Brothels and online-scam businesses owned by Chinese nationals are guarded by armed men, according to a restaurant manager, an entertainment-business investor and other Wa State locals.

Most operate undercover as massage parlors.

The armed guards make sure trafficked victims don’t flee and do what they are told. These so-called businesses more accurately resemble organized crime groups.

Female sex workers at brothels in Panghsan or Mongpauk earn 200 yuan (around 84,000 kyats at the current exchange rate) for 45 minutes, and between 1,000 and 2,500 yuan for the night, according to local agencies that help find recruits for brothels and online scammers.

In some brothels, sex workers are reportedly forced to pay 50 percent of their earnings to their boss. But some are even less fortunate, sold by traffickers to Chinese businessmen for 15,000 to 20,000 yuan to become sex slaves.

A virgin can earn a trafficker between 5,000 and 8,000 yuan per day. Hence, human traffickers target young girls as young as 14.

“They [sex workers] should not be older than 25. Fifteen-year-olds are also okay. They are better since we can contract them for a long time. Virgins get better prices,” a brothel manager in Wa State told The Irrawaddy.

Two of the registered 350 human trafficking victims were girls aged between 14 and 16.

Women younger than 25 are preferred for prostitution, according to job adverts posted by brothels in Panghsan and Mongpauk.

Applicants have to send three photos and a video of themselves to the brothels. Chinese bosses use middlemen in Shan State border towns, who provide transportation costs for successful applicants or send vehicles to pick them up, according to individuals engaged in the business.

The prostitution industry in Wa State is not limited to sex with customers. Sex workers are also used as escorts for Chinese gamblers and nationals working in casinos, in internet scams and brothels, to perform in porn videos and via livestreams. Sex workers are also forced to use narcotics and stimulants so they can work for hours without sleep, according to accounts by victims, some of whom have filed complaints at Mongpauk police station.

Meanwhile, men and women trafficked for phone and internet scams are confined in apartments and forced to work up to 19 hours per day, according to victims. Some were first sold into the scams but later forced into prostitution.

Varying degrees of punishment are imposed on those who refuse to take orders.

First-degree punishments include being confined to a room, gang-beaten, tased, and denied food and water, according to an ethnic Palaung woman who suffered torture before being released in 2022 after her family paid ransom money. Second and third-degree punishments include hanging from a tree or beam, searing the skin with hot objects, confinement in a doghouse, being stripped naked and beaten, imprisonment in a pitch-black room for several days, and chest-deep immersion in a water tank.

An ethnic armed organization official posted to Panghsan for six years said: “This system is practiced on all [victims] regardless of their race or nationality. Whether they are Bamar or Chinese or Wa or Kachin or Palaung, they will be punished if they fail to pay back debts or lose at gambling and can’t repay the money. Men and women come to work here and if they want to go back before their contracts expire, or if they refuse to do the work as ordered, they are also beaten. Or they can be ransomed.”