SpaceX pulls plug on 2,500 Starlink terminals tied to Myanmar fraud farms

SpaceX says it has shut down thousands of Starlink terminals that were powering Myanmar's notorious scam compounds after its satellite network was found to be keeping human trafficking and cyber-fraud operations online in the country's lawless border zones. In a statement posted on X, SpaceX's senior vice president of …

[Empire of the Pussycat]

Myanmar scams are not allowed

Orange scams are fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Myanmar scams are not allowed

Beat me to it

[lglethal]

It's a bit of a "funny" story this one. The scam centres are run by "militias" allied to the Junta. The Junta makes a ton of money off them.

The only reason this one got shut down (and it's actually clear that only a small portion of the set up got taken down) is that China appears to have given the Junta some specific names and said you will arrest these people and send them here for trial or else lose China's backing.

So they went in, arrested those people, made a big show and dance about shutting down these militias (even though it's the ones that they are friends with), and then allowed the majority to get back to the work of running their scam centres.

It's unfortunate that so few media outlets have bothered to do deeper reporting on this and basically just parrot the Junta's bull crap...

[BinkyTheHorse]

Yeah, anyone that has even a passing familiarity with Myanmar's current situation should find this entire action suspicious.

Thanks for the elaboration; sounds like my initial thought - that the Junta is using a "human trafficking" excuse to shut down rival faction's comms - was too simple for how f***ed-up the state of that country is.

Nevertheless, I can only think that this will be followed up by other shutdowns (or attempts) in different fronts where Starlink is used, under the same excuse.

PS. Just in case some bad-faith commenter rolls in: usage of "excuse" does not mean endorsement of human trafficking. The point is said human trafficking could have been actually stopped by the Junta rolling in and ending it.

[Anonymous Coward]

SpaceX basically only shut them down only after they got raided and found dozen of Staflink terminals…..

.They will be able to geolocate all of their terminals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Scam centres

The BBC article on KKPark on Monday stated that the Junta had seized 30 Starlink terminals:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0jdn4yjze6o

The article also refers to the fact that most of the scam centres are allied to the Junta (or at least, allied to militias which oppose the Junta's main enemy). It even claims that only part of KKPark was raided.

The jump from 30 Starlink terminals seized to 2,500 disabled (per this article) may be a bigger hit to the other scam centres.

[Irongut]

carries "a risk of misuse by bad actors"

Particularly the bad actor in chief Herr Musk.

Have you seen his part on Big Bang Theory? Terrible acting, he looks more like an Optimus robot than a human being.

[Valeyard]

Re: carries "a risk of misuse by bad actors"

ha i love the thought that you were trying to think "hm what's the worst thing i can bring up that elon musk has done recently... ah yes he's a bad actor. that's literally the worst aspect of elon musk"

[Ossi]

For more info

For those with an interest and access to an Economist subscription, they have a compelling podcast about KK Park called 'Scam Inc.' covering all the victims: both those who are scammed and what are essentially indentured workers (or worse) doing the scamming. Highly recommended listening. The location is on the Myanmar border because it's the perfect location to run a criminal enterprise, but it's a Chinese operation.

[stiine]

Re: For more info

Is its location mainly to avoid the Great Firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

Took them long enough

[John Sager]

Locatable terminals?

Dunno if Starlink do this but putting a GPS chip or software into their antenna terminals and doing a low-level 'tell me where you are' scan would be an obvious check. Some terminals could have 'anywhere globally' accounts (e.g. aircraft) and some could be 'no more than 1 km from declared location'.

[DS999]

Re: Locatable terminals?

Starlink terminals have a GPS chip as the location is necessary as part of their boot up process to be able to figure out where to look for Starlink satellites. A guy in Ukraine figured out how to connect it to an external GPS antenna to provide more gain to help get around Russian jamming. Presumably the GPS location of the terminal is sent back to Starlink HQ.

Presumably you could use that external GPS antenna mod to provide a false GPS signal, thereby hiding your true location from Starlink. But then it wouldn't be able to locate the satellites to make the connection, so I don't think that could be used to hide your location from Starlink. You'd have to figure out how to hack the software for that.

[Blazde]

Re: Locatable terminals?

The satellites need to know your approximate location in order to send your traffic while beam-forming in your rough direction. Being off by up to roughly 10-20 miles should be workable, but you wouldn't be able to fake your location enough to avoid appearing 'on the China-Myanmar border'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Locatable terminals?

Self-evidently the Starlink satellites over the region will help narrow this down on location identification too. Akin to cell tower triangulation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry

I the Junta, the quiet Junta.

The Starlink sleeps tonight….

[Anonymous Coward]

Lack of oversight

Come on it can't be hard to put in the most basic of warning systems?

If a bunch of terminals in a specific region of concern are putting through huge amounts of traffic to online dating sites, crypto sites and other scam affiliated destinations it's not hard to notice.

Likewise if the account is registered in a different country than the device is permanently located, why isn't this being acted on?