A major law enforcement raid in Myanmar has uncovered how satellite internet access is fueling a vast, multibillion-dollar criminal empire — enabling online scams and cyber fraud operations.
When Myanmar’s military stormed the notorious KK Park compound on October 20, 2025, they uncovered more than just another cybercrime operation.
Among the approximately 2,198 individuals detained across more than 250 buildings, authorities seized 30 Starlink satellite terminals—a fraction of what independent analysis suggests are thousands of such devices powering one of Southeast Asia’s most sophisticated criminal enterprises.
The raid near Myawaddy in Kayin State, a border town notorious for its sprawling fraud factories, has thrust an uncomfortable spotlight onto SpaceX’s satellite internet service and raised urgent questions about the responsibilities of global infrastructure providers in an age of borderless crime.
The scale of a crisis
The numbers paint a stark picture of an industry operating at industrial scale. Conservative estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime indicate that hundreds of large-scale scam centers worldwide are generating just under $40 billion in annual profits.
The regional cyberfraud industry in East and Southeast Asia alone caused estimated losses between $18 billion and $37 billion in 2023, according to UNODC data.
In the United States, victims reported more than $5.6 billion in losses to cryptocurrency scams in 2023, including over $4 billion from so-called “pig butchering” schemes—romance scams designed to extort money from often elderly and vulnerable people.
“The regional cyberfraud industry has outpaced other transnational crimes, given that it is easily scalable and able to reach millions of potential victims online, with no need to move or traffic illicit goods across borders,” said John Wojcik, a regional analyst with UNODC.
Starlink’s uncomfortable role
What makes the KK Park operation particularly troubling is the central role of satellite technology.
Starlink, which is not licensed to operate in Myanmar, went from virtually non-existent in the country before February 2025 to becoming Myanmar’s biggest internet provider every single day between July 3 and October 1, according to data from APNIC, the Asian regional internet registry.
Following an investigation by Agence France-Presse revealing the “huge scale” deployment of Starlink dishes atop scam compounds, SpaceX announced it had “proactively identified and disabled over 2,500 Starlink Kits in the vicinity of suspected ‘scam centers'” in Myanmar.
Lauren Dreyer, SpaceX’s vice president of business operations for Starlink, emphasised the company’s commitment to “ensuring the service remains a force for good.”
She said the company had “disabled over 2,500 Starlink kits in the vicinity of suspected scam centres” in Myanmar.
“We are committed to ensuring the service remains a force for good and sustains trust worldwide – both connecting the unconnected and detecting and preventing misuse by bad actors,” Ms Dreyer said.
Yet the timeline raises uncomfortable questions. California prosecutors officially warned Starlink in July 2024 that its satellite system was being used by fraudsters, but received no response.
It wasn’t until widespread media attention and Congressional scrutiny in October 2025 that SpaceX took action to disable the terminals.
A Congressional inquiry
The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee has launched an investigation into Starlink’s involvement with the Myanmar scam centers.
Senator Maggie Hassan, a leading Democrat on the committee, called on Elon Musk to block the service to fraud centers, noting that “transnational criminals halfway across the world may be perpetrating these scams by using Starlink internet access.”
While the committee has the power to call Musk to a hearing, it cannot compel his testimony.
Former California prosecutor Erin West, who now heads Operation Shamrock, a group campaigning against the compounds, said: “It is abhorrent that an American company is enabling this to happen.”
The human cost
Behind the technology lies a humanitarian catastrophe. These compounds operate through systematic human trafficking, luring foreign laborers with fraudulent job offers before coercing them into romance and investment fraud operations.
Workers, many trafficked from more than 50 countries including China, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and Uzbekistan, have their passports confiscated and face violent control.
Since October 2023, Myanmar’s military junta reported deporting more than 50,000 people suspected of involvement in online scam operations to China.
Between January 30 and October 19, 2025, authorities arrested 9,551 foreign nationals from scam compounds, repatriating most of them. Yet experts warn this represents only a tiny fraction of those trapped and working in these centers.
A cat-and-mouse game
The raid on KK Park highlights both the scope of the problem and the limitations of current enforcement efforts. While Myanmar’s military seized 30 Starlink terminals, independent analysts documented evidence of thousands of devices at the site.
An AFP journalist observed more than 1,000 individuals fleeing the compound following the raid, while reports of daily explosions within the complex suggest ongoing operations.
Transnational crime expert Jason Tower of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime called the military raid “more of a publicity stunt than a crackdown,” noting it was “business as usual” for dozens of scam compounds still operating along the Moei River separating Myanmar and Thailand.
The criminal syndicates have proven remarkably adaptive. Following Thailand’s February 2025 crackdown that cut power, fuel, and internet supply to border compounds, operations simply pivoted to satellite connectivity.
A spreading cancer
The UNODC warns that the industry is metastasising globally. “It spreads like a cancer,” said Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. “Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear; they simply migrate.”
Crime networks are expanding operations to South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Pacific islands.
They’re rapidly adopting artificial intelligence to write scamming scripts, deploying increasingly realistic deepfake technology to create personas, and utilizing cryptocurrency and underground banking to launder massive amounts of stolen money.
The infrastructure dilemma
The KK Park case represents a convergence of cybercrime, human trafficking, and satellite communications abuse that challenges traditional enforcement paradigms.
Satellite internet services operate across jurisdictions, often in areas where national governments have limited control or are complicit in criminal operations.
SpaceX’s remote disabling of terminals demonstrates that global infrastructure providers possess technical capabilities to police misuse.
But this raises profound questions: What are the responsibilities of companies providing global connectivity? How should they balance legitimate uses against criminal exploitation? And who decides where to draw the line?
In Myanmar, for instance, Human Rights Myanmar has warned that overly broad shutdowns of Starlink could harm civilians, journalists, and human rights defenders who rely on the service in a country where the military has weaponized internet shutdowns since its 2021 coup.
An inflection point
As the U.S. Congress investigates and international pressure mounts, the satellite internet industry faces a reckoning.
The KK Park raid and SpaceX’s subsequent disabling of thousands of terminals may prove to be a watershed moment—not just for Starlink, but for how the international community addresses the intersection of global infrastructure and transnational crime.
The UNODC has warned that the international community stands at a “critical inflection point.” Failure to address these sophisticated criminal networks would have “unprecedented consequences for Southeast Asia that reverberate globally.”
For now, the question remains: In a world of borderless technology, who bears responsibility when infrastructure designed to connect the disconnected becomes the very tool enabling a multibillion-dollar criminal empire to flourish?
The answer may determine whether satellite internet becomes a force for good—or the new frontier for global organised crime.
