Ankur Desai

He says the situation is reversible.

Our global affairs reporter Ambarasan Etirajan told us more.

And where are the worst affected areas?

Ambrasan Etirajan reporting.

Next to Myanmar, which has become one of the world's leading hubs for online scams.

Criminals have taken advantage of the chaos brought by the country's civil war to create large scam centres which lure foreign workers with the promise of well-paid jobs before forcing them to carry out international fraud.

But their compounds have now come under attack from the Burmese military, and the main insurgent group in Myanmar has taken control of two sites.

Our Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head is at the border with the story.

This is the Mui River that divides Myanmar from Thailand.

And you can hear the detonations going on from the other side.

There is an artillery exchange between the Myanmar military and the main Karen insurgent group, the KNU, which has just taken over in the last couple of weeks a scam compound that I can see the two of them together, known as Sundaram Baoli.

They're just on the other side of the river.

The people you can hear behind me, a lot of children as well,

are residents who've been driven down to the river to escape the fighting.

We see a column of smoke going up from where those detonations were.

All this fighting has escalated because both sides, the army and the KNU, the Karen insurgents, say they're trying to shut down the scam compounds that have proliferated all along this river.

The KNU has taken over these two, Shunda and Baoli,

and driven out the scam workers.

There are many who refuse to leave but they're trying to shut it down.

The army has taken over other scam compounds further north.