On 23 July 2026, a confrontation between two groups of Chinese nationals in Colombo Port City led to an abduction and murder. Sri Lankan police have stated that three Chinese men were confronted by a group of around twenty others, threatened with firearms, assaulted and abducted. Two were later found bound tied up inside a van, but the third was found dead outside Colombo. The murdered Chinese man arrived in Sri Lanka from Cambodia in April using a passport issued by Suriname, had unusually large amounts of money passing through accounts linked to him, and is believed to be linked to an organised cybercrime operation.

The murder follows police raids and arrests from 2024, which have intensified in 2026. In March, 135 Chinese nationals were arrested for operating scam operations; in April, 152 mostly Chinese foreign national were arrested for running a scam centre; on 2 May, 120 foreign nationals from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Madagascar were arrested and large quantities of laptops and mobile phones were seized; on 3 May, 37 Chinese nationals were arrested and 147 mobile phones and 100 SIM cards confiscated; in June, the police arrested 18 Chinese nationals staying in Sri Lanka on one year visas, alleged to be involved in cybercrime activities involving the creation of fraudulent documents under the names of companies based in the US.The number of cases has increased rapidly compared to 2024 and 2025.

Sri Lanka has become the new hub for online fraud operated by Chinese organised crime groups. As the Asian Crime Century has noted before, these Chinese organised crime groups are highly adaptive, nimble and mobile. They move their operations to new locations when enforcement action is escalated and displaces them, or prior to such action as they build redundancy into their business.

Moving beyond the Mekong

Chinese organised crime groups have been displaced from South East Asia, and Sri Lanka has become a new hub for their online criminal operations. This displacement and relocation of Chinese organised crime groups is not new, as reported in the Asian Crime Century in January 2023. In the first two decades of the 21^st century, Chinese organised crime groups gravitated to the Philippines, where they operated online gambling with licenses in the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority, the Aurora Pacific Economic Zone & Freeport Authority, and the Authority of the Freeport Area of Bataan. The criminal groups in the Freeport Zones also started operating casino gambling and online gambling as new revenue streams in the 1990s and 2000s, largely to cater to Chinese nationals who were eager to gamble. From 2016 onwards, Chinese organised crime groups were displaced from special economic zones in the Philippines by national gambling licensing which created ‘Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators’ (POGOs). From 2018 onwards, some (but not all) of the Chinese organised crime groups in the Philippines were displaced by pressure from the authorities to Cambodia (especially Sihanoukville) and Myanmar to operate casinos, online gambling, and online fraud.

The displacement of Chinese organised crime groups to Cambodia and Myanmar grew during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020. The pandemic accelerated a digital transition for large numbers of consumers and facilitated Chinese organised crime groups that had previously used physical casinos and junket rooms across Asia as their primary interface to operate at scale through online gambling platforms, cyber-fraud compounds, and cryptocurrency networks.

In 2024, the UNODC cited law enforcement estimates that the online fraud industry in South East Asia was generating from US$27 to US$36 billion annually. The US Institute for Peace reported that “As of the end of 2023, a conservative estimate of the annual value of funds stolen worldwide by these syndicates approached $64 billion.” The UNODC estimated that at least 100,000 people were being held in online fraud operations in Cambodia and another 120,000 in Myanmar. This huge and increasingly visible criminal industry was therefore highly vulnerable to displacement once governments began mounting concerted enforcement operations from 2023 onwards.

The inflection point marking the start of displacement of Chinese organised crime operations from South East Asia to Sri Lanka came around 2023 to 2024. The UNODC has explained the pressure from the Chinese authorities that was building on the criminal groups operating in Cambodia and Myanmar for several years before this, with the introduction of the new Law on Countering Telecommunications Network Fraud in 2022 and a major enforcement campaign from 2023. From January to November 2023, 391,000 telecom and online fraud cases were reportedly solved and 79,000 suspects according to the Ministry of Public Security.

The scale of enforcement action from 2023 to 2024 was significant and was a driver for displacement. The UNODC recorded 28 major law-enforcement operations against cybercrime and fraud-centre sites between January 2023 and August 2024 across Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and the Philippines, involving at least 9,500 people who were arrested, detained, rescued, released or repatriated. More than 4,200 were identified as Chinese nationals, although the actual number was likely to be higher. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) authorities reported that over than 53,000 Chinese telecom and internet-fraud suspects had been apprehended through China–Myanmar law-enforcement cooperation and repatriated to China from July 2023 to November 2024 (UNODC, October 2024).

Chinese organised crime in a land like no other (just like the others)

Sri Lanka for many years branded the island nation as “a land like no other”. However, for Chinese organised crime groups searching for alternative operating locations Sri Lanka is a land just like others that they have utilised. In 2026, Sri Lanka and the PRC celebrated 70 years of diplomatic relations. Business and commercial links between the two countries have grown more quickly in the past fifteen years, and Chinese criminal groups have been a part of this expansion.

Following the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2009, Chinese investment in the country started to increase. From 2010 and 2014, Chinese financial commitments were US$5.8 billion, growing more quickly after the introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from 2013. Chinese companies started to become involved in ports, construction, and logistics, including the US$1.4 billion development of the Colombo Port City project launched in September 2014 and the China Merchants controlling interest in Hamboamba Port (Government of Sri Lanka, 2014).

This commercial expansion created a substantial legitimate Chinese commercial presence and much greater flows of people, businesses and capital between the PRC and Sri Lanka. In the first half of 2014, Chinese tourist arrivals increased by 137 per cent year-on-year to 52,230 people, and then increased another 68 per cent in 2015 (People’s Daily, 3 July 2014). The BRI facilitated Chinese commercial infrastructure and connectivity of travel and communications, which created an environment where illicit Chinese networks could more easily operate or conceal themselves among legitimate activity.

There is no evidence that Chinese organised crime grew at the same scale of in Cambodia during from 2013 to 2020. News media and the authorities in Sri Lanka did not report a significant volume of Chinese criminal activities during the period. This indicates that there was a time lag between the start of BRI investment and the growth of Chinese organised crime in Sri Lanka in the early 2020s. The inflection point in 2023 to 2024, with hundreds of Chinese nationals arrested or detained by the police in connection with online fraud operations, coincided with the height of enforcement activities in Cambodia and Myanmar driven by the PRC authorities in late 2023.

The Sri Lankan authorities have corroborated the organised crime problem by reporting waves of operations between March and May 2026, which led to the detention of over 400, mostly Chinese, foreign nationals suspected of involvement in online fraud. The PRC authorities have indicated that there is a major problem, stating in May 2026 that “Since the beginning of this year, in response to the growing trend of individuals involved in online gambling, telecom fraud, and related criminal grey and black industries relocating from other countries to Sri Lanka, China and Sri Lanka have intensified their joint law enforcement efforts.” (Embassy of the PRC in Sri Lanka, 29 May 2026)

The escalation of the Chinese organised crime problem in Sri Lanka is leading to a corresponding increase in PRC security assistance to the country. In March 2026, the Ministry of Public Security and the National Immigration Administration of the PRC met with a delegation of police and security officials from the Sri Lankan Government. They discussed immigration and border control, and the PRC pledged to support modernizing Sri Lanka’s border control operations as well as cooperate to combat transnational organized crimes, human trafficking, and cybercrimes. (Sri Lanka Ministry of Public Security, March 2026)

The PRC statements explain that the illegal gambling, online fraud compounds, underground banking operations, and illegal online marketplaces are a spillover of regional criminal networks operating in East and Southeast Asia that are expanding toward “more remote and more vulnerable” regions, as well as beyond the region itself. The PRC has committed to assist Sri Lanka and other countries to combat these organised crime activities, but this fails to recognise the displacement effect of enforcement action.

Conclusion: Chinese organised crime – displaced but not defeated

Modern Chinese organised crime enterprises are mobile. When political pressure and law-enforcement action make one jurisdiction more difficult, networks, people and money can migrate elsewhere. Sri Lanka is showing the same indicators previously seen in the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Chinese organised crime has developed in Sri Lanka from connectivity established from the BRI links in 2013. This business growth was incubated from 2015 to 2023 with growing criminal activities, but not on the industrial scale as in South East Asia. The displacement of Chinese organised crime to Sri Lanka started from 2023 to 2024, and became highly visible that year as major enforcement operations were conducted. Chinese organised crime is now likely to be entrenching in Sri Lanka.

The BRI did not bring organised crime to Sri Lanka, but the commercial connectivity it created provided the legitimate economic environment which can be used as a cover by mobile Chinese criminal networks. The Asian Crime Century has explained this as the ‘Chinese Organised Crime and the Mobile Capital Circulation System’, which can scale globally in locations where there is a Chinese diaspora and local corruption, is driven by PRC capital movement controls, is facilitated by modular Chinese criminal groups and underground bankers that adapt quickly and easily, utilises the Belt and Road Initiative links, and criminal groups that have technology adoption velocity by quickly integrating new technology to existing or new criminal business lines.

Sri Lanka is now a significant operational base for Chinese transnational organised crime, but it is not the final destination in this criminal migration. The lesson from the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar is that enforcement can disrupt Chinese organised crime without defeating it. These criminal networks adapt, disperse and re-establish themselves wherever conditions provide opportunity. Sri Lanka is now the latest unwilling host, and is responding by ramping up enforcement action in collaboration with the PRC government. This all looks very familiar.

On 23 July 2026, a confrontation between two groups of Chinese nationals in Colombo Port City led to an abduction and murder. Sri Lankan police have stated that three Chinese men were confronted by a group of around twenty others, threatened with firearms, assaulted and abducted. Two were later found bound tied up inside a van, but the third was found dead outside Colombo. The murdered Chinese man arrived in Sri Lanka from Cambodia in April using a passport issued by Suriname, had unusually large amounts of money passing through accounts linked to him, and is believed to be linked to an organised cybercrime operation.

The murder follows police raids and arrests from 2024, which have intensified in 2026. In March, 135 Chinese nationals were arrested for operating scam operations; in April, 152 mostly Chinese foreign national were arrested for running a scam centre; on 2 May, 120 foreign nationals from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Madagascar were arrested and large quantities of laptops and mobile phones were seized; on 3 May, 37 Chinese nationals were arrested and 147 mobile phones and 100 SIM cards confiscated; in June, the police arrested 18 Chinese nationals staying in Sri Lanka on one year visas, alleged to be involved in cybercrime activities involving the creation of fraudulent documents under the names of companies based in the US.The number of cases has increased rapidly compared to 2024 and 2025.

Sri Lanka has become the new hub for online fraud operated by Chinese organised crime groups. As the Asian Crime Century has noted before, these Chinese organised crime groups are highly adaptive, nimble and mobile. They move their operations to new locations when enforcement action is escalated and displaces them, or prior to such action as they build redundancy into their business.

Moving beyond the Mekong

Chinese organised crime groups have been displaced from South East Asia, and Sri Lanka has become a new hub for their online criminal operations. This displacement and relocation of Chinese organised crime groups is not new, as reported in the Asian Crime Century in January 2023. In the first two decades of the 21^st century, Chinese organised crime groups gravitated to the Philippines, where they operated online gambling with licenses in the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority, the Aurora Pacific Economic Zone & Freeport Authority, and the Authority of the Freeport Area of Bataan. The criminal groups in the Freeport Zones also started operating casino gambling and online gambling as new revenue streams in the 1990s and 2000s, largely to cater to Chinese nationals who were eager to gamble. From 2016 onwards, Chinese organised crime groups were displaced from special economic zones in the Philippines by national gambling licensing which created ‘Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators’ (POGOs). From 2018 onwards, some (but not all) of the Chinese organised crime groups in the Philippines were displaced by pressure from the authorities to Cambodia (especially Sihanoukville) and Myanmar to operate casinos, online gambling, and online fraud.

The displacement of Chinese organised crime groups to Cambodia and Myanmar grew during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020. The pandemic accelerated a digital transition for large numbers of consumers and facilitated Chinese organised crime groups that had previously used physical casinos and junket rooms across Asia as their primary interface to operate at scale through online gambling platforms, cyber-fraud compounds, and cryptocurrency networks.

In 2024, the UNODC cited law enforcement estimates that the online fraud industry in South East Asia was generating from US$27 to US$36 billion annually. The US Institute for Peace reported that “As of the end of 2023, a conservative estimate of the annual value of funds stolen worldwide by these syndicates approached $64 billion.” The UNODC estimated that at least 100,000 people were being held in online fraud operations in Cambodia and another 120,000 in Myanmar. This huge and increasingly visible criminal industry was therefore highly vulnerable to displacement once governments began mounting concerted enforcement operations from 2023 onwards.

The inflection point marking the start of displacement of Chinese organised crime operations from South East Asia to Sri Lanka came around 2023 to 2024. The UNODC has explained the pressure from the Chinese authorities that was building on the criminal groups operating in Cambodia and Myanmar for several years before this, with the introduction of the new Law on Countering Telecommunications Network Fraud in 2022 and a major enforcement campaign from 2023. From January to November 2023, 391,000 telecom and online fraud cases were reportedly solved and 79,000 suspects according to the Ministry of Public Security.

The scale of enforcement action from 2023 to 2024 was significant and was a driver for displacement. The UNODC recorded 28 major law-enforcement operations against cybercrime and fraud-centre sites between January 2023 and August 2024 across Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and the Philippines, involving at least 9,500 people who were arrested, detained, rescued, released or repatriated. More than 4,200 were identified as Chinese nationals, although the actual number was likely to be higher. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) authorities reported that over than 53,000 Chinese telecom and internet-fraud suspects had been apprehended through China–Myanmar law-enforcement cooperation and repatriated to China from July 2023 to November 2024 (UNODC, October 2024).

Chinese organised crime in a land like no other (just like the others)

Sri Lanka for many years branded the island nation as “a land like no other”. However, for Chinese organised crime groups searching for alternative operating locations Sri Lanka is a land just like others that they have utilised. In 2026, Sri Lanka and the PRC celebrated 70 years of diplomatic relations. Business and commercial links between the two countries have grown more quickly in the past fifteen years, and Chinese criminal groups have been a part of this expansion.

Following the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2009, Chinese investment in the country started to increase. From 2010 and 2014, Chinese financial commitments were US$5.8 billion, growing more quickly after the introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from 2013. Chinese companies started to become involved in ports, construction, and logistics, including the US$1.4 billion development of the Colombo Port City project launched in September 2014 and the China Merchants controlling interest in Hamboamba Port (Government of Sri Lanka, 2014).

This commercial expansion created a substantial legitimate Chinese commercial presence and much greater flows of people, businesses and capital between the PRC and Sri Lanka. In the first half of 2014, Chinese tourist arrivals increased by 137 per cent year-on-year to 52,230 people, and then increased another 68 per cent in 2015 (People’s Daily, 3 July 2014). The BRI facilitated Chinese commercial infrastructure and connectivity of travel and communications, which created an environment where illicit Chinese networks could more easily operate or conceal themselves among legitimate activity.

There is no evidence that Chinese organised crime grew at the same scale of in Cambodia during from 2013 to 2020. News media and the authorities in Sri Lanka did not report a significant volume of Chinese criminal activities during the period. This indicates that there was a time lag between the start of BRI investment and the growth of Chinese organised crime in Sri Lanka in the early 2020s. The inflection point in 2023 to 2024, with hundreds of Chinese nationals arrested or detained by the police in connection with online fraud operations, coincided with the height of enforcement activities in Cambodia and Myanmar driven by the PRC authorities in late 2023.

The Sri Lankan authorities have corroborated the organised crime problem by reporting waves of operations between March and May 2026, which led to the detention of over 400, mostly Chinese, foreign nationals suspected of involvement in online fraud. The PRC authorities have indicated that there is a major problem, stating in May 2026 that “Since the beginning of this year, in response to the growing trend of individuals involved in online gambling, telecom fraud, and related criminal grey and black industries relocating from other countries to Sri Lanka, China and Sri Lanka have intensified their joint law enforcement efforts.” (Embassy of the PRC in Sri Lanka, 29 May 2026)

The escalation of the Chinese organised crime problem in Sri Lanka is leading to a corresponding increase in PRC security assistance to the country. In March 2026, the Ministry of Public Security and the National Immigration Administration of the PRC met with a delegation of police and security officials from the Sri Lankan Government. They discussed immigration and border control, and the PRC pledged to support modernizing Sri Lanka’s border control operations as well as cooperate to combat transnational organized crimes, human trafficking, and cybercrimes. (Sri Lanka Ministry of Public Security, March 2026)

The PRC statements explain that the illegal gambling, online fraud compounds, underground banking operations, and illegal online marketplaces are a spillover of regional criminal networks operating in East and Southeast Asia that are expanding toward “more remote and more vulnerable” regions, as well as beyond the region itself. The PRC has committed to assist Sri Lanka and other countries to combat these organised crime activities, but this fails to recognise the displacement effect of enforcement action.

Conclusion: Chinese organised crime – displaced but not defeated

Modern Chinese organised crime enterprises are mobile. When political pressure and law-enforcement action make one jurisdiction more difficult, networks, people and money can migrate elsewhere. Sri Lanka is showing the same indicators previously seen in the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Chinese organised crime has developed in Sri Lanka from connectivity established from the BRI links in 2013. This business growth was incubated from 2015 to 2023 with growing criminal activities, but not on the industrial scale as in South East Asia. The displacement of Chinese organised crime to Sri Lanka started from 2023 to 2024, and became highly visible that year as major enforcement operations were conducted. Chinese organised crime is now likely to be entrenching in Sri Lanka.

The BRI did not bring organised crime to Sri Lanka, but the commercial connectivity it created provided the legitimate economic environment which can be used as a cover by mobile Chinese criminal networks. The Asian Crime Century has explained this as the ‘Chinese Organised Crime and the Mobile Capital Circulation System’, which can scale globally in locations where there is a Chinese diaspora and local corruption, is driven by PRC capital movement controls, is facilitated by modular Chinese criminal groups and underground bankers that adapt quickly and easily, utilises the Belt and Road Initiative links, and criminal groups that have technology adoption velocity by quickly integrating new technology to existing or new criminal business lines.

Sri Lanka is now a significant operational base for Chinese transnational organised crime, but it is not the final destination in this criminal migration. The lesson from the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar is that enforcement can disrupt Chinese organised crime without defeating it. These criminal networks adapt, disperse and re-establish themselves wherever conditions provide opportunity. Sri Lanka is now the latest unwilling host, and is responding by ramping up enforcement action in collaboration with the PRC government. This all looks very familiar.