Myanmar police arrest 156 in raid on iGaming operation center

Authorities moved on a property in Naung Lay village, in Myanmar’s eastern Shan State, after receiving a tip that the site was running illegal gambling operations. Of the 156 people detained, the overwhelming majority — 144 — were Chinese nationals, split between 140 men and four women; the rest were a mix of nationalities, including one Laotian woman and eleven Myanmar citizens rounding out the group.

The gender split across the group leaned heavily male — 148 men to eight women overall — a staffing pattern that shows up repeatedly at similar illegal gambling operations broken up elsewhere in the region.

The device count alone signals the scale of the operation: 658 mobile phones, 134 computers, and 28 laptops among the equipment seized, the kind of hardware footprint a coordinated processing center needs to keep dozens of people working simultaneously around the clock. Investigators also recovered 15 CPUs and three Wi-Fi routers on site during the same sweep, bringing the total device count seized in the raid to roughly 850 pieces of equipment in one location.

A less typical detail stood out too: 13 satellite communication terminals, five uninterruptible power supplies, and two generators — infrastructure built to stay online and powered even if the local grid or internet connection failed, plus a refrigerator and freezer suggesting the site was set up to keep people working there for extended periods without needing to leave the premises at all for basic supplies. Authorities haven’t disclosed financial flow details or damage estimates tied to the platforms as of publication.