Episode 4 | Inside Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds

Rejecting calls from an unknown number, blocking suspicious accounts on social media, turning down a job offer too good to be true: these days, almost all of us have had some interactions with online scams. With luck and vigilance, this amounts to little more than a nuisance; yet, for the many who fell victim to the schemes, the consequences can be devastating. In recent years, cyber scams have taken on an industrial scale, and Southeast Asia has emerged as a global epicentre. This is the subject of a timely and fascinating new book, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds (Verso 2025, with forthcoming editions in Chinese, Bahasa, and Vietnamese).

Who works at these compounds, and under what conditions? When the perpetrators of online scams are also victims of human trafficking, how should the authorities deal with them? What are the common misconceptions about the scam industry, and in what ways does it reflect features of legitimate businesses? For Episode 4 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with two of Scam’s co-authors, Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li.

Guest Bios:

Ivan Franceschini is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne. His current research explores the intersections of globalisation, labour, and the evolving dynamics of crime in the digital age, with a particular focus on the cyber-fraud industry. His latest books include Scam (Verso, 2025) Proletarian China (Verso, 2022), Global China as Method (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Xinjiang Year Zero (ANU Press, 2022). and Afterlives of Chinese Communism (ANU Press and Verso, 2019). He co-founded the Made in China Journal, Global China Pulse, and The People’s Map of Global China. He also co-directed the documentaries Dreamwork China (2011) and Boramey (2021).

Ling Li is currently pursuing a PhD at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a focus on the role of technology in enabling modern slavery and human trafficking in East and Southeast Asia. In the past few years, she has been providing support to survivors of scam compounds in Southeast Asia, interacting with local and international civil society organisations to bring them relief and help with repatriation. Besides being a co-author of Scam (Verso, 2025), her work has appeared in journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Trends in Organized Crime, and the Journal of International Women’s Studies, as well as public facing publications such as The Conversation and Global China Pulse.

Related Materials:

Dite, Chris. 2025. ‘The Online Scam Industry Is Capitalism Built on Slave Labor: An Interview with Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, and Mark Bo.’ Jacobin, 14 May. https://jacobin.com/2025/05/online-scam-industry-slave-labor,

Franceschini, Ivan, Mark Bo, and Ling Li (eds.) 2024. Scammed: Dissecting Cyber Slavery in Southeast Asia. Special issue of Global China Journal (vol. 3 no. 1). globalchinapulse.net/global-china-pulse-1-2024.

Franceschini, Ivan, Ling Li, Yige Hu, and Mark Bo. 2024. ‘A New Type of Victims? Profiling Survivors of Modern Slavery in the Online Scam Industry in Southeast Asia.’ Trends in Organized Crime. doi.org/10.1007/s12117-024-09552-2.

Franceschini, Ivan, Ling Li, and Mark Bo. 2025. Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds. London and New York, NY: Verso.

Franceschini, Ivan, and Ling Li. 2025. ‘Scam Factories: The Inside Story of Southeast Asia’s Brutal Fraud Compounds.’ Podcast and multimedia series in The Conversation, 24 February. theconversation.com/scam-factories-the-inside-story-of-southeast-asias-brutal-fraud-compounds-250448.

Li, Ling. 2025. ‘Doing Fieldwork at the Margins: Methodological Reflections from Research Crime, Violence, and Exploitation.’ Global China Pulse 4(1): 103–13. globalchinapulse.net/doing-fieldwork-at-the-margins-methodological-reflections-from-researching-crime-violence-and-exploitation.

Full episode transcript:

Yangyang (00:06.008)

When I was 13 years old, I visited Beijing for the first time from my home province to take part in an English public speaking competition. My mother thought we should make full use of the amenities of the nation’s capital and took me to get some medical exams done at one of its premier hospitals. The moment we walked out of the hospital, a middle-aged woman approached us. She was very friendly and she had a young child with her.

She talked about her child’s ailment and asked what our medical concern was. And then she said she knew a retired medical professor who was a specialist in this area and offered to take us to the professor’s private clinic. My mother and I followed the woman for a block or two before we felt something was fishy. So we made up an excuse and walked away.

I had not really thought about this episode from over 20 years ago until very recently, when I read a fascinating new book titled, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds. As much of our lives have moved from physical space into the digital realm, so have scams. Aided by social media and new technologies, cyber scams have taken on an industrial scale and countries in Southeast Asia, such as Cambodia and Myanmar, have emerged as a global epicenter for these transnational crimes. One thing that makes these crimes distinct is that the victims are not just the people who get scammed, but often also include the scammers themselves, who have been trafficked and kept captive at the scam compounds and are coerced into committing these crimes.

To discuss this urgent yet complex crisis. I’m very honored to have two of the book’s co-authors on the show, Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li. A third co-author of the book is Mark Bo.

So first up, Ivan Franceschini is a lecturer in Chinese studies at University of Melbourne. He’s also a co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Made in China journal. Thank you so much for joining us, Ivan.

Ivan (02:16)

Thank you. Thank you Yangyang for having me here.

Yangyang (02:18)

So you first started researching the scam industry in Southeast Asia a few years ago, right? How did you come upon this topic?

Ivan (02:27)

Well, it was quite by chance at that time. I was working on Chinese investment in Cambodia and I was interested in how Chinese investor and Chinese investment was playing out at the grassroots. I was interested in the impact of Chinese investment on labor rights specifically. So I was working on construction workers and the situation in construction sites in this city on the coast in Cambodia, called Sihanoukville. And I remember at that time that was about 2019, 2018, and I remember seeing these new buildings that had just popped up near the coast, on the beach, right next to the beach, in this village on the outskirts of the city. And they were like this kind of like a compound, was a compound, it’s like several apartment building or like office buildings, like in the middle of nowhere, basically, it was a village. And then they were known as Chinatown among the locals. And so when I heard for the first time about this Chinatown, when I saw them coming out, mean, popping up out of nowhere in the fields, in this kind of coast, on the coast right next to the beach. I was really surprised and I couldn’t make any sense of it. mean, people were saying that people inside were doing some online work, but it was always unclear what kind of online work and everything. It online gambling, probably, that’s what they were saying at that time. But then later, like much later, several months later, during the pandemic and everything, stories started to come out more more often about scams, about people trapped inside and that’s how I realized that that was one of the most notorious and one of the biggest scam compounds at that time at least. So that was my first exposure to the industry.

Yangyang (04:07)

So you just like stumbled upon one of these SCAM compounds. And then later during your research, you also surveyed a few more of these sites. Can you give our listeners a sense, like a visual description of what do these compounds look like from the outside?

Ivan (04:21)

Well, you have to think like these scams compounds that don’t exist in a void, they’re not in in an emptiness in the desert or in the jungle we are talking about Southeast Asia here. They are often embedded in the urban space, but you have to think that they are like, they’re very different. I mean, they are very diverse. There is not one size fits all type of compound. You some of them are casinos and then you have space inside that is reserved to scams.

Others are hotels and have the upper floors that are reserved to scam operations. But in some cases, and those are the most visible ones, you have these real compounds with several buildings inside that are walled. And they have like often they have barbed wire on top of the walls and they are very much guarded. So they have gates and you can see surveillance cameras, and then you can see all the buildings inside and then you know like you can see immediately that these compounds scam compound from one thing the windows are barred even at the higher levels at the higher floors you see that the windows are bars which is not to prevent people from getting in like burglars and people like that, it’s just to prevent people from getting out jumping out and stuff like that.

Yangyang (05:31)

Yeah, it is really, really interesting. Like these facilities are not really subtle, as you said, they’re not so much invisible and sometimes they don’t even try to hide their coercive nature and are very much a part of the local economy and local community. And so to go from the outside of the compounds to inside, like who actually works there and what do they do? We’d like to bring in Ling Li. So Ling is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Venice and her research and work have focused on issues related to human trafficking and modern slavery. So Ling, how did your work on trafficking and coerced labor, these issues bring you to the scam compounds in Southeast Asia? Can you give us a brief description of who actually work inside these compounds? Like how old are they, where they come from and how did they end up there?

Ling (06:24)

Okay, yeah, sure. Thank you so much and very pleasure to be here today. Well, my background has long been in issues related to irregular migrants and human trafficking. I’ve worked as an investigator on cross-border drug trafficking cases and then later with humanitarian organizations on child soldier prevention efforts. So the first time I came to Cambodia was actually as a consultant for the modern slavery research center at the University of Liverpool.

At that time my main goal was to understand the situation of Cambodian women being trafficked to the Middle East to work as domestic workers. But when I arrived in Cambodia, I happened to meet some Chinese businessmen and began hearing about cases of Chinese nationals being trafficked into this country and also into those scam compound.

That led me to connect with local and international NGOs during rescue or after care work on the ground.

Over that time, I also started to receive direct requests for help. I mean, there’s not a lot of Chinese working on this issue. when the NGOs saw there’s a Chinese national and can speak Chinese, they just give me the cases. And that’s when I realized the situation was far more complex. Many people weren’t just trafficked, as you said, but they were detained and tortured.

And what made it worse is that they were being treated as scammers back to their original countries. Even though many had clearly been deceived, they have evidence to show that. That’s when I became particularly interested in the issue of false criminality in scam compound and the blurry line between victim and perpetrator.

And talking about the question about inside the compound. Demographics really vary by country, but most of those trapped are young men in their 20s and 30s, but we do find minors and also people like in their 50s. And they came from a wide range of countries like China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines are the most common ones from 2022. But then after that, there’s increasingly from African national, nations like Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. And recently I’ve also encountered victims from Turkey, Brazil, Morocco and Jamaica. So the way they end up there are also very diverse. Many were alert by online job ads, as a lot of people know, like offering high salaries, but others are tricked by friends or even their family members.

I mean that’s something that mirrors pattern that we can see in more conventional traffic cases.

And I wanted to also say something is like more recently that the scam recruiters have adapted their tactics. for example, they now deliberately lower the advertised salary to make the fake jobs seem more realistic. In some cases, people who lost money at casino were also sold into the scam compound to pay off their debts. But of course, we also see kidnapping cases that was intensively at the beginning of this, like so 2022 we see a lot. Now there’s still some, but less. And of course there’s a significant number of individuals who entered the compound knowingly to work in scams.

Yangyang (10:24)

Wow. So this is a really complex scenario and impacting a very diverse population, even just for the people working inside the scam compounds themselves. And one thing Ling, I noticed what you just mentioned, and also you lay out in the book that most of these people working from the scam compounds in various situations of enslavement are young men. And that seems like a little bit counterintuitive, especially that I also learned from your fascinating book that one typical scamming technique is these romance plots where these young men also receive like manuals to pose as women online and to trap people into these romance plots and for these scam victims to give up their money. And so that just like puzzles me like why not just like use women in the first place, especially one would think that young women and children are the usual victims of human trafficking as you just mentioned when you first came to Cambodia, you also worked on Cambodian women being trafficked.

Ling (11:26)

Yeah, that’s a very important observation. Thank you so much for bringing it up. I mean, the popular stereotype is that trafficking mostly affects women, especially for sexual exploitation. But that narrow framing makes it harder for people to recognize other forms of trafficking, especially those involving men. I in fact, this is not very new to trafficking men in sectors like the fishing industry. There’s a long history of male victims being trafficked and exploited under harsh conditions and the scam industry in a way follows a similar logic. mean, the labor demand is for people who can endure long hours, produce high volume of scams in this case, and work under constant civilians and threat. it’s physically and psychologically intense work and young men are often seen as more suitable or I don’t know if the word is good, expendable in the eyes of the recruiter and traffickers. Well, I haven’t done any systematic research on this gender pattern thing, but we do have some assumptions based on the field of observations and open to have a discussion. like first in many countries, it’s more socially acceptable or even expected for men to migrant alone for work.

And I’m not saying that women do not travel alone. I mean, in places where female labor migration is more normalized, like in the Philippines, we do see more women among the victims. And a second thing is, like in countries like China, the legal and media focus on trafficking has long been centered on women and children.

That leads many men to believe that this is what happened to me. And when they do for victims, they often receive less public sympathy or institutional support. When I first started working in Cambodia, I was surprised to find there was absolutely no shelter specifically for male victims of trafficking.

That invisibility creates a vicious circle because men aren’t seen as victims. They also don’t get the help they need.

Yangyang (13:46)

I also learned from the book that these scam industries in Southeast Asia have absolutely taken on like an industrial scale. is a multi-billion dollar industry with hundreds of thousands of people working in it. And so an industry of such scale and sophistication, as you also mentioned, they did not just like emerge overnight. Even these scam facilities cannot be built up overnight.

So Ivan, coming back to you, can you give us a brief overview of the history of the scam industry? How did it end up in Southeast Asia now, but where did it emerge from, and how has it evolved over the years?

Ivan (14:24)

Well, the interesting thing here is that Southeast Asia is only one among several clusters in the online fraud industry. It’s not the only one. It’s the most visible one right now because of human trafficking, because of violence, because of torture. But it is not the only one. if you are looking at the broader online scam industry, we can see other clusters in West Africa, East Europe and other places in the world. If we look at the literature and what has been written by criminologists and everything, we see that Southeast Asia is barely mentioned.

Only now, only the past couple of years, some scholars have been writing about this, but before then, it was a blind spot. Which means that the industry in Southeast Asia is quite new. So in the book and in our research, we have been trying to understand how and why Southeast Asia has become this kind of cybercrime hub. And the answer is that it has brought us to Taiwan in the 90s and we found the first earliest evidence of these kind of groups that started engaging in telecommunication fraud using the phones and then the internet and everything in the late 90s and then we found that they started targeting the mainland, Chinese in the mainland and then they started to move on the coast in China in Fujian mostly and in other places all over the coast, east coast and you know, like, and so we try to track down the movement of these people. We saw a place in China, Anxi, a county that emerged as the sort of the scam capital of China because there was a really high concentration of this kind of scam operations in the early 2000s. And the interesting thing is that Southeast Asia still didn’t appear on the map at that time in the 2000s. It started to appear on the map around early 2000, 2011. There were some Chinese scholars, there are some Chinese scholars who have been doing a study and they found that it was 2011 when the first mass repatriation, not mass, like the first repatriation of people detained, Chinese people detained in Southeast Asia, the repatriation to China was in 2011. Before then there is no evidence of that happening. But we see that happening in early 2010. So at that time we see these Chinese, ethnic Chinese, scammers starting to set up shop in Cambodia, in the Philippines and in other parts of the Stasi allows Myanmar. And why they did that at that time was it was because law enforcement in Taiwan, mainland China was catching up. China was cracking down quite hard on this kind of operations. So they started moving to other places where they could find more suitable, a more suitable environment, meaning impunity to carry out their operation. So in 2011, around early 2010s, you see that you start seeing these kind of reports in the local media in South East Asia and Cambodia about raids done by local law enforcement. And the interesting thing is that these raids were always on apartments, on villas. They were very small scale operations. A few dozen people maybe, but it was always small scale. And then when you saw it in the news, I mean, it made the news because it was something like, okay, quite striking. So that was the… beginning, but then, know, what changes like in the mid-2010s, you see that this kind of operation started scaling up. You see the compounds we discussed popping up that was in the late 2010s. That was before COVID. The idea that these kind of things happen only during COVID, like that’s misconception, just started way before COVID in the late 2010s.

And you see this kind of operation like coalescing into scam compounds, coming together, sharing infrastructure, sharing expenses and sharing protection costs. And that made them much stronger. And this kind of new political economy of the scam industry, online scam industry, made it possible for them to carry out scams on an industrial scale. And in this, they were also aided by new technological advancements.

So basically this is the timeline and then know you had COVID from 2020 to 2022 and that’s when we started seeing all these reports and not even reports at that time it was people, rumors and people sharing online experience of being trafficked in the compound, people asking for help. It was at a time when mobility was quite limited obviously during COVID to Southeast Asia, China, you know like strongly limited international mobility for Chinese nationals. And so at that time, you started seeing stories of people getting trafficked from China, from Taiwan, from other parts of East Asia. So because that’s when the industry turned to slave labor, basically. And then since then, it has been growing and growing and growing. And then today is really a massive, massive industry. But if you ask me, okay, so this is the trajectory.

And the interesting thing is why South-East Asia? That’s the question we should be asking. So we know that there is a push factor, which is law enforcement crackdown. When China cracked down really hard on this operation, as Taiwan did, you see they move. They can’t survive. If there is a will from a government to crack down on them, these scammers have to move. And so the question is, where do they move? And they have to choose a place. They have to choose some places. So why did they choose Cambodia? Why did they choose Myanmar or Laos or the Philippines? Well, here there is a misconception, another one. There is this idea that is going around and it has gained a lot of strength that our scam compounds, they appear in this country because this country are broke, because this country there is no law in this country, this country are unstable. And people look at Myanmar and they look at civil war and say, look, this is the evidence, this is the proof that our scammers can happen only where there is a breakdown in public order and safety and whatever.

It is not like that. Scam operations, thrive in places that are stable, where they can get protection. The key is that they need infrastructure, they need access to the internet, they need access to services. But the key here is protection. They need places that are stable, where they can thrive and where they can just be protected. And who is protecting them? That’s the question. The protection comes from local elites that are willing to act as protective umbrellas.

So it’s not about instability. When you have instability, like in Myanmar, that’s a nuisance, that’s a problem for scammers. That’s when they move. Cambodia in these days, while we are recording this episode, is cracking down on the compounds. And we don’t know how that will play out in the long term. There are a lot of questions and lot of doubts about how effective this crackdown will be. But we have seen another exodus of this operation at the moment. They’re just moving around. They are moving from Cambodia to the next place and jumping around.

Law enforcement crackdown. Okay, we have to move out where we move to the next country. Next country crackdown, we move back to the first country. It’s this kind of game that they’re playing. So this is what we are seeing right now. And yeah, I hope this answered your question.

Yangyang (21:24)

Thank you so much, Ivan, for this absolutely fascinating overview across time and space and with a lot of nuance packed into this industry that has shown incredible mobility and adaptability over the years. And so one thing that I did notice, as you mentioned, right, the scam industry, of course, it’s a global problem.

But with regards to the part in Southeast Asia, it traces back some of its roots to Taiwan, to mainland China. On the other hand, a lot of its victims on both sides of the scamming schemes are ethnically Chinese. And so I’m wondering, you also mentioned part of the reason it ended up in Southeast Asia has to do with this push and pull factor like crackdowns within Taiwan and in mainland China. And so what is the role of say the Chinese state actors in this scam industry in Southeast Asia? Are they just ineffective crackdowns? Are they seeing this as another country’s problem? Or are there actual Chinese state actors that are in some ways complicit in the schemes as some reports have alleged or criticized the Chinese government of being complicit in this as well?

Ivan (22:38)

Well, mean, China, as you mentioned, been… The Chinese people, Chinese national within China, they have been targeted very heavily by scammers, right? So there has been a massive outflow of money from China that has been lost due to scams and online gambling. And the Chinese government has been really following this with a lot of concern for many years, which is why it has been cracking down since the early 2000s, right? Which is the reason why, you see, as I mentioned this operation move from China to East Asia at some point. So China has been cracking, the Chinese government has been cracking down really hard for financial reasons and also for because of the societal consequences of this kind of scam that are really disruptive for families all over China because it’s like an epidemic of scams. So that being said, mean like there is this issue that the industry is seen as a Chinese thing but I think this is something that should be challenged for two reasons mostly. One is that the industry is really a global thing, it’s not a Chinese thing. We are focused on the Chinese side of things, but it’s just one piece of a broader picture that has been enabled by the growth of new technologies that are really global in scope and the whole illicit infrastructure of services that allows scams to thrive. And the other thing is like, you need to look at a local context. So yeah, you have ethnic Chinese scammers, but they work in cahoots with local counterparts, organized crime groups, like the traffickers, they are not all Chinese. And they also need local protective umbrellas. So you have this global picture and you also have the local picture. And Chinese actors are like sandwich in the middle and they play a very important role, but it’s not all. So about the question, I’m not trying to dodge the question about Chinese actors. There has been a lot of emphasis on, okay, China is behind this. You see a lot of…there are some observers, some reports claiming, China behind it. Some people believe that China is using the scams to erode the economic strength of the United States. This kind of perspective is very US or Europe centric in that it is completely neglects how Chinese people within China are also targeted by the scams and are probably by luck also one of the biggest markets for scammers. I mean, this is quite icy. I think it’s quite bias as a perspective. What we know about Chinese, the role of Chinese, the Chinese state, Chinese state actors. There are reports, of course, of individual criminals that have been linked to triads and other groups, organized crime groups within China that have been joined, joining activities that were organized by Chinese government. There are reports about some individuals. But again, you know, like this doesn’t prove any direct connection between these individuals and the state and also the role of these individuals in the industry should not be overplayed because we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of compounds and these individuals are connected to a few big ones in some cases. So what we see for certain if we have to look at the role of the state, we see for certain some state-owned enterprises who are being contracted by compound owners to build the structure.

We saw the banners of the state-owned enterprises. So we saw that. We saw it in Cambodia. We see it elsewhere. But these are contractors. So they are not shareholders of the compounds. So it is very possible that when they were building the compound, they had no clue what they were building. And then that their involvement stopped the moment the construction was over. We didn’t find any evidence, convincing evidence of continuing involvement of state-owned enterprises in the compounds once these became scam compounds. So there is definitely a failure in due diligence here. There is no doubt about that and there should be more scrutiny on this. But that’s all we found in terms of involvement of the Chinese state in this online scam industry on these kind of operations. China has been cracking down really hard within China, yes. It has also been intervening in Myanmar with strength. It has been also working behind the scenes quite strongly in the Philippines, in Cambodia. Of course, they adopt different tactics in every country. just… probably, I mean, there is a lot of criticism about the Chinese response. It’s not saying that what I’ve been doing is perfect. But I would say that blaming the Chinese, the online scam industry and the Chinese government is quite reductive and is also a distraction from what should really be done at this stage, which is like to look, okay, this is a global challenge and we are all like facing it together and then we should really find ways to deal with it. And that this involves talking to the Chinese government in this sense. You can criticize as much as you need, as you should. But I mean, like there is no way around talking to the Chinese government about how to deal with these scammers and the wave of misery that they are causing to Chinese citizens, to US citizens, to people all over the world because again it is a global phenomenon.

Yangyang (28:00)

Yeah, so like a racialized lens on a global problem really often both misses the cause and misplaces the solutions. And I think one of the things with like a Western-centric quote unquote China threat discourse is actually exaggerates the power of the Chinese state. That even with all these crackdowns from the Chinese state based on its stability and financial incentives, it still cannot just like simply stamp out the scam industry. And so Ling, coming back to you.

As Ivan  also mentioned earlier, these scam compounds, are not just placed into lawless societies. They are actually placed into societies with certain stability, with certain infrastructure to be able to support the scam industries. So there are actually a lot of local elites, whether in politics, in the military, in business, that are in some ways involved with industry, with the scam industry. And so with your work on the ground, both like working with the victims and researching the industry, you must also interact with some of these local elite and some of the local actors. So talk a little bit about the role of the local elites, their complicity in the scam industries. And one thing that actually puzzles me is what is their motivation? Is it purely personal financial gain or is it more complex than that?

Ling (29:19)

Well, from what I observe, it’s just my personal opinion is the motivation is absolutely financial. But it’s not just about individual profit. In many cases, particularly in Myanmar the scam economy plays a structural role in sustaining armed actors. So for example, based on testimonies from the son of Bai Shoucheng, who was a Okokan politician from Shan State, Myanmar, has stated that up to half of their troops were working as a compound security guard and their salary were paid directly by the scam bosses. So in this context, the scam industry effectively bankrolls, the military apparatus. And I mean another financial element.

You actually have already mentioned in the introduction that the scam compound contribute to the local economy. And that is a case specifically in Cambodia. They contribute by paying for utilities, hiring local guards and creating demand for restaurants, transportation and construction service. So this economic integration create incentives for local power holders to tolerate or even facilitate their presence.

For them, mean, protecting the scam economy becomes a rational decision to safeguard their own political or economic interest. But that’s from the like, elite’s big picture. But also like for people working, even go against like the law enforcement, they should be against the the industry, then they become a part of it also take their own share. So that is individual gains. So that’s quite complicated.

Yangyang (31:19)

Yeah, so following up on this point, so these scam compounds, they’re not isolated from the local environment or the local community and often they are even in some ways contributing to if one can use that word to the local economy, not just directly, but also through related industries such as construction or even like food delivery services, as I read from the book. And so even in the book, you also raise this concept called compound capitalism to understand the scam industry. Can you unpack that concept for us? And also s compound capitalism a particular type of capitalism, or should it be understood as being related to other types of capitalism that also employ some similar practices to the scam industry?

Ivan (32:13)

Well, mean, compound capitalism was a concept that we coined to emphasize how this kind of phenomenon, is, you know, like it’s largely new, mean, scam compounds are something that came up like in the past 10 years or less. In fact, as longer roots, if we look at the history of capitalism, we find some elements that scammed compounds, some elements that just, scammed compounds managed to combine in a way that maximizes their ability to extract money from people. So the point was to emphasize how these compounds just have some historical roots. So compound capitalism, as we define it as like four elements, the first one is the element of exceptionality. So basically it is the idea that these compounds, work as areas of exception where the power of the state somehow doesn’t apply.

They are carved out from the state. what happens inside the compound stays inside the compounds. They have their own force of policing. They just manage discipline and everything without involvement from the outside in some ways. They are still connected to the outside economy. Of course they need the food and services and everything. But still they work as errors of exception in so many ways. Like they manage the discipline of the workforce in any way they want. Laws don’t apply and people cannot get in, police cannot get in, authorities cannot get in. So that’s the first element, exceptionality. The second one is how they discipline the workforce. So the way the manner of the workers is like had a long history. We see in history that a lot of employers they have been, you know, like providing accommodation to their workforce, you know, as a way to domesticate them, to control them, of course. Sometimes they did it in a very paternalistic way as a favor, as a way to create this kind of enterprise, as a family or whatever. But it is also a very strong form of control. So we try to look back in time, we see this kind of, know, provision of dormitories, accommodation to the workers and the way they are managed and controlled on the work site in cases like in South Africa, in the mines, during apartheid.

And then also we look back at the dormitory regime in China, which of course was not slavery, cannot be compared to what we are seeing in the compounds today. But there are some similarities and some, you know, like some reverberations that we see in the compounds today. And then the last two elements, one is something that is about the extraction of data that we compare to surveillance, what has been called surveillance capitalism.

We see that these compounds rely on the forced extraction of data from targets. And then we see some similarities in the way this is done by legitimate companies. They also rely on data extraction in different ways, of course, and also in subtle ways. And as a way to make profits, the compound rely on that. They market this kind of data. They need this data. They take advantage of it. And of course, then they use this data to scam people out of their money.

But I also like, you know, like they provide a sort of service, like when you are a scammer, your job is to create a connection with your victim, at least in romance scams or that kind of scant that is called big butchering. And it’s to create a connection, you have to create an addiction in the people you are talking to. You have to create a need, you have to make them addicted to you, to your voice, to talking to you, right? So that’s this kind of addictive, addictive quality of the let’s call them services that are provided by the scan compounds between scare quotes, of course, is something that we find a lot in common with what has been called surveillance capitalism. And the final point in this compound capitalism is like how these operations rely on a workforce that is mostly desperate. We find a lot of people inside the compounds that have been like, they have lost their livelihood during COVID or after.

They have no alternatives for employment. So they are desperate enough that they might believe any offer that comes their way, job offer, no matter how unrealistic it is, and they might just buy it because they’re desperate to find a way out from the predicament. So this reliance on a workforce that has been emiserated, poor, and then like, desperate is something that is another component of compound capitalism. Until this last point, I would like to emphasize a bit because we discussed the victims before in this episode, but it doesn’t really come out enough how the people who end up in the industry are in many cases just desperate. There is this idea that these people are greedy, and for sure some of them are. For sure there are many of them, as Ling said before, that go into the compounds willingly. There is no question.

Some of them are criminals. They stay there. They go willingly. They remain willingly. They manage to make some money in the process also. Not that much, not that often, but they do. But a lot of them are really desperate people. And they’re not even that kind of, you know, like a new type of victim that is educated and, like you think they have an IT background, they can speak languages, they know how to scam people, they need to be able to talk to people. Otherwise, how would they be able to scam you?

If they can’t even speak your language or they don’t know how to manipulate your feeling, right? That’s wrong. That’s another misconception. We see that a lot of these people, a lot of these victims are really… They’re really young people in some cases, but they don’t have any… The education is average or lower than average. Middle school, elementary school, high school, but definitely not IT background or stuff like that. They don’t speak other languages than their…

Chinese, if they’re Chinese or the home language, whatever that is, and then they just have no experience traveling abroad. We see minors, we see this type of people, we see really people who have a lot in common with the traditional idea of human trafficking victims. So really we are dealing with these kind of workers.

So I just wanted to point that out to make it clear because that’s a really important point that often missing.

Yangyang (38:41)

So what I’m really learning here is that the scam industry shouldn’t be understood at something just isolated or just like criminals, but it’s really part of global capitalism. And in some ways it’s not just in terms of how the scam compounds are embedded in local economies and embedded with local businesses, but also the scam industry itself in some ways also aggregates and is manifesting some extreme features of legitimate capitalist businesses as we know it, such as like sweat jobs or surveillance technologies or cryptocurrency or online gaming and some of these industries. So like the line between criminal activity and legitimate business with regards to the scam industry at times is actually rather murky. And another thing I’ve learned from the book, is that another part where the boundary of legality is murky is that between a victim of human trafficking and a criminal, a perpetrator of online scams. so Ling, coming back to you, I know that you have worked with different organizations to help and rescue some of these individuals trapped inside the scam compounds. And I imagine resources are quite limited.

And so especially for a crisis of this kind of magnitude. So how do you determine, how do you draw the line between a victim and a perpetrator? And how do you prioritize whom to save first?

Ling (40:18)

Thank you. And this is one of the most difficult challenge I have to say. Well, I think if you are a police officer handling these cases and you must gather enough evidence to answer tough questions like to what extent did they, these individuals commit crimes to reduce their own suffering and how much control did they really have over their actions? And then this answers.

Will be very initial, essential, I mean, because there is legal loophole in the current laws. So right now for forced criminality, we rely on the non-punishment principle that’s adopted by all the ASEAN countries. So it means if someone holds a gun, force me to cross the border and throw me to a factory to work non-stop, I shouldn’t be punished for illegal border crossing. But the real life scenario is not that simple, right? Even certain countries waive punishments, certain forced criminal activities like immigration violation and forced prostitution. But scam is definitely not one of them. So the burden of proof falls completely on victims themselves. It is never easy because it is a common practice for a scam company to monitor victims’ working phones. So no evidence can be kept or sent out. And criminals may even encourage victims to talk to their families, but under their surveillance, of course, just to fake the evidence that the victims did the crime voluntarily notice that most embassies have advised their citizens to surrender, pay fines and be repatriated instead of going through the victim identification process and the reason virus, but most officials cite the complicity and the length of the process and the difficulties to interact with local law enforcement. With this background, this comes to the question of how to how we properly identify victims. Well, we do follow international standards like the UN indicators. In practice, this means asking people whether they reported their case to the police on all their empathy and listening carefully to their story to assess whether it makes sense, whether they are signs of control and deception. But again, the reality is messy. So we’ve definitely encountered cases where people lied, either to avoid paying exit fees to their scam employer or because they failed punishment back home and sought claiming to be a victim might protect them. So we’ve learned in a hard way to be cautious and in practice we tend to prioritize certain groups such as women, children and those who report early after entering the compound, especially if they contact the law enforcement in their country right away. And these cases are often clearer and carry a lower risk of manipulation to us. But we are also very aware that this approach has limitations.

Yangyang (43:34)

This is really interesting. So I listened to a recent Chinese language podcast you gave and I learned a lot from it. But I did notice there is one note you mentioned that for the rescue efforts you’re involved with the civil society organizations, one criteria with regards to Chinese national victims trapped in the scam compounds is that you require the victims’ families in China to report to the police as a criteria for them to receive assistance from your organization. Am I understanding correct?

Ling (44:07)

Yes.

Yangyang (44:08)

I see. So forgive me for this layperson’s question, but I guess like an imperfect analogy I thought of is, for example, means testing for welfare recipients here in the US. And so naively, I would think it is better to save someone or assist someone who might be undeserving than to miss out on victims who may not be able to meet the criteria or for various reasons may prefer not to interact with law enforcement. So I’m curious in this case, is this like a preference for your work or is it a reluctant compromise because of the complexity of this issue, especially that involves transnational movement of people. So one inevitably have to deal with borders and have to deal with these law enforcement agents of the state.

Ling (45:03)

It’s for sure a necessary compromise. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, we’ve been deceived a few times by people who weren’t actually victims. They went to the scam centers willingly and they did crime. And then it put us in a weird position if we help them and we become the facilitator of a criminal. And also given our limited resources, we have to make difficult choices and focus our effort on those who truly need urgent protection.

And I mean asking people to report to the police is one way to very effective way to assess their situation. If someone is genuinely not involving in scam, they usually won’t hesitate to file a report. This is my experience during these four years. But for those who are afraid of being exposed, often they disappeared from contact once. I mean once this step is required.

But that said, we are not trying to abandon people just because they made mistakes. If someone was lured into scamming or participate out of fear or survival, we will still support them their rescue. We don’t believe anyone deserve to be abused or held against their will. But we also recognize that accountability matters. If a person knowingly commit scam, they do need to face legal consequences after returning home.

That’s part of doing justice not only for them as victims, but also for the people they scammed.

Yangyang (46:39)

I see. Thank you, not just for the answer, but for the incredible and incredibly difficult work that you and your colleagues do.

And so Ivan, coming back to you, know that part of your expertise has been in labor issues and labor organizing. And one of the interesting things about the scam industry is that sometimes local authorities, as you described in the book, would treat the people trying to escape the scam compounds not as victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, but as people who are just like having labor disputes and are unsatisfied with their employment conditions. And so I’m kind of curious, are there lessons from labor organizing and labor activism that might be of assistance to the people inside the scam compounds?

And related to the issue of legality here, partly I’m also thinking of, say, like sex workers organizing, when they’re also engaged in activities that are often considered illegal in their countries of work, and they’re also often victims of abuse and trafficking.

Ivan (47:45)

This is a very good question and indeed this is a labor problem. The way it has been framed as a labor issue is like it has been so far by local authorities in places where there are scam compounds and they have been trying to frame this as a labor dispute as a way to hide what’s really going on in the compounds so they can claim that it’s all a willing arrangement between two free parties and there is a labor dispute and one is like always holding a grudge and making up claims so that’s the way it has been working which is really extremely problematic and we see it all the time in Cambodia. The Cambodian government had been denying the existence of the problem for many years and whenever there were these kind of people coming out with these kind of claims, what the Cambodian government was claiming to the industrial labour dispute. For me it is also a issue in the sense that these compounds are a form of organisation of labour to rely on slaves, on a workforce that is partly made by slaves at least.

And so I was very interested in looking at them from a labor perspective, how they discipline workers and this kind of situation like bonus, rewards, punishments. The labor organization on the compound is a really peculiar thing to look at. But coming to your question about lessons for organizing and the people in the compounds, are very atomized. Solidarity inside the compound is very difficult to achieve considering all the constraints and everything. It’s more common based on our observation among certain types of population. Vietnamese workers that are known for having quite strong solidarity and managing to run out of compound en masse. There were several cases like that and we heard several Chinese victims in our interviews saying that they were kind of jealous of how Vietnamese were managing to do this. But overall, solidarity is very limited.

And when you come out of the compound, I mean, it’s quite rare to come out en masse. Usually you come out individually, you come out alone, and then you end up in immigration or detention. And then you might, you find it very hard to create bonds with other people, you know, like you also get moved around a lot and move from one dorm to the next, from one room to the next, from one compound to the next, then you get out and then you are put in a place and then the other in detention and everything. So it’s very hard for them to create this kind of bonds that leads to solidarity.

And another thing that you also, they are very atomized, the workforce is very atomized here. And another thing you have to think is about shame. You compare to sex work and the element of shame is definitely there. The crime that these people commit or they are believed to commit is, it has victims. Sex work is not the same. Here we are talking about people ruining people’s lives or people who are believed to have ruined people’s lives financially, emotionally too. So the shame they have to deal with, and the shame they have to deal with at the societal level when they go back to China or their communities is very strong. So it’s very difficult for them to come out and, you know, like, I want to be, you know, like, I want to create an organization. Some of them do. Some of them, become quite vocal they are what Ling calls survival leaders. There are that kind of people that the majority will not want to do that. They will want to move on and also because of the pressure from society of course. So it’s quite difficult in the case of sex work you have feminist movement, you have a lot of movement and history that has built up to a point that the shame has just been considerably reduced and there have been strong efforts to organize, raise awareness among former sex workers or current sex workers.

We don’t see that in the case of the compounds, not at the moment. Unions should be involved. We have been saying that for a long time. There were some efforts in this sense. Unions in the country of origin. So you can have unions in the places where you have compounds, but you’re talking about Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar. And of course, unions in Cambodia, have been weakened considerably by the authoritarian politics of the past 10 years or more in Cambodia. So there is not much that can be done even if there have been attempts. But what can be done is to mobilize trade unions in countries of origin from where the victims come. And then you could try to mobilize unions to monitor agents, to do awareness raising, to do that kind of stuff, you know, to look at what’s going on in the places where the compounds are recruiting people. That could be done, that should be done more. I haven’t seen much union involvement in the issue. Again, there were some attempts in this sense, but then with the recent changes in the US government. The US government used to be one of the main supporter of anti-trafficking efforts in the region, and know, with the demise of USAID, this has been considerably undermined. So given these changes, these attempts to involve unions have become much, much weaker and that’s quite sad.

Yangyang (52:55)

Yeah, so thank you for raising this really important point that a lot of the shame that is associated with people involved with the scam industry is not just out of like social customs as related to sex work, but it is really that there are a lot of victims that have been schemed out of their life savings and also suffered really serious emotional damage, which just makes this issue even more complicated in terms of assisting the victims who have escaped or have been rescued from the scam compounds. So Ling, coming back to you, I’m wondering whether you could give us some suggestions or some examples in terms of how can national governments on one hand, whether it is from the destination country or the source country, or how can civil society organizations or society at large assist with these individuals who have managed to leave the scam compounds and are looking to restart their lives, even with all the trauma and all the physical and psychological damage they have suffered.

Ling (54:04)

Yeah, sure. mean, before we can call them as victims, they have to be identified. Many, many countries in, I mean, ASEAN region or even globally, we do have CSOs, NGOs having this program, legal support, mental support, but then the condition is they are victims. So you have to go through victim identification and recognized. And it is never easy.

I mean, take a Cambodia example, the precondition of getting identified is the victim have to be rescued by the police. That’s majority because if you escape or pay a ransom to get out, there’s no proof you will detent. So you are not victim kind of by natural.

And you need, I mean, just you need a lot of luck to be accepted to the to the shelter, to the to the process. And I have dealt with more than 300 cases right now and maybe 30, 40 get in maximum.

Then they will face three times interviews, same questions, but from different departments since they don’t share their findings, which means victim have to tell their trauma multiple times. And sometimes the memory doesn’t match each other and then they might not be identified as victim. And what is worse is that the victim often have to wait three to seven months before the repatriation with no fast track for minors or people with health condition and also before repatriation the Cambodian government will ask victims to sign a paper to claim they will give up their right to seek legal justice in Cambodia. So you can see even this part the starting is so difficult and then there is a possibility of the victim fail the identification. Then they are facing illegal state fines, which is around 3000 US dollars in Cambodia, and they won’t have no support at all.

I mean, I’ve shared a lot of negative facts, but there are countries are doing and trying to do better. for example, in Thailand, where our NGO partners have been strongly advocate for trauma informed interviewing and also in the Philippines, we’ve also seen encouraging signs like several survivors we followed were able to access reintegration assistance after returning home. And there’s a relatively well structured process in is that include initial reception, psychosocial support and some job referrals. And even in China, well, there’s a variable. So it depends on the province. We’ve encountered cases where local authorities did nothing, but also a few where survivors said that the government helped them find employment. So it’s kind of inconsistent.

So what we, well, the problem here right now is the funding, especially for civil society organizations. As Ivan already said that after the US aid cut in the region, not a lot of people can do anything in rescue, sheltering and integration work. And without this financial support.

It’s incredibly hard to provide any long-term survivor center assistance that are really needed.

Yangyang (57:41)

I see this is indeed incredibly difficult and we are coming up on the hour for the program. And I know that we’ve discussed a very heavy, both intellectually complex and emotionally challenging topic. And I’d like to end on a more optimistic note. Like how do you find light at the darkness in the dark corners of humanity? And so Ling to give you the last word, I was wondering whether you have or could share a moment or two from your work in a field that have not just like didn’t just, I know a lot of this work challenges one’s faith in humanity, but are there any moments that have like renewed or affirmed your faith in humanity through these years?

Ling (58:29)

Yeah, thank you for the question. I mean, over the past three, four years, I had many moments when I wanted to give up because of that lack of funding, being deceived or the guilty of not being able to rescue someone in time. Yes, definitely there are a few moments that kept me going. So one definitely was in early 2022 when I was in Cambodia knocking on the doors of various organizations, asking if anyone could help with the emerging scam compound crisis. And at that time there was very little international understanding of this issue and even UN agencies turned me away.

I remembered asking myself why I am doing this if no one else cares. But two things changed that. First, I met Ivan. He immediately introduced me to his network and invited me to cooperate with our third co-author, Mark Bo, on researching this issue. That gave me a sense of solidarity and team support I had been missing.

And second is I met a Taiwanese police officer when he found out that I was trying to do rescue work, he quietly slipped me $300 in cash. I was so touched. And to this day, I still hope to find a way to thank him properly. And also later, I met many incredible survivors. Some of them, after returning home and processing their trauma, decided to dedicate themselves to anti-human trafficking or anti-scam work and support other victims and every time I speak with them they give me the courage of keep going. But I want to be clear that the system shouldn’t rely on personal kindness or the burnout of individuals is not sustainable. What we really need is for government to recognize the essential role of civil society’s place and to institutionalize victim identification and support process so that this work doesn’t depend on luck or goodwill alone.

Yangyang (01:00:36)

Yeah, I am reminded of a line from the historian Robin D.G. Kelly who said and I would paraphrase that freedom dreams do not just blossom against fascist nightmares, but often bloom within fascist nightmares, like within those conditions of depravity and violence. And so thank you so much, Ling Li, for joining us and for your incredible work both with the book and in the field.

Ling (01:01:02)

Thank you.

Yangyang (01:01:03)

And Ivan Franceschini, our intrepid co-editor-in-chief of the Made in China journal. Thank you so much for joining us on the show and congratulations to you and your co-authors for this fascinating new book, Scam from Verso, and I would encourage everyone to get it.

Ivan (01:01:20)

Thanks to you.