Inside the cyber-scam capital of the world

The message from Alice was blunt: “I don’t trust you. You are one of them, right? You all just want to sell me like some animal.”

Alice’s hostile reaction wasn’t completely surprising to Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo, the co-authors of “Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds” (Verso), out July 8. “Like the dozens of other survivors we met in the following months,” they write, “her harrowing experience had left her unable to trust anyone.”

Alice (not her real name), a Taiwanese single mom, had recently escaped from a Cambodian scam compound where she’d been raped, beaten, sold multiple times and nearly forced into a brothel. 

She’d been lured to the town of Sihanoukville by a friend who promised her a legitimate job, and even paid for her visa and flight. What awaited Alice, however, was not a front-desk position but forced criminal labor in an online fraud mill. 

“The supervisor informed her that she had been sold there to conduct online scams,” the authors write, “and that she would not be allowed to leave until she had earned enough money for the company.” 

When she resisted, the supervisor threatened Alice with a stun gun and “said that if she did not comply, he would lock her up in a room and let several men rape her,” the authors write. “Which is exactly what happened soon after.”

They tried to make her a “pig butcher,” referring to a slow-burn online scam that involved using fictional profiles of wealthy, attractive people to blackmail hapless marks. Alice refused to play along, feigning ignorance of how to type. They made her clean. Then they sold her again. And again.

This is what modern slavery looks like in the internet age. Alice is just one victim among several interviewed by the authors, all of them part of a vast criminal economy with operations across Southeast Asia. In countries like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, cybercrime syndicates run industrial-scale scam operations staffed by trafficked laborers and protected by complicit authorities. 

The industry blossomed during the pandemic, when “scam operators achiev[ed] record profits capitalising on the misery and loneliness of people stuck in endless lockdowns,” the authors write. According to the latest UN estimates, there were in 2023 “at least 120,000 people . . . forced to carry out online scams across Myanmar, with another 100,000 in Cambodia,” write the authors.

At the center of this ecosystem is Sihanoukville, a once-sleepy Cambodian beach town transformed into “a global online scam hub,” the authors write. The transformation began in the mid-2010s, when Chinese criminal groups began buying up property, converting apartments, villas and hotel rooms into closed compounds for scam work. These were not fly-by-night setups. They came with dorms, cafeterias, surveillance rooms and punishment cells. By the late 2010s, Sihanoukville had become a scam metropolis.

The business model was simple: Traffic in people, extract money from strangers online and do it all behind steel doors. The operations “often look like standard apartment buildings with unusually strict security measures,” the authors write. “Such as high walls with barbed wire and guards posted at gates, to prevent people from escaping as much as to stop unauthorized people from entering.”

The profits were massive. The risk was minimal. And the victims weren’t only the ones on the other end of the keyboard.

George, a Ugandan man in his early 30s with an IT degree, was recruited from Dubai in August 2022, to manage data in Laos. He was offered a monthly salary of $1,500, plus allowances and commissions. Once there, he signed a fake contract, had his passport taken and was put to work defrauding people using prewritten scripts. When he refused, he was sold to another compound in Myanmar. 

“They don’t tell you [how much they sell you for],” he told the authors. “They just tell you: ‘We own you. We bought you’ . . . It’s weird. It takes you back to the ages of the slave trade in Africa.”

Inside the compounds, daily life blends corporate dystopia with prison brutality. New workers are given scripts and digital playbooks with titles like “Phrases for Love, Friendship, and Gambling.” There are quotas, and heavy surveillance. Everything workers type can be tracked. 

If they miss a quota, punishment follows. Some workers are forced to do “frog jumps,” an excruciating squat exercise repeated for hours. Others are made to run up and down stairs, or stand in the blistering sun for hours while holding heavy objects. The unlucky and disobedient ones are beaten or sold.

The scams themselves are psychologically sophisticated. Pig butchering involves building rapport over weeks or even months before proposing a seemingly low-risk investment in a phony crypto platform. Once the victim’s guard is down — and their life savings transferred — the scammer ghosts them.

Some workers are paid commissions based on how much their victims lose. “Bonuses can be lucrative,” the authors write, “and the rules are often posted in public areas as a reminder to all staff.” Others are forced to perform the scams without pay under threat of physical harm. The result is a chilling blend of victim and perpetrator: exploited laborers trained to exploit others.

One company in Cambodia charged workers for everything they used inside: toilets, chairs, keyboards, the portion of floor they occupied and even the “seaside air” they breathed. “Consequently, no matter how long they work, their debts can continue to grow,” the authors write. Many go deeper into debt while trapped, their families extorted for ransom payments that may or may not result in release.
The psychological toll is devastating. Alice described “brainwashed” survivors who “developed some mental illness.” Meanwhile, her own family thought she was trafficked “because I am greedy and wanted to get rich overnight,” Alice admits.

Efforts to crack down have had limited effect. When compounds in Cambodia are raided, the operators move to Laos. When Laos tightens regulations, they set up shop in Myanmar. There are always more buildings, more bribes and more desperate people willing to answer job ads that turn out to be traps.
The authors note that these operations are not rogue or isolated. They are systems. Ecosystems. And they are growing. “Tech companies are failing to ensure that their services are not used as platforms for organised criminals,” the authors write. Messaging apps continue to facilitate communication between recruiters and victims. Governments continue to look the other way — or actively profit from the business.

Even when victims are rescued, justice is rare. Some are deported. Others are treated as criminals. A few, like Alice, find ways to speak out. Most don’t. And even for those who escape, the trauma lingers.
Alice eventually found a way to post a call for help on Instagram and “was rescued before being sold a fifth time,” the authors write. She now works with advocacy groups to warn others about the dangers of overseas job scams. “If I had been enslaved for a year or two,” she tells the authors, “I might not be able to believe in humanity anymore.”

This industry isn’t going away, the authors write. It’s adapting. It’s expanding — even as it faces a crackdown by the Trump administration, which recently designated the Cambodian firm Huione Group what so many already know it to be: a money-laundering operation. Still, much work remains to free women like Alice. In the time it took to read this story, another person somewhere may have just clicked “Apply Now” on a job that doesn’t exist.