Broken Tooth’s reign: from Macau triads to global cyber fraud

Pig butchering scams are scamming billions and destroying lives worldwide, yet one of its most notorious players, Broken Tooth, lives freely in Southeast Asia. Why hasn’t he been stopped?

A major criminal in the online fraud world remains at large, report the Wall Street Journal. “Broken Tooth,” also known as Wan Kuok-Koi, is a major criminal on the loose and has been posting videos of himself paragliding in Laos, or another stepping off a plane wearing a Wagner Group t-shirt.

Billions of dollars are lost each year to a new kind of scam called pig butchering, whereby a victim is befriended online, flattered and fattened up before being duped for their money – or “slaughtered.”

Common crimes include dating scams, crypto fraud and fake investments. These cons typically take place over weeks and sometimes months.

As Broken Tooth is one of the biggest perpetrators of such activity, it begs the question: how can someone so dangerous openly flaunt their freedom?

Wan Kuok Koi, born in Macau in 1955, was involved in the infamous 14K Triad gang in the 1990s before being arrested in 1999. He also served prison time until 2012 for high-level crimes such as extortion, loan-sharking and racketeering.

Since then he’s been rumored to have set up a shady center in Myanmar, named the Dongmei Zone where people are coerced into working and impersonating attractive women to garner trust in order to scam victims, report the Wall Street Journal.

This “business rebranding” has allowed Broken Tooth to leverage his criminal ties from the past and continue his enterprise in a different guise.

The shift also helped Broken Tooth to set up the Hongmen group in Cambodia in 2018. The group, which functions as a secret society, promotes itself as a civilian group doing good by building schools and nursing homes in China. Thus it becomes clearer that Broken Tooth may be both a villain and a saint in his region.

Yet Dongmei’s Myanmar office reportedly even advertised rental spaces. This border zone is in a kind of no-man's land as the area shares borders with China, Thailand and Laos, making it hard to regulate as a strategic cybercrime hub.

One worker mentioned that he was trafficked into Dongmei and enslaved for seven months. During this time, his passport was confiscated, and he was forced to lure more victims into parting with their cash.

So how can such a criminal remain on the loose? One big reason is that in 2020, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Broken Tooth, but this was largely part of a public pressure campaign against China amid the escalating trade war.

Furthermore, in accordance with long-standing stereotypes, Asian governments like those in Thailand and Malaysia investigate such affairs in a tepid manner. When the bulk of cases include shady crypto transactions, they become increasingly hard to trace.

China, as ever, seems to be increasingly happy to take on an ambiguous role, perhaps the reason being that any pressure or commentary to capture Broken Tooth seems to come from the west.

Cross-border scams and encrypted discourse on apps like Telegram also present major challenges, blocking authorities from mounting a serious prosecution case.

Criminals like this thrive on inaction. This pig butchering crime began to gain traction during the pandemic, when individuals were largely isolated, and such activity became normalized and slipped through the cracks.

As these kinds of crimes continue to rise in 2025, what will it take for a global collaboration to thwart pig butchering? How many more victims will it take before authorities act? This remains very much a “case open.”