Reporting a scam in Myanmar

Myanmar has been under military rule since the February 2021 coup, and parts of its borderlands are effectively controlled by armed groups and militias that profit from scam compounds rather than shut them down, the Council on Foreign Relations notes that under the junta, “the scamming centers have thrived” and that law enforcement responses “have been very much contained within national boundaries.” Because of this, the reporting infrastructure you’d expect elsewhere in the region, a dedicated fraud hotline, a functioning police cybercrime portal, largely doesn’t exist here in a form an ordinary victim can rely on.

The one channel we could verify as actually working is the Department of Consumer Affairs (DOCA)’s online complaint portal, which handles disputes over purchases, e-commerce, and financial services with an identifiable business. It’s built for that kind of case, an unlicensed lender, a seller who took payment and didn’t deliver, not for anonymous cross-border fraud like pig-butchering or romance scams run from inside a scam compound. Myanmar Police Force is reported to have a Cyber Crime Unit inside its Criminal Investigation Department, but its public-facing website could not be reached and no working public complaint channel for it could be confirmed. A 2026 law promoted domestically as an “Anti-Online Scams Law” does exist, but Myanmar-focused human-rights researchers who reviewed it describe it as built around surveillance, account-freeze, and censorship powers rather than a genuine avenue for victims to get help.

If money has already left your account, contact your own bank or mobile-money provider first, don’t wait on a Myanmar authority to do it for you. If you’re a foreign national and the scam traces back to a Myanmar-based compound, your own country’s police or consumer-protection agency is the more realistic place to get a response than any Myanmar one.