Explaining Cybercrime as a Rebel Financing Strategy in Myanmar

What explains the turn to cybercrime as an armed group financing strategy? Cybercrime lets groups bypass limits on rent seeking and natural resource extraction, widens the funding base and circumvents conventional sanctions. We offer a scope-limited theory: under a conjunction of structural shock, organisational origins permitting extra-legal activity and access to enabling infrastructure, armed groups adopt cyber-enabled fraud as a financing mechanism. Adoption means active organisational involvement that generates revenue, not incidental territorial overlap. A case study of Myanmar’s Karen BGF, which partnered with a cybercriminal organisation, and a limited comparison with Mexico’s CJNG separate structural conditions from organisational factors.