[3] However, some former Red Guards fled as refugees to Hong Kong, where they "turned their military prowess to crime", according to a Canadian court record, forming the triad known as the Big Circle Gang.
In Hong Kong, the Big Circle Boys were known for their clannish qualities formed out of common experiences in the Red Guard and in the prison camps; for their well planned raids; their use of guns in their crimes and their extreme violence.
[4] Some of the Big Circle Boys came to Canada as illegal immigrants owning to their lengthy criminal records in Hong Kong, but came legally by claiming refugee status.
[4] By the late 1980s, the Big Circle Boys were notorious in the Chinatowns of both Vancouver and Toronto for their armed robberies of businesses; home invasions; and the their practice of kidnapping wealthy Chinese-Canadians to force their families to pay hefty ransoms.
[6] By the early 1990s, the Big Circle Boys had moved up from robberies to more profitable crimes as prostitution, human trafficking, drug smuggling, loansharking, credit card fraud, and the counterfeiting of currency, computer software, and films.
[6] Using connections in Asia, the Big Circle Boys were involved in smuggling heroin from the "Golden Triangle" nations of Burma, Thailand and Laos into Canada, the United States and Europe.
[7] In December 1990, the Vancouver police broke up a human smuggling ring led by the Big Circle Boys were bringing in illegal immigrants from China to Canada.
[9] The triad now thrives among the unregulated factories and underground banks of Guangdong, and especially in the city of Guangzhou; they were nicknamed the "Big Circle Gang" after a drawing on a map indicating in which part of China they operated.
[10] They spread rapidly across Canadian cities in the 1990s, and confidential informants say Big Circle Boys are trusted bonding agents among many actors in fluid networks of Asian drug-trafficking.
On 22 January 2021, as part of Operation Kungur, Dutch police arrested Tse Chi Lop, alleged to have assumed the leadership of the organisation and having taken it to higher levels as Sam Gor (The Company), with the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime putting the larger syndicate's turnover at $8-18 billion in 2018.