Global Times: By the end of 2025, courts nationwide had sentenced more than 41,000 individuals repatriated from northern Myanmar for their involvement in telecom fraud; the notorious Ming and Bai family criminal gangs based in northern Myanmar have been completely dismantled, the Global Times learned from China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) on Thursday.
More than 27,000 first-instance cases involving telecom fraud linked to northern Myanmar had been concluded by Chinese courts by the end of 2025, said a spokesperson from the SPC.
Among them, the cases of the Ming and Bai criminal gangs – part of the widely-watched “four major families” criminal rings in northern Myanmar – have completed all judicial proceedings.
A total of 39 individuals were sentenced to life imprisonment or harsher penalties, with 16 who of them sentenced to death and executed immediately. The two major cross-border armed criminal groups have been completely dismantled, said the spokesperson.
From July 2023, the Ministry of Public Security launched a special operation targeting telecommunications fraud crimes originating from northern Myanmar that affect China. Over the past two years, with the sentencing of the Ming and Bai crime syndicates in northern Myanmar, and the Wei and Liu syndicates entering the prosecution phase, all four major crime syndicates have been brought before the courts.
On November 3, 2025, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court of Guangdong Province sentenced Bai Suocheng, Bai Yingcang, Yang Liqiang, Hu Xiaojiang and Chen Guangyi — five defendants in the Bai family criminal group — to death, together with corresponding supplementary penalties, for crimes including intentional homicide, intentional injury, fraud, drug trafficking and manufacturing, kidnapping and operating a casino, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Upon review, the SPC confirmed that the Bai family criminal group, with Bai Yingcang and others as principal offenders, established multiple compounds in the Kokang region of Myanmar through self-construction and cooperative development. The syndicate recruited and attracted several “financial backers,” including Yang, to move into these compounds and provided them with armed protection, the report said.
SPC reviewed the case and confirmed that since 2015, the Ming family criminal gang, led by core family members including Ming Guoping and Ming Zhenzhen, had established multiple compounds in Kokang. The group recruited multiple financiers and provided armed protection to carry out telecom fraud and illegal gambling, involving more than 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) in illicit funds, according to media reports in January.
The criminal gang also colluded with other telecom fraud groups to deliberately kill, injure and illegally detain fraud-related personnel, resulting in the deaths of 14 Chinese citizens and injuries to several others, the SPC confirmed, according to CCTV News.
The SPC spokesperson said that people’s courts have strictly, efficiently and comprehensively punished telecom and online fraud crimes in accordance with the law, effectively safeguarding the personal and property safety of the public.
From 2021 to 2025, courts nationwide concluded more than 159,000 first-instance telecom and online fraud cases, sentencing over 338,000 defendants, the spokesperson said. Notably, in 2023, concluded cases and defendants sentenced saw a year-on-year surge of 48.4 percent and 38.6 percent year-on-year, respectively.
In 2024, the increases stood at 29.4 percent and 26.7 percent, followed by 1.2 percent and 4.5 percent in 2025, showing a significant slowdown in growth. This positive trajectory demonstrates the phased effectiveness of judicial authorities’ efforts to combat and curb such crimes, the spokesperson said.
