Ling Li is a PhD student at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the coauthor of Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds.
Discussion of cyberfraud tends to focus on people who are cheated out of their money by scammers. But this vastly lucrative industry also relies on the forced labor of those who have been trafficked to work in prisonlike compounds in Southeast Asia.
Centered in the lawless region of Southeast Asia known as the Golden Triangle, the scam industry is a new kind of capitalism built on corruption, organized crime, and slave labor — and it’s growing.