“I Feel Lucky”

It took some time, but eventually someone offered to pay for her journey back to Taiwan. Just a few days before her flight, she agreed to meet with one of us in a public place. It was then that she shared her whole story:

I feel lucky because I was rescued very quickly, basically in a week. If I had been enslaved for a year or two, I might not be able to believe in humanity anymore. I know some of the victims have been brainwashed, or some have been tortured to the point that they are numb or have developed some mental illness. And at the same time, people outside, including my own family, think that I was trafficked because I am greedy and wanted to get rich overnight. So, I need to tell my story. I need to let them know the real situation.

Knowing that she had been tortured and sexually abused in four different scam compounds, it was shocking to hear Alice describing herself as “lucky.” She had been lured by a bogus job presented to her by a friend whom she trusted, a man in the Philippines who even paid for her visa and flight to Phnom Penh.

When she arrived at her supposed new office in Sihanoukville, the supervisor informed her that she had been sold there to conduct online scams and that she would not be allowed to leave until she had earned enough money for the company. Threatening her with a stun gun, he said that if she did not comply, he would lock her up in a room and let several men rape her, which is exactly what happened soon after.

“At the beginning, they tried to force me to do pig-butchering work,” she said, referring to a type of online scam, called shazhupan (杀猪盘) in Chinese, in which scammers take on fictional profiles, initiate contact with hapless marks, and then slowly gain their trust before tricking them into fake investments:

I knew it was illegal, so I played dumb and said that I didn’t know how to type. So, they assigned me to do cleaning and paperwork. Then they sold me again and again. I was repeatedly raped and almost forced to work in a brothel-like clubhouse in the last company.

Alice eventually found a way to post a call for help on Instagram and was rescued before being sold a fifth time. Because of that cry for help, however, everyone in her social circles has come to know what happened to her, which has led to public shaming and is making her reintegration more difficult now that she is back home. As she told us:

I want you to write about me. I am a victim of modern slavery, but no organization is helping me. I also want to say it is not a matter of being greedy or stupid. It can really happen to anyone.

A Booming Industry

Alice is just one of many affected by what the media dubbed a “scamdemic,” a surge in online fraud that gained worldwide attention following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. While online fraud operations can be found all over the world — one just has to think about the notorious Nigerian prince advance-payment scams — this latest wave of online fraud has largely originated from one specific region: Southeast Asia.

It also presents some other new peculiar traits, most notably the emergence of new facilities — commonly known as scam compounds — where cyberfraud is practiced on an industrial scale by a workforce that includes a significant number of people trafficked into forced criminality. These scam compounds did not suddenly materialize out of thin air but should rather be seen as the latest development in a process that stretches as far back as Taiwan in the 1990s.

It was at that time and in that place that entrepreneurial criminal groups began to experiment with the internet to conduct large-scale scams. As Taiwanese law enforcement caught up, from the early 2000s these scammers turned their attention to mainland China, targeting it from locations in Taiwan while also establishing operations on the mainland itself.

Later on, in the early 2010s, as the authorities on both sides of the strait tightened up on online fraud and gambling, operations began to move into Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia, the Philippines, Myanmar, and Laos. Even from their new bases, they continued to target the Chinese market. According to our review of news reports of police raids from that time, those pioneering scam operations in Southeast Asia were often small scale and mostly located in apartments, villas, and hotel rooms.

But soon things began to change. Although it is difficult to pinpoint an exact moment in time for this shift, available evidence indicates that from around 2016 onward these operations started to assume industrial dimensions, coalescing into bigger scam compounds. Such a trend was acknowledged by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate, which in a 2023 report on telecom and online fraud noted that these operations had become increasingly “monopolized” and less scattered, with large criminal groups often using “technology parks” as a cover for their activities.

These compounds in many cases are purpose-built for online operations, with offices, dormitories, and space for shops, entertainment, and other amenities for workers. In some cases, they are office buildings attached to or in the vicinity of public-facing casinos, or they may occupy the upper floors of a licensed casino. In others, they are repurposed condominiums and apartments.

Spinach Cities

Many reports have focused on the presence of cyberfraud operations in special economic zones (SEZs), and a small number of such cases have been documented, for example in Cambodia and Laos. They are not the norm, however, and this reporting often demonstrates confusion between self-described “industrial” and “technology” parks and SEZs. There have also been reports of entire “spinach cities” (菠城 bocheng) — a pun on the Chinese word for “spinach” (菠菜 bocai), a homophone for “gambling” (博彩 bocai) — purpose-built, especially in Myanmar’s border areas, to host these types of operations.

As their business thrived, scam operations — most of which were still run by criminal groups from mainland China and Taiwan — increasingly resorted to deceptive and violent methods to recruit and retain their staff. Starting from around 2018, stories began appearing on Chinese-language social media of Chinese individuals getting tricked and often smuggled into Cambodia to work in scam compounds that they were not allowed to leave.

There were also reports of Chinese nationals being kidnapped off the streets in places such as Sihanoukville, sold to scam operators by supposed friends and acquaintances, or reluctantly entering the industry due to unserviceable debts. Meanwhile, many individuals who had found their way into the sector knowing what kind of work they would be doing also found themselves trapped, their documents taken away, and their liberty restricted.

When COVID-19 happened, it was a game changer. The industry was already expanding rapidly, but as scam operators were achieving record profits capitalizing on the misery and loneliness of people stuck in endless lockdowns, they needed a steady stream of new people to sustain their business. Still, travel restrictions made recruitment more challenging than ever.

After the containment measures imposed by the Chinese authorities in early 2020 dried up the flow of new workers arriving through legal channels from mainland China, criminal groups running scam companies increasingly resorted to smuggling people out of the country. Whether they knew what they were getting into or not, these individuals often found themselves trapped in scam compounds, unable to return home because they lacked proper documents and, in many cases, had incurred substantial debts to their smugglers.

At the same time, Chinese nationals already stranded abroad, often unemployed and facing financial hardships after losing their livelihood because of the pandemic, found themselves increasingly vulnerable. Many of them needed to make a living, no matter how, and entered the scam compounds.

Expanding Their Reach

During the pandemic, scam operations in Southeast Asia also expanded their reach beyond the Sinophone world. We were able to locate an early instance of a non-Chinese person trapped in a scam compound: in summer 2021, the local press in Cambodia reported that the husband of a Philippine national was claiming that his wife was being held against her will in a compound in Sihanoukville.

She had responded to a job ad posted on Facebook, and upon arrival her passport was immediately confiscated. Only after her story appeared in the English-language media was she allowed to leave and return home.

Today the workforce in Southeast Asia’s scam compounds is very diverse, with international organizations active in the region claiming to have handled cases of at least forty nationalities trapped there. With most cases going unreported, many more nationalities are likely to have gone unrecorded.

Since the end of the pandemic, the industry continues to expand. The scam-compound model — that is, cyberfraud on an industrial scale, often performed by people being held in conditions akin to modern slavery — was so successful that the existence of such facilities has now been documented far and wide. In early 2023, the United Arab Emirates began making headlines as an online scam and human trafficking hub.

In a global warning issued in June 2023, Interpol said scam operations fueled by human trafficking had spread to West Africa. The same month, media outlets reported the discovery of the bodies of eight young workers who had tried to quit their jobs at a cartel-run scam call center in Mexico, only to be brutally murdered and dismembered.

Later that year, over forty Malaysians were rescued from a scam operation in Peru, and in 2024, a police raid on a cyberscam operation in Zambia led to the eventual trial and sentencing of over twenty Chinese nationals to up to eleven years in jail. This was followed by the arrest of over a hundred Chinese and Malaysians for “cybercrimes” in Nigeria and dozens of Chinese nationals in an Angolan call center.

Scam Patterns

Official data on the impacts of cyberscams are partial at best, in that they only consider reported cases in an industry where self-reporting is notoriously low as victims often feel too ashamed to share what happened to them. Also, scam patterns and the way law enforcement categorizes them vary considerably from country to country, making it difficult to have a coherent and consistent dataset. Nevertheless, the available data are enough to give us a glimpse of the massive size of the industry today.

As we have seen, the Sinophone world is one of the main targets of these operations. In 2023 alone, the Chinese authorities claimed to have uncovered over 437,000 cases of telecommunication fraud and managed to stop scams with a total value of CN¥328.8 billion, roughly equivalent to US$45.29 billion. In the same year, the Hong Kong authorities recorded 39,824 cases of fraud (a 3.8-fold increase from 2018), 70 percent of which were internet-related, for a total loss of over HK$9 billion (US$1.15 billion).

In Taiwan, an all-time high of NT$8.878 billion (US$270 million) was reportedly lost to scams in 2023. As for Singapore, the losses that year amounted to SG$651.8 million (US$492 million) in a record-high 46,563 reported cases — the third year in a row that Singaporean citizens had lost over SG$600 million to scams perpetrated by “syndicated, well-resourced, and technologically sophisticated” scammers based overseas.

Southeast Asian countries have also been heavily targeted due to their geographical proximity to the scam operations. According to official data, in Thailand over THB63 billion (US$1.79 billion) were lost to cyberscams reported between March 2022 and May 2024. In Vietnam, almost 17,500 fraud cases were reported in 2023 to a portal operated by the Ministry of Information and Communications, for a total loss of more than VNĐ300 billion (US$12.24 million). The Malaysian authorities recorded RM1.218 billion (US$280 million) in losses to online scams in 2023.

It has also been well documented how online frauds have targeted people far beyond the region. In 2023, the FBI Crime Complaint Center received more than 69,000 complaints from the public regarding financial fraud involving the use of cryptocurrency, including investment, tech support, extortion, romance, government impersonation, and other types of scams. Estimated losses amounted to more than US$5.6 billion, almost 50 percent of the total losses associated with financial-fraud complaints.

While it is not possible to know for certain how many of these cases have links with Southeast Asia, given the timing and techniques employed we can safely assume that operations in Southeast Asia played an important role in this explosive growth. In one remarkable instance in which the Southeast Asia connection became explicit, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on an Australian woman duped into investing in fake cryptocurrency.

After realizing she had been defrauded, she confronted the scammer, who confessed his identity as a twenty-year-old trapped in a scam operation being run from a compound in Cambodia. He told her that his bosses would punish him for poor performance and that he needed CN¥300,000 (US$63,000) to be released.

Victims

Stories such as the one that this man told his Australian target bring us back to how the current wave of online scams relies in part on the exploitation of an army of laborers, many of whom are forced to work under duress. Evidence has been mounting that today there are potentially hundreds of thousands of people toiling in hundreds of scam operations across Southeast Asia and beyond. While some enter willingly in the hope of making money, many others do not.

Regardless of how people find their way into the compounds, often they are not allowed to leave without paying a substantial fee. Rescuers and anti-trafficking groups describe such payment as a “ransom,” and it sometimes amounts to tens of thousands of dollars. There is overwhelming evidence that torture, violence, and brutality are prevalent within many of these operations.

Rescues are sporadic at best, hampered by the complicity or inaction of local officials, protection of local elites, and the mobile nature of the industry — which, to make things worse, is in some cases located in remote areas or even active conflict zones. While largely the results of educated guesswork, estimates for the numbers of people involved are staggering.

In a 2023 report, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that “credible sources” indicated that at that time at least 120,000 people may have been held in situations where they were forced to carry out online scams in Myanmar, with another 100,000 in Cambodia.

Officials in both countries reacted angrily to this report, but in 2022 a senior official at the Cambodian Ministry of Interior admitted that the authorities estimated some 100,000 people in the country had been involved in “illegal online gambling” — a euphemism often used by the Cambodian government to refer to online scam operations — before a short-lived crackdown was launched in September 2022. Although he was referring to the overall workforce and not those who had been trafficked or forced to work, this gives an indication of the size of the industry.