibility to block criminals from using the service to target Americans.”
She later followed this up with a post on social media that included a screenshot of the Reuters story and called publicly for the company to take action. In her letter to Musk, Hassan also cited statistics from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network showing that Southeast Asia-based scam operations have been responsible for defrauding U.S. citizens out of billions of dollars.
Since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly Chinese criminal syndicates have established a firm base of operations in mainland Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar. These factories of fraud have relied on a large indentured workforce – mostly ordinary people who have been attracted by promises of employment, only to be kept imprisoned and forced to operate various types of digital scams, often on pain of beatings, mistreatment, and torture, as detailed in a recent report by Amnesty International. In April, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that scamming operations had generated close to $37 billion globally in 2023.
Hassan is not wrong to claim that Starlink has facilitated such operations, albeit unwittingly. The remote internet service has allowed crime groups to set up online scamming operations in remote parts of the region, particularly in peripheral parts of Myanmar run by rebel groups. Internet is widely available in most regions, but Starlink units provide a portable alternative that has allowed scam operations to relocate swiftly in response to crackdowns by the region’s governments. In February, Thailand’s government cut internet access, along with power connections and fuel supplies, to three regions of neighboring Myanmar in an effort to shut down the online scamming centers that had been established there.
However, as one observer noted on X yesterday, any crackdown on Starlink operations in Myanmar might also imperil their use by Burmese civil society organizations and political groups resisting the rule of the military junta in Naypyidaw. These groups have used satellite internet services to circumvent the strict internet controls and widespread mobile phone blackouts imposed by the junta since it took power in a coup in February 2021.
According to a report published in Frontier Myanmar in March, “Opposition groups increasingly rely on foreign-owned networks, such as satellite Internet services, to bypass government control and maintain connectivity.” It added, “If Musk (or Trump) imposes broad restrictions on Starlink due to concerns about online scamming and illicit businesses, it could have unintended consequences – severing critical communication channels for activists and resistance groups while doing little to curb criminal enterprises.”