Two courts in east China's Fujian Province on Tuesday delivered first-instance verdicts in cases involving the Wei family, a telecom fraud group based in northern Myanmar, sentencing three defendants to death and three others to life imprisonment.
The Intermediate People's Court of Quanzhou and the People's Court of Nan'an sentenced Wei Huairen, Chen Dawei, and Liao Jingfang to death; Wei Qingtao, Kang Min, and Xiong Hengxing to life imprisonment; while 55 others, including Su Hongxiang, Deng Zida, and Chen Longjiang, received fixed-term imprisonment ranging from three years and three months to 24 years, with supplementary penalties including fines, confiscation of property, and deportation.
The Wei family is the third of northern Myanmar's so-called "four families" to face Chinese legal judgment, following the Ming and Bai families. Among the four, the Wei family was considered the most harmful.
Unlike other telecom fraud groups in northern Myanmar that relied on private armed groups, the Wei family operated through officially recognized, regular border forces, giving it exceptional power.
The first generation of the family included Wei Chaoren, who entrenched himself in politics, and Wei Huairen, who monopolized power over the Kokang Border Guard Force. The second generation focused on illicit industries.
As chairman of the border force's supervisory committee, Wei Huairen blatantly abused public power, promoting relatives to core military posts and grooming his nephew Chen Dawei as the family's military successor. Chen was given full supervision of the troop, turning state security power into a private tool for the family's criminal operations.
With armed power in hand, the Wei family accumulated early capital through gambling and prostitution, then fabricated rumors of high-paying jobs in northern Myanmar on the internet, luring large numbers of Chinese nationals to the region.
Since 2017, the Wei family has built 14 large-scale telecom fraud bases disguised as industrial parks to attract investors. They treated trapped Chinese nationals as commodities, with individual sales and ransom prices soaring to more than 300,000 yuan (about 45,000 U.S. dollars).
The syndicate created an armed control model of the bases, forging a bloody criminal system to help harvest huge illicit profits through rent, taxes and ransoms.
Beyond the black money is brutal violence. Indifferent to human life, Chen Dawei once killed trapped people randomly as human sacrifices just to build bonds with financiers. In 2022, Chen detained and executed innocent people over a personal dispute. The police later found victims' remains kneeling face down, bound in chains, with seven bullet holes in one skull.
To expand criminal profits, the Wei family upgraded its fraud model, disguising its fake wealth management schemes as blockchain and trust projects, and using social media platforms and its dedicated applications to channel traffic, with individual cases often involving hundreds of millions of yuan.
Within five years, the syndicate's fraud proceeds reached nearly 6 billion yuan, while casino turnover reached nearly 10 billion yuan. Its illicit chain of prostitution, gambling and drug industries also supported the Wei family's extravagant squandering.
In order to dismantle the syndicate, Chinese police officers crossed the border three times to collect evidence, braving the risks of armed conflict in northern Myanmar. They traveled across 28 provinces and more than 240 cities in China, spending more than 700 days on evidence collection and case building.
Thanks to their efforts, the ringleaders of the "four families" were finally captured in late 2023 and early 2024.
Ringleaders of northern Myanmar telecom fraud group sentenced to death
