Recruitment scam warnings are being issued in Thailand and Myanmar following the abduction of young Chinese actor, Wang Xing, better known as Xingxing, earlier this month.

The warnings by Chinese embassies follow Wang’s safe return to China after falling victim to a human trafficking scam that had him illegally transported to Myanmar.

Thailand’s Prime Minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, announced Wang’s rescue and transfer to Thai authorities four days after his abduction to Myanmar on 3 January. 

Wang was delivered into the care of Thai police in the Mae Sot district of Tak province. 

Thai and Chinese media reported that Wang had flown from Shanghai to Bangkok in response to what he believed to be a job offer. Arriving at 3am on Friday (3 January), he was told he would be taken directly to the film’s casting location. 

Instead, it appears that Wang was driven some 500km to the northwest of Thailand, where contact with him was lost. Wang’s girlfriend, Jiajia, had been using location tracking software to track his movements. After some 60 hours without contact, she raised the alarm by contacting authorities in China and Thailand. 

Wang is known for his roles in TV series "Fox Spirit Matchmaker: Red-Moon Pact", "The Tale of Rose" and Linmon Media’s "Under the Skin 2", a 28-part crime, drama series that started airing last month. 

According to Jiajia, Wang had responded to a job advertisement on Chinese social messaging platform WeChat from a casting co-ordinator named Yan Shiliu, who purported to be working with leading Thai production company, GMM Grammy.

Mae Sot borders Myawaddy, part of eastern Myanmar where criminal gangs have previously lured victims across the border. Once in Myanmar, they are forced into slave labor as scam-call operatives.

Such operations have flourished in the nearly four years of civil war in Myanmar since the military coup of February 2021. But both junta and rebel groups are believed to have ramped up drug production and scam centres to finance their war efforts.

Myanmar is now the biggest nexus of organised crime on the planet, according to a recent report by Global Organised Crime Index.

Thai authorities said they had been unable to find any record of Wang having exited the country. But a source at Linmon told this correspondent that the company had been informed that Wang had been rescued in Myanmar.

It is unclear how many other Chinese actors have been duped into forced labor in Myanmar.

This weekend, another Chinese actor, Deng You, used Chinese social video platform Weibo to report that he too had been contacted by Yan and that he had travelled to Bangkok for work on a TV series.

Deng reported that, on his arrival, the film crew tried to confiscate his passport. When he refused, they cancelled his return plane ticket.

The swift response by the Thai government to the Wang incident may reflect the potential for damage to the country’s lucrative tourism industry from publicity about cyber-scam, drugs and illegal gambling industries along its borders with Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.

In 2023, No More Bets, depicting the trafficking of a model and a computer analyst to an unnamed southeast Asian country where they were forced into cybercrime, was a huge hit. The Chinese crime film earned some US$540 million, mostly at the mainland China box office, and provoked a social backlash within China against Thailand and other countries in the region. 

In response to No More Bets, Thai authorities travelled to China and denied that the crimes shown in the film were taking place in Thailand. Myanmar complained to China that use of the Burmese language throughout the movie hurt its reputation. Cambodia banned the film on the grounds that it could discourage foreign investors and tourists. – By Patrick Frater