Ah Ling ran a beauty parlour in Tai Kok Tsui for eleven years. She knew how to read people, she was good at her job, and last October someone offered her a management role in Myanmar that paid three times what she made at home. She is not the first and she will not be the last.

The police arrested a 31-year-old Hong Kong woman on Thursday for allegedly recruiting at least five others into the Myawaddy scam belt, pitching beauty industry contacts on overseas gigs that turned out to be fraud operations. The recruiter collected fees per head. The network ran through WeChat. What's interesting is the recruiting class: licensed beauticians, trained professionals, people with income and a trade. The scam operators have moved up-market on the supply side because the returns are better. A trained worker who speaks Cantonese can front for a wider range of fraud schemes than a desperate school-leaver, so they cost more to acquire and the middleman charges accordingly. The HKPF Commercial Crime Bureau is handling the case, and the Consular section at the Myanmar Embassy confirmed Thursday it has received family-contact requests for two of the five, both women in their late twenties, whose whereabouts are still listed as unconfirmed.