A Chinese court has sentenced 16 members of a notorious Ming family to death, state media CCTV has said. The sentence comes after the 39 were found guilty of conducting criminal activities.
Five of the 16 will receive 2-year suspended sentences in the death sentences. Another 11 were jailed for life, and the remaining 12 were handed prison terms ranging from five to 24 years.
The Ming family is famous for running scam centres in Myanmar. They were once one of the most powerful in Myanmar's Shan State, and ran scam centres in Laukkai, which held at least 10,000 workers.
They worked for one of the four clans that ran Myanmar's sleepy backwater town of Laukkai, close to the border with China, and turned it into a hub for gambling, drugs and scam centres.
They were arrested in 2023, alongside other families, following a crackdown and handed over to Chinese authorities.
The Ming family was also found guilty of engaging in criminal activities, including telecommunications fraud, illegal casinos, drug trafficking, and prostitution in 2015.
The court noted that their gambling and scam activities had generated more than $1.4 billion (Sh182 billion).
The court also found that the family and other criminal groups were responsible for the deaths of several scam centre workers, including shooting workers in one incident to prevent them from returning to China.
More than 100,000 foreign nationals, many of them Chinese, were estimated to have been lured to these scam centres, where they were effectively imprisoned and forced to work long hours running sophisticated online fraud operations targeting victims all over the world.
Their downfall started two years ago, when an alliance of insurgent groups launched an offensive which drove the Myanmar military out of large areas of Shan State and took control of Laukkai.
China, which holds significant influence over these groups, is believed to have been behind offensive.