LoginAnalysis: Victims or Villains?
Organised cartels and people traffickers are making huge sums by forcing people to work in Southeast Asia’s ‘scam compounds’, blurring the line between victims and criminals.
Richard Young, Editorial Lead Writer
Posted 23 June 2025 | JoTS Online
Content Tags: Analysis|Crime|International
Over the past few years, scam emails, calls and texts have become so ubiquitous that they have virtually come to be accepted as an inevitable consequence of globalised mass-communication. According to National Trading Standards (NTS) data, 40 million UK adults (73%) have been targeted by scams, with 19 million (35%) suffering a financial loss.
But those statistics only tell part of the story. While we are all too familiar with the tactics used by scammers and the harm they cause, we are perhaps not so aware of the systems of coercion and abuse that lie behind their crimes. The remote nature of scams can give the impression that those perpetuating them are an anonymous, faceless mass, an army of ‘bad guys’ out to dupe the vulnerable and unwary.
However, recent research by various international organisations provides fascinating insights into the operations of scam call centres across Southeast Asia – a global hotspot for online fraud – and reveals the tragic reality that many of the ‘scammers’ are actually victims themselves.
Now, that research has led to renewed multinational efforts to crack down on the criminal gangs who exploit victims in the UK, Southeast Asia and around the world.
What began as a regional crime threat in Southeast Asia has become a global human trafficking crisis, with millions of victims
Slave labour
According to the United Nations (UN), in recent years hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked and forced to work in scam centres across Southeast Asia, carrying out phone, text and email scams as well as committing online cryptocurrency and gambling fraud. In Myanmar alone, at least 120,000 people are estimated to be trapped in scam centres, with a further 100,000 in Cambodia. Across Laos, the Philippines and Thailand, there are hundreds of thousands more.
As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk put it, “People who are coerced into working in these scamming operations endure inhumane treatment while being forced to carry out crimes. They are victims. They are not criminals.”
Industrial-scale scam centres in Southeast Asia have their origins in the loosely regulated gambling industry that sprang up in the region in the early 1990s, according to the US Institute for Peace (USIP). Years of political instability in Myanmar, with widespread human rights violations and corruption, led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of desperately vulnerable people and, true to form, organised criminals leapt in to exploit that vulnerability, treating them as a ready-made source of free labour.
The covid pandemic exacerbated the problem, with global travel restrictions leaving casinos and gambling resorts empty, as well as bringing about a worldwide explosion in online activity. According to thinktank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Chinese organised crime groups behind many of the region’s casinos rapidly “repurposed the facilities into cyber-scamming compounds”.
As well as displaced people, some of the workforce were tricked by seemingly legitimate job adverts. They went for an interview – sometimes travelling thousands of miles – only to have their passports confiscated and to find themselves held captive. The US Department of State’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report identifies victims from countries as far afield as Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Peru, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Many of these unwilling recruits are young, tech-savvy graduates who left their home countries in search of new lives and opportunities overseas, only to find themselves trapped in a nightmare.
The compounds themselves are heavily guarded, and those working within are literally prisoners – in Myanmar’s Myawaddy region on the border with Thailand, groups such as the Karen National Army (KNA) and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) serve as armed guards.
The conditions under which many of the ‘scammers’ are forced to live and work are nothing short of horrific. One of them, a 25-year-old Ethiopian who was held captive in a compound in Myanmar where he was forced to carry out so-called ‘pig-butchering’ romance scams targeting Westerners, told Agence France-Presse that his captors tortured him with electric shocks which left him unconscious, half-starved him, and forced him to work for free for 18 months. The threat of violence was constant; to encourage him and his fellow prisoners to work harder, they were presented with the severed fingers of other captives as a warning. “There were people in the compound who lost limbs because of torture,” he said.
Another 26-year-old Ethiopian held captive in Myanmar was beaten with wire whips for six months before his family managed to raise $8,000 to secure his release, leaving them financially destitute.
According to the Humanity Research Consultancy, most of the compounds are owned by a Chinese-speaking ‘landlord’ who rents the facilities to various criminal groups who operate different types of scam – some might specialise in impersonation fraud, for example, while others focus on data harvesting. And the criminals are keen to stay at the forefront of technology; as the UN Office of Drugs and Crime highlighted in a September 2023 policy paper, “recent reports from government counterparts indicate increased use of AI tools to commit online scams, including face swapping and voice replication to bypass banking security systems.”
Trillion-dollar business
The financial incentives for the criminal cartels who operate the scam centres are eye-watering. According to Interpol, fraud resulting from human trafficking in Southeast Asia rakes in almost $3trn annually. As Interpol’s secretary-general Jurgen Stock commented at a briefing in Singapore last year, “Today, a bank – or indeed anyone – is less likely to be robbed at gunpoint than via a keyboard by someone on the other side of the world.
“What began as a regional crime threat in Southeast Asia has become a global human trafficking crisis, with millions of victims, both in the cyber scam centres and as targets.”
Widespread recognition of the scale of the problem has catalysed fresh countermeasures against the cartels. The Thai government has cut power, fuel and internet connections to parts of Myanmar linked with scam compounds, while in March the Chinese government worked to secure the release of 200 of its citizens held in the Myawaddy region. According to Reuters about 7,000 people, most of them Chinese nationals who were previously held in scam compounds, are currently in camps run by the KNA and DKBA. Thai authorities have also launched a crackdown across the border in Cambodia, working with local police to rescue 215 people from a scam compound in February.
A high-profile case also drew much-needed attention to the issue in January when 22-year-old Chinese actor Wang Xing was kidnapped in northern Thailand’s Tak province. During a week in captivity Wang – who had travelled to Thailand to attend a bogus film casting – was trained to scam other Chinese people before being released. The case caused a stir on Chinese social media and sparked renewed efforts by the Thai government to get to grips with the issue, which is obviously harmful to the country’s image as a popular tourism destination.
However, the astonishing profits involved – and ongoing instability in the region, not least that caused by the devastating earthquake in Myanmar at the end of March – mean that a definitive solution is unlikely in the near future. And while Southeast Asia is obviously a nexus for online fraud, the problem is by no means specific to that part of the world. Scam centres – some with suspected links to Chinese organised crime – have been discovered in Ghana, Peru, the UAE, Mexico and elsewhere.
As the CSIS notes, “The emergence of copycat centres would represent a worrying expansion of this issue, introducing entirely new criminal organisations and tactics to an already elusive threat.”
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Content Tags: Analysis|Crime|International
