Myanmar’s military government has detained more than 10,000 foreign nationals over the past nine months who the junta said illegally entered the country for involvement in online scams.

Of the 10,119 people detained through Oct. 27 in a joint crackdown with China and Thailand, about 9,340 have been repatriated, the Ministry of Information said Tuesday. Arrangements are being made to return the rest, it added.

The move comes as the international community pressures the junta to dismantle billion-dollar scam networks. Last month, the U.S. sanctioned several companies in Shwe Kokko, a major scam hub it said is controlled by an ethnic armed group allied with the junta.

Junta spokesman Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun blamed the Karen National Union, an ethnic army fighting the military, for allowing scam networks in KK Park near the Thai-Myanmar border. He accused KNU leaders of profiting from leasing land and providing security for the gambling hub.

Saw Taw Nee, the KNU’s head of foreign affairs, said in an interview that the group denies all the allegations by the junta. "They have done it for years for the sake of their interests but when the international community pressures on them, they try to find a culprit and pin this on us,” he said.

Criminal networks in places such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia are operating “industrial-scale cyber-enabled fraud and scam centers, driven by sophisticated transnational syndicates and interconnected networks of money launderers, human traffickers, data brokers and a growing number of other specialist service providers and facilitators,” the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report this year.