China is not messing around when it comes to how it deals with fraudsters and other types of hardened criminals, as the communist nation executed 11 people convicted of intentional homicide, fraud and other crimes that were connected to a cross-border scam. The top court in the country approved the death sentences, according to authorities.
The announcement about the executions was posted on the official website for the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, which is the highest state body in China that oversees criminal prosecution and oversight. The executions came after a ruling and execution order came down from the Supreme People’s Court, which upheld judgments made by a lower court concerning the fate of the Ming family criminal organization.
The Ming family was accused of operating a sizable telecommunications fraud scheme, along with a series of gambling operations from the northern part of Myanmar that involved over 10 billion yuan, which is close to $1.4 billion in U.S. money. The group, according to authorities, worked closely with several criminal organizations that were headed up by “financial backers” to operate telecom fraud schemes, underground casinos, drug trafficking, and prostitution operations.
According to Fox News, The Supreme People’s Procuratorate went on say, “The Ming family criminal group also colluded with the online fraud criminal group of Wu Hongming and others to deliberately kill, intentionally injure, and illegally detain people involved in fraud, resulting in the death of 14 Chinese citizens and injuries to many others.”
Among the individuals handed a death sentence were Ming Guoping, Ming Zhenzhen, Zhou Weichang, Wu Hongming, Wu Senlong, and Fu Yubin. All of them were originally sentenced in September 2025 by the Wenzhou Intermediate People’s Court of Zhejiang Province. Several of the defendants filed appeals, however the Zhejiang Higher People’s Court rejected the appeal and upheld the original verdict, submitting the case to the Supreme People’s Court for mandatory review. The prisoners were given an opportunity to meet with some of their close relatives before they were executed.
A report from The New York Post explained the group scammed people by luring them into romantic relationships and investing in cryptocurrency. At first, the syndicate targeted Chinese speakers, but soon expanded into several different languages, bilking billions of dollars from victims all over the world. The syndicate often staffed their scam centers with trafficked foreign nationals that they forced to work for them under threat of violence.
Some of the workers who were freed from their horrific ordeal explained that they were often mistreated, taking severe beatings and suffering through other forms of torture while being kept prisoner in heavily guarded compounds. According to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime hundreds of thousands of innocent people are working at these scam centers across the world.
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The UNODC also issued a warning that the industry is now spreading out from South-East Asia to South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Pacific. In just the last year, over 7,600 Chinese nationals have been suspected of being involved in some form of online gambling and telecom fraud and were repatriated from Mynamar’s border regions.
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video