Myanmar just legalized capital punishment for crypto scam bosses 🪙

Myanmar's military-backed parliament approved an anti-online scam bill on Tuesday that makes the death penalty mandatory when coercion used to force people into running scams results in death, and sets a maximum penalty of life imprisonment for operating online scam centers or committing "digital currency scams (crypto scams)," according to the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar and a draft published in May. The Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, Myanmar's combined Parliament, passed the legislation in full after resolving differences between the two chambers' versions. The report did not say whether the bill had received presidential assent or when it would take effect, and the final amended text was not immediately available, leaving the precise wording of the crypto-related penalties unconfirmed.

Lower House MP Aye Chan told AFP that the death-penalty provision survived into the approved version and that "the important parts of the bill remained the same." The May draft set terms of 10 years to life for the coercion offenses, including violence, torture, unlawful arrest or detention, and 10 years to life for crypto scams and operating scam centers. Myanmar resumed judicial executions in 2022, hanging four activists in the first such killings since 1976, and Min Aung Hlaing, who led the 2021 coup and took office as civilian president in April, commuted every death sentence in the country to life imprisonment in April. Three months on, his parliament has legislated new ones.

The bill is the first law passed by the government of Min Aung Hlaing, whose USDP won 339 of the contested seats in phased elections that Aung San Suu Kyi's dissolved party could not contest, with 166 seats in both houses reserved for the military under the constitution. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the Karen National Army, formerly the Karen Border Guard Force, as a transnational criminal organization in May 2025, saying the militia's territory on the Thai border "is home to multiple cyber scam syndicates" and that it "has benefitted from its connection to Burma's military." The KNA denies involvement in scams.

Scam operations across East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania drove $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion in losses in 2025, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates, with people from at least 80 countries found inside the compounds. The UNODC, in a report published Tuesday, described a "fundamental" restructuring of the region's underworld into a single, interconnected criminal economy in which locally rooted syndicates have fused into a transnational network that trades services ranging from money laundering to fraud and human trafficking. The agency has warned that police in the region still cannot trace proceeds on-chain.

Cambodia has advanced its own bill setting life terms for compound bosses, and U.S. prosecutors seized $25 million in crypto tied to scams routed through the region this month. Interpol's recent operation exposed a $122 million crypto wallet tied to romance scam laundering in the region.