Interview With Authors of SCAM: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds
Three top-notch researchers have teamed up to share their vast knowledge on Southeast Asia's scam compounds.
The spread of cybercrime compounds has been so hectic and fast-paced that it’s hard to keep up with the flood of headlines. A new book by three top-notch researchers helps us step back and see the big picture of how this illicit industry took root in Southeast Asia and why it’s become such a formidable threat to, well, pretty much anyone with a smartphone.
Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds by Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo brings together in one place years of academic fieldwork, reviews of media reports, scholarly literature, reports by civil society groups, and in-depth interviews with survivors of human trafficking who toiled inside scam compounds. Since 2022, Li interviewed more than 100 survivors of scam operations in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos as she worked with families and non-profit organizations to support their requests for assistance and repatriation. So Scam illuminates this murky world from both macro and micro perspectives. It provides a terrific historical overview of how this illicit industry developed, and individual stories of human suffering that help us understand how it impacts victims of human trafficking.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong recently hosted Li and Franceschini for a book talk and I had the pleasure of moderating the discussion. Below are a few key take-aways from our conversation, which you can watch in full here:
The sheer variety of people who’ve been tricked into toiling inside Southeast Asia’s scam compounds is truly mind-boggling. I asked Li to summarize the backgrounds of the survivors she’s met over the years; she recounted talking to an event planner, a chef, drivers, plumbers, DJs, construction workers. Pretty much anyone can become a target for recruiters seeking to trick people into working inside these fraud fortresses, regardless of their educational or financial background. (I found the same trend in my reporting as well).
This contradicts one common misconception about the workers inside these scam factories. The people on the other end are sometimes described as highly-educated and multi-lingual. Certainly there are instances where the workers have higher-education degrees or training and knowledge of multiple languages. But Franceschini and Li came across many Chinese, Vietnamese and Indonesian ex-scam industry workers who were young and lacked higher education and training or foreign language skills. Some were minors or construction workers without much formal education at all. What closed the skills gap? Technology and the training and instruction provided by the professional scammers who run the operations.
Another misconception: Scam compounds thrive in chaos, such as conflict zones. On the contrary, they seek stable, welcoming environments. The criminal bosses behind these operations need protective umbrellas from corrupt government officials and other enablers who will shield them from interference or crackdowns. This is one major reason why Cambodia has become such a magnet for industrial-scale scam operations in recent years; the country’s ruling elites have provided scam syndicates a protective umbrella they can rely on. (Even now, with the government’s recent announcement of a crackdown, there are reports that the nationwide raids have missed key sites and politically-connected elites who enable the industry).
Will Southeast Asia’s scam centers replace human laborers with artificial intelligence chatbots? Good question — it came up during the Q&A portion of our panel. Li discussed the outcome of a research experiment in which 20 participants were chatted up by either AI chatbots a real person who engaged them in the type of conversation that lures people into online investment scams. Afterwards, 18 out 20 said they preferred talking with the AI chatbot because its emotional support was perfect. That might sound like great news for scammers, except that all of the participants also correctly identified the AI chatbot. Why? The AI chatbot was simply too perfect. Scammers know this, so AI is unlikely to take over the entire scam process anytime soon. But it’s likely to be utilized more and more to assist in tricking people into parting with their life savings.
Franceschini, Li and Bo have done a lot of important research on scam compounds over the last few years so I’m really glad they decided to team up and share their vast knowledge with the public. I really enjoyed reading Scam and I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in transnational crime and human trafficking in Southeast Asia.
You can find more info about their book here, and I also recommend Global China Pulse, an open access journal co-founded by Franceschini which creates space for academic research and discussions on topics like this. You can check out the cyber-scam issue of Global China Pulse here.
Thank you so much to Ivan, Ling and Mark for bringing together so much crucial info on this topic and creating space for these important discussions.