Congress Committee Investigates Starlink over Myanmar Scam Centers
The Guardian | Starlink has come from being a negligible player to become Myanmar’s biggest internet provider in three months, according to the APNIC regional internet registry.
The bipartisan Joint Economic Committee in the US Congress is investigating the involvement of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite business in providing internet access to the Myanmar scam compounds. The centers use forced labor to target victims around the world with telephone, internet, and social media scams.
Americans are among the top targets of Southeast Asia scammers, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. Americans lost at least $10 billion last year, up 66% in 12 months.
According to an investigation by Agence France-Presse, large numbers of Starlink dishes began appearing on the roofs of scam compounds around the same time as a February crackdown that resulted in the freeing of 7,000 people held in the centers and forced to scam. The action was also supposed to eradicate the compounds, per agreement with the Myanmar militias that guard the centers.
The committee’s Senator Maggie Hassan (D) has called on Musk to block the Starlink service to the fraud factories.
“While most people have probably noticed the increasing number of scam texts, calls and emails, they may not know that transnational criminals halfway across the world may be perpetrating these scams by using Starlink internet access.”
Former California prosecutor Erin West, who now heads Operation Shamrock in the effort to stop scams, “It is abhorrent that an American company is enabling this to happen.”
In July 2024, while still a cybercrime prosecutor, she warned Starlink that the mostly Chinese crime syndicates that run the centres were using its technology. Starlink did not reply.
Full article: US Congress committee investigating Musk-owned Starlink over Myanmar scam centres
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