In the past two months, immigration authorities investigated about 14,000 people illegally entering or leaving the country and stopped about 21,000 people involved in online gambling and fraud from leaving the country, Li Tao, deputy director of the NIA's Border Inspection and Management Bureau, said on Friday.

Exit and entry administration departments have also tightened the issuance of exit and entry documents, and intensified the examination of applicants' materials to promote the crackdown on cross-border gambling and online fraud, he said.

The joint battle against online fraud in northern Myanmar has further intensified, with Myanmar handing over another 1,207 suspects to China on Wednesday after a successful operation on Sept 3, the Ministry of Public Security said on Friday.

The ministry said that efforts will be intensified to enhance police cooperation in the fight against online fraud in northern Myanmar, which mainly targets Chinese citizens.

The ministry has mobilized public security departments in Yunnan province and other regions to push forward the crackdown on such crimes in response to the grim and complex online fraud situation in northern Myanmar.

As a result, the public security organs of Pu'er, Yunnan, have actively carried out border cooperation with law enforcement forces in Myanmar, and provided them with information about the fraud groups and scammers in a timely manner.

On Sept 3, police from Xishuangbanna Dai autonomous prefecture in Yunnan and law enforcement agencies from Myanmar successfully dismantled 11 fraud networks in northern Myanmar in a joint operation, detaining 269 suspects, including 186 Chinese nationals. The Chinese criminals were handed over to Chinese police and repatriated.

In addition to online fraud, drug-related crimes in the Greater Mekong Subregion were also discussed at a meeting in Beijing on Wednesday attended by officials from China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In recent years, Cambodia has hosted high-rise compounds — many built in Chinese-run “special economic zones” — that human right advocates say in part serve as quasi factories for online financial fraud conducted against victims across Asia, and increasingly, in the United States. Forbes recently profiled one California-based scam victim, who lost over $1 million to what’s known as a “pig butchering” scam, where a scammer builds a longer term relationship with their victim before convincing them to invest money into a cryptocurrency scheme.

Inside these hubs, workers who have been lured and trafficked from neighboring countries are made to conduct these scams via various online channels. However, as part of a recent nationwide crackdown against what Cambodian government officials have called “illegal gambling,” at least some building complexes believed to house these cryptocurrency-fueled financial scam operations have been disrupted in recent days, experts say.