YANGON, Myanmar (AFP) — China has repatriated more than 900 citizens it suspects of working in internet scam centres in Myanmar’s borderlands, a Beijing ministry said.

Myanmar’s many-sided civil war — sparked by a 2021 coup — has enabled the rapid growth of lucrative internet fraud factories established in its loosely governed borderlands.

Many people have said they were trafficked into often heavily fortified scam compounds to target victims with romance or business scams on social media, luring them into making untraceable cryptocurrency payments.

Analysts say some are willing participants in the industry worth billions of dollars annually.

Thousands have been repatriated in recent months after a pressure campaign from neighbouring China.

China’s Ministry of Public Security said Wednesday 920 more “Chinese fraud suspects” had been handed over at an eastern Myanmar border crossing with China’s province of Yunnan in recent days.

They were arrested since March 24 in multiple rounds of raids carried out by Myanmar, the ministry said, adding that computers, mobile phones and bank cards were seized.

Images on Chinese state media showed some of the suspects being paraded before the cameras handcuffed and flanked by security forces.

“This follows the complete eradication of a large-scale telecom fraud park in northern Myanmar near our border,” said a ministry statement.

The ministry said their joint efforts with Myanmar have “captured a total of more than 55,000 Chinese fraud suspects”.

A spokesman for Myanmar’s Border Guard Forces told AFP they “still have more than 1,000 people to transfer” home from the scam centres, without providing details of their nationalities.

High-profile cases of Chinese nationals trafficked into scam centres have spurred diplomatic action from Beijing — a key ally of the junta as well as some ethnic minority armed groups controlling parts of Myanmar.

However, many of those executing the online scams hail from elsewhere in Asia or from Africa, and are brought to Thailand before making illegal crossings to Myanmar.