Governments and businesses across Southeast Asia have been alarmed by renewed attention to the region’s notorious fraud hubs, where workers, often victims of human trafficking, seek to defraud individuals in wealthy economies such as Singapore and Hong Kong.
In mid-October, the United States and the United Kingdom severe sanctions Targeting individuals and entities within the Cambodia-based Prince Group that officials allege are linked to transnational cybercrime. Near Singapore later Seize assets worth more than $115 million linked to the group. (Prince Group said this week it “categorically denies” any accusation that it or its chairman, Chen Zhi, engaged in any illegal activity.)
South Korea also has Emergency measures introduced last month Kidnapped nationals rescued in Cambodia after a South Korean tourist was found murdered near a scam. On October 22, Vorapak Tanyawong, Deputy Minister of Finance of Thailand Resigned after just one month He began his work after accusations linked him to a network of scam centers in Cambodia. (Wola Parker denies the accusations)
On Thursday, the United States announced it will start Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, called it a “national security matter and a homeland security matter.”
The issue has been in the headlines since the beginning of the year when Chinese actor Wang Xing disappeared in Thailand and was taken to a scam center in neighboring Myanmar, and now the situation has escalated dramatically.
Hundreds of thousands of people remain Trapped in the heart of Southeast Asia scamsAccording to the United Nations. Jacob Sims, a fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center and an expert on transnational crime and human rights in Southeast Asia, said many people are attracted by false job ads on platforms such as Facebook.
“They were taken to these compounds that looked like penal colonies, with barbed wire and guard towers facing in and bars on the windows,” Sims added. “They were brought in and told to defraud people, and if they didn’t they were beaten, tortured, abused, killed – and that became the life of all these people.”
These scams are mainly located in the three countries of Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, especially in border areas that have been ceded by local governments actually control.
Despite growing global efforts to combat these impacts, sustainable change has proven elusive. When one fraud center is busted, another one quickly springs up elsewhere.
“Criminal groups are very strategic and look for areas where governance is weak, where local authorities are easily manipulated and where corruption is rampant,” said Hammerli Sriyai, a visiting fellow at the Yusof Issa Institute of Southeast Asia in Singapore. “These will be perfect conditions for them to collude with local elites.”
an emerging issue
The center of fraud has now become a problem for global diplomacy. Last month, during the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, South Korea and Cambodia Agreed to set up a dedicated task force to hunt down traffickers. The United States and the United Kingdom respectively Both men seized $15 billion Worth Bitcoin from Southeast Asia’s Scam Empire.
For one, criminal gangs have spent decades building their elite protection networks, Harvard’s Sims said. When the COVID-19 pandemic halted international travel, many criminal networks pivoted from gambling to fraud hubs.
Subsequently, a growing number of scams began to be protected by local elites.
“Local officials and economic interests often collude (with the operation of fraud centers), providing protection in exchange for kickbacks,” said Joanne Lin, a senior fellow and coordinator at the Yusof Issa Institute of Southeast Asia.
An example is KK Park, one of the biggest scams on the Myanmar-Thailand border. A spokesman for Myanmar’s military accused the country’s armed ethnic group, the Karen National Union, of joining forces with Chinese criminal groups to establish KK Park.
Scam centers have traditionally relied on trafficked people. A 2025 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that Victims at the center of Southeast Asia scams come from more than 50 countries around the world.
“The pandemic has created a new class of vulnerable people who have stable jobs, are multilingual, urban, well-educated, young and tech-savvy,” said Harvard’s Sims. “It expands the pool of people who are vulnerable to being trafficked into the centers of scams.”
But while scammers used to be mainly Chinese and Thai, the ranks of scammers have now expanded to include more young people from Myanmar and Cambodia. Political instability and Myanmar’s civil war have undermined employment prospects for young people, who now provide a steady source of labor for fraud hubs.
“This shows the corrupting influence of the industry. It’s not just a handful of foreigners using these countries as islands for their operations, it’s also attracting locals,” said researcher and co-author of Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Base.
Artificial Intelligence, Cryptocurrency, Deepfakes
Scammers are also leveraging new technologies to enhance their operations. Online translation services and AI deepfakes are increasing the sophistication and credibility of scams.
The most common is the “pig-killing scam,” a long-term fraud in which scammers build trust with victims through a false friendship or romantic relationship and then lure them with false investment plans.
“If you think you’re dating a very attractive person online, you’re going to want to talk to them, maybe over video chat. In this case, the use of deepfakes is really good,” Sims said.
Scammers also exploit alternative currencies such as Cryptocurrencies and other decentralized finance (DeFi) tools such as stablecoinsaiding the money laundering process and making illicit profits more difficult to trace.
Kristina Amerhauser, senior analyst at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), said these currencies are integral to cybercriminal activity because they are poorly understood and often pseudo-anonymous.
“When you exchange crypto back to fiat currency (i.e., government-issued currency, such as the U.S. dollar), the know-your-customer checks performed by cryptocurrency exchanges are often limited, making it very attractive to criminals,” Amerhauser said.
whack-a-mole game
These fraud hubs have far-reaching consequences for Southeast Asia and beyond.
They erode public trust and drain household savings, especially the elderly and those with low digital literacy, said Lim of the Yusof Issa Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Many victims lost their life savings, thereby undermining social stability.
For governments, she added, these activities damage international reputations and strain law enforcement resources.
but The transnational nature of the fraud hubThis, coupled with rampant corruption, makes it difficult for law enforcement to combat them.
“The international legal framework is based on state actors being treated as partners – each moving towards the vague idea of development, prosperity and freedom. But these states do not play by those rules,” Sims added. “In (countries with fraud centers) where the domestic rule of law has been so undermined, the idea of upholding international law in any way other than rhetoric is completely impossible.”
With the support of local power brokers, law enforcement became a game of whack-a-mole.
Yan Zhiyi, a senior analyst at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), said that even if international agencies such as Interpol manage to track down and identify the perpetrators at the center of the scam, it will still be challenging to identify a legitimate “authority” to target them. Instead, when a center is discovered or attacked, operators quickly move elsewhere and resume operations, Lin said.
root cause
As international pressure intensifies, crackdowns on fraud centers have intensified in recent months, such as in the case of KK Park. A military-led crackdown in October led to more than 2,000 arrests.
But some experts, such as Sims and Sriai, believe these measures are only temporary solutions.
“Most of the observable responses in all three countries were performative, designed to move the industry into the hands of more powerful local elites or relieve international pressure — or both — so there was no real reform,” Sims said.
Instead, they believe it is crucial to address the root causes of why people fall into fraudulent activity in the first place.
Sriyai said many countries around the world are facing economic stagnation, job insecurity and inflation, and countries need to address domestic issues to prevent citizens from being lured into scam centers.
Regional networks and intergovernmental organizations such as ASEAN or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, can also play a role.
“ASEAN can serve as a focal point between Southeast Asian countries and the international community, which may have the technical expertise and resources to help smaller ASEAN countries,” Sriyai said.
The alliance also provides an effective platform for negotiations with major countries such as China, where many fraud groups originate.
But ultimately, experts believe individuals must protect themselves. This is where governments can help improve digital literacy, including teaching people what cryptocurrencies and fintech platforms look like and how they work.
“Legislation and enforcement are important, but so is raising people’s awareness and building their ability to spot suspicious applications and understand when they might be investing in illegal platforms,” GI-TOC’s Amerhauser said.