Myanmar's military-backed parliament approved the Anti-Online Scam Bill on Tuesday, introducing the death penalty for those who use violence, torture, unlawful arrest or detention to force people into online scams. The law makes capital punishment mandatory when such conduct causes death.
The important parts of the bill remained the same.
Lower house MP Aye Chan confirmed that the death penalty remained in the approved version of the bill, noting that where abuse kills the victim, "the death penalty shall be imposed."
The draft bill published in May proposed sentences of 10 years to life in prison for coercion offenses, as well as capital punishment for causing death. The final text of the bill has not been released.
The bill also imposes prison terms of 10 years to life for operating online scam centers and for crypto scams, and mandates 10 years imprisonment for any instance of forced labor related to cybercrime.
Estimated losses from scam operations across East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania in 2025, according to UNODC.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that scam operations across East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania drove $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion in losses in 2025, with people from at least 80 countries found inside scam compounds.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned the Karen National Army (KNA) in Myanmar as a transnational criminal organization in May 2025, stating its territory on the Thai border hosts multiple cyber scam syndicates. The KNA denies involvement in scams.
The bill is the first law passed by the government of President Min Aung Hlaing, who took office in April 2025. Shortly after assuming power, he commuted every death sentence in the country to life imprisonment. Myanmar had resumed judicial executions in 2022, hanging four activists in the first such killings since 1976.
A quarter of the seats in both houses of Myanmar's parliament (166) are reserved for the military under the constitution. The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) won 339 of the seats in phased elections that Aung San Suu Kyi's dissolved party could not contest.
The law's approval came two days before the United Nations International Organization for Migration's World Day Against Trafficking in Persons on July 30. In a related development, Cambodia has advanced its own bill setting life terms for compound bosses. U.S. prosecutors seized $25 million in cryptocurrency tied to scams routed through the region in June 2025, and the FBI seized 127,000 Bitcoin worth over $8 billion from the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army in May 2025.