Thai police said they’ve dismantled an illegal system of internet cables strung across a Mekong River bridge into Laos where the connections were used by call center operators to target people in Thailand.
The network of cables ran across the 2nd Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge, which links Thailand’s Mukdahan province with southern Laos’ Savannakhet province, officials from the Mukdahan Immigration Office told reporters on Oct. 20.
The cables extended 5 kilometers (3 miles) into Laos and were capable of carrying high-speed internet to more than 10,000 people, including cyberscam centers in Laos, Thai authorities said.
The cyberscam operation in Laos used the Thai internet connection to make it look as if calls and messages were coming from inside Thailand, authorities said.
Secret sites have proliferated throughout Southeast Asia in recent years as the COVID-19 pandemic forced criminal networks to shift their strategies for making money. Most of the operations involve convincing people through messaging apps or telephone calls to invest in bogus investments.
A Laotian resident of Savannakhet province, who asked for anonymity for security purposes, said the cables may have been installed because of the recent crackdown on call centers in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Bokeo province.
“Members of call centers or online scamming gangs are everywhere in Laos,” the resident told Radio Free Asia. “They have now fled to other provinces, including Savannakhet.”
Arrests expected
A private company that was licensed to operate telecommunications services only within Thailand was also involved in the operation, Thai authorities said. They did not name the company.
Video from Thai media outlets showed uniformed Thai police using what appeared to be bolt cutters to sever the cables on the bridge earlier this week.
Thai authorities have been in contact with Lao police, an official from the country’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, or NBTC, told RFA on Tuesday.
“We’re expecting there will be some arrests in the near future,” he said.
It was unclear if any arrests had been made in Thailand. Wiroat Tatongjai, the bridge’s Mukdahan province-based director, told Thai media that his department is working with the NBTC to determine which company was involved in installing the cables.
An official from the Lao Ministry of Technology and Telecommunications said on Tuesday that they had just been informed of the Thai police action and still needed to assign the case to investigators.
“We want to know why the cable was laid from the Thai side,” an official from Savannakhet province’s Department of Technology and Telecommunications told RFA. “For what purpose – or for what kind of businesses – was this done?”
Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Matt Reed.