A Chinese court last month sentenced 11 people to death over their roles in a illegal scam empire along the border with Myanmar. But it won’t end a noxious multibillion-dollar industry that devastates the lives of two sets of victims. The first are those cheated out of money, often by people posing as potential romantic or business partners in what are known as “pig‑butchering” schemes. The second are those who are forced to cheat them, working in conditions amounting to modern slavery.

The recent study, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, by Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo, paints a terrifying picture of the sector. Workers are trafficked into heavily guarded, prison-like compounds, where they are routinely abused and tortured for failing to meet targets, or extorted for ransoms. Others take the jobs willingly, but find that they cannot repay ruinous charges for food and accommodation. Their work requires them to be connected to the outside world round the clock, yet they are too terrified to seek help because of the surveillance and violence they endure.

Reports of people being forced into criminality in online scam centres in south-east Asia first emerged in 2018. Five years later, the UN Human Rights Office reported that 120,000 people had been forced to carry out online scams in Myanmar alone, with another 100,000 in Cambodia. The Cambodian police boast that they rounded up 3,000 suspects from 19 countries this summer, in their biggest crackdown yet.

But scam centres have now been identified in Serbia, Peru, Pakistan, central Africa and most recently Timor-Leste. One NGO worker told the authors of Scam that a common scenario might be “a Chinese perpetrator residing in Cambodia [using] a trafficked Filipino individual to deceive a US citizen, using credit cards from Dubai for money laundering”.

The trafficking of Wang Xing, a Chinese actor, to Myanmar in January highlighted the brazenness of these criminals. But as China and others turn up the heat, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime warns that syndicates are targeting individuals from countries with limited diplomatic or consular resources, citing more than 700 Ethiopian nationals rescued in Myanmar this year. Satellite internet services and solar power have allowed operators to move to remoter areas. Deepfake technology is opening up new avenues for scamming.

Corrupt officials, from local police to senior politicians, allow these enterprises to thrive. When victims are rescued, authorities frequently prosecute them as scammers or fine them for immigration offences. Assistance may come instead from white-hat hackers, local NGOs or business people from the victim’s homeland. Remarkably, even some scam targets have put aside their anger and helped those tasked with exploiting them after learning the full story.

Criminal syndicates prosper by extracting and exploiting data, and working across transnational boundaries to evade control. To fight them, governments must share intelligence and target networks, not isolated compounds. Cooperation needs civil society – yet China and others distrust it. Technology companies must stop their platforms being used for organised crime; WhatsApp recently deleted 6.8m accounts linked to online scam centres. Above all, however, authorities must ensure that traumatised victims are not punished as perpetrators.

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