Foreigners are gathered at a Myanmar fraud base on February 16, 2025 (©Kyodo)
In 2025, the International Criminal Police Organization reported that the scam center crisis had spilled out from Southeast Asia into a global phenomenon that poses a 'serious and imminent threat to the public.' Japan recorded a loss of ¥324.11 billion (2.12 billion USD) to special fraud, romance, and social media-based investment scams in that year.
In March 2026, Taiwan indicted 62 people linked to Prince Holdings Group. That followed findings that the founder, Chen Zhi, had funneled NT$10.8 billion NTD ($337 million) in illicit funds via shell companies, luxury goods, sports cars, and real estate.
Western democracies are also subject to significant scam losses. Scammers pretending to be Chinese authorities have threatened international students in Australia with twenty-four-hour surveillance, accusations of fake passports or credit cards, among other threats. $5.1 million AUD ($3.6 million) was lost to such scams within just five months.
Typical Countermeasures
Typically, authorities have taken defensive measures that either involve criminal crackdowns or scam education for citizens. Japanese police have encouraged people to download scam-blocking apps and called for regulating Meta. But they have also collaborated with other countries to block fraud and illegitimate withdrawals.
Chen Zhi was extradited from Cambodia to China. Governments around the world are understanding the seriousness of scam centers as transnational crime.
However, a primarily defensive solution will be insufficient for curbing scam center activities. AI tools will only allow scam centers to develop more sophisticated tricks before security forces in democratic countries can react.
Tackling scam centers also requires understanding the issue as a humanitarian crisis that involves rehabilitating those forced to work there and giving them better employment alternatives amidst desperate situations.
Scam Centers as a Humanitarian Crisis
Many of these scam centers are based in Southeast Asia, specifically the borderlands around Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia. The industry thrives in areas where central authorities cannot enforce the rule of law due to civil conflict. (Examples include Myanmar's 2021 military coup and Thailand-Cambodia's border conflict.) In these places, poor governance, absence of governance, and fraught politics facilitate transnational criminality.
People caught up in these crises are kidnapped or lured with false job opportunities to work in IT or computer engineering roles at well-known tech companies. Upon arrival, scam center recruiters seize the passports of their prey and force workers to carry out cybercrime. Consequences for attempted escape, underperformance, or any behavior that could expose operations, include violence, electric shocks, rape, torture, and other atrocities.
OHCHR Report
A report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) addresses slavery in scam centers. Specifically, it explores commonalities in how workers are lured into their compounds from a behavioral science perspective. Two key concepts were found in the trafficking of scam victims: opportunities for scammers to lure workers and the capabilities of the workers selected.
Opportunities opened during the COVID-19 pandemic and Myanmar's military coup, when many people lost jobs, fell into debt, and sought new work opportunities. Of those locked in scam center operations, 58% were university graduates and often multilingual. This allowed them to scam those in their country of origin. However, among Vietnamese workers, young men from poor or rural backgrounds were also prime targets for employment scams.
Scam center abuse goes beyond forcing workers to engage in cybercrimes and fraud against their fellow countrymen. Many are also forced into sexual slavery and even wildlife smuggling. Traffickers who work for scam compounds are under the pressure of torture threats themselves, perpetuating cycles of abuse and criminality among those they recruit.
Alarmingly, the charity group Blue Dragon reported that 65% of forced workers knew their traffickers.
Security Threat to Democracies
In a review of the documentary film "The General: Vietnam in the Age of Tô Lâm," the author states that the problems of Southeast Asia's undemocratic norms will affect East Asian democracies. Scam centers are only a manifestation of how Southeast Asia's human rights violations are destabilizing the world's communication landscape.
Many scams are connected to the North Korean IT worker scheme, in which North Korean citizens illegally obtain jobs in high-paying roles at US companies and earn millions of dollars for Pyongyang's military. Others are connected to Chinese criminal networks, with Chen Zhi's Prince Holdings Group only one such example.
Individuals from democratic countries have also been co-opted into scam center slavery. The documentary YouTube channel Asian Boss did a segment on South Koreans who were tricked into working for Cambodian scam compounds, where victims experienced torture and, in some cases, death. In March 2026, 13 Japanese nationals were detained in Indonesia for allegedly engaging in online scams that involved posing as Japanese police while targeting Japanese citizens. Similarly, two Japanese high school students were rescued from a center in Myanmar where they had been forced to commit fraud.
Scam center abuses are not merely human rights violations confined to Southeast Asia. They are national security threats to the free world.
Solutions
In an increasingly destabilized geopolitical landscape, the rest of the democratic world needs to advocate against these human rights abuses. They generate a steady supply of trapped, unwilling workers, keep scam center coordinators unaccountable, and create vulnerabilities in national security for the affected countries. Furthermore, cracking down on scam centers needs to take into account the humanitarian as well as criminal concerns.
The OHCHR report noted that legitimate labor migration pathways are a key solution to keep job seekers from taking scam center jobs. Rehabilitating those who have been rescued from the illegal industry goes hand-in-hand with that approach.
Reintegrating Scam Center Victims
I spoke to a woman in the Philippines whose nephew had recently escaped from a scam compound and was now back in his country doing construction work. She stated that the Public Employment Service Office in their local area funnels legitimate work opportunities to Filipinos seeking overseas work and provides financial assistance to escaped workers. Upon her nephew's repatriation, he stayed in a hotel for three days to be questioned, but no one provided trauma support.
Yet as the OHCHR report also mentions, employment brokers in Southeast Asia also lack effective safeguards. Also, a large percentage of migrants ー 78% from Bangladesh, over 50% from the Philippines, and 36.2% from Vietnam ー first heard about their job through an informal intermediary. The combination of desperate job seekers and political instability puts such informal intermediaries in a prime position to exploit trust and send people to scam centers.
Governments and NGOs should support trafficking survivors as they seek legitimate employment. As the report recounts, this can be "challenging due to the unexplained gaps in their resumes and the psychological trauma." That said, the capabilities exploited at scam center compounds, such as multilingualism and the ability to follow elaborate scripts, should facilitate their transfer to more legitimate lines of work.
Grassroots civil society organizations can also play a key role. Aside from rescuing trafficked victims, they can help with education and the formation of support networks for victims from scam centers. For example, the Cambodia-China Charity Team helped rescue a couple of hundred detained workers from Cambodian scam compounds. Civil society organizations often have the language, cultural knowledge, and rapport with local communities to drive efforts such as scam identification, advocacy for those trafficked into compounds, and societal reintegration for returned victims.
Recognizing the Humanitarian Problem
Lastly, authorities should recognize forced criminality and non-punishment principles within anti-trafficking laws and regulations. These provisions will encourage trafficking victims' families to come forward and share information about their cases.
Many trafficking victims are trapped in cycles of threat and abuse within the scam center industry. If the only alternative is the strong hand of the law from governments, they may be forced to choose between the scamming job and facing official legal punishment.
Democracies need to tackle the humanitarian crises feeding the scam centers, along with the governance breakdown and political instability in Southeast Asia. Until that happens, the consequences of these scam centers will continue to be a problem for the developed world.
RELATED:
- How Cambodia Became China's Global Scam Hub
- Defeat Multi-Billion-Dollar Fraud Industry with White AI, Overseas Help
- Compromise Now, Repress Later: Lessons from 'The General'
Author: Frances An
