Scam, Inc.: China Cracks Down on Booming Industry In Southeast Asia

Lisa, an 18-year-old from Thailand, was hunting for a job during a school break when she was recruited for an administrative job promising a high salary.  

Instead of finding an office job, however, she was smuggled across a river at night into Cambodia, where she spent 11 months held against her will, forced to scam people in other countries and on other continents. When she tried to escape, she was severely beaten. 

“There were four men… three of them held me down while the boss hit me on the soles of my feet with a metal pole…,” she recounted in interviews with Amnesty International. “They told me that if I don’t stop screaming, they’re going to keep hitting (me) until I stop.” 

Lisa is one of hundreds of thousands of young Asians and Africans trafficked or lured to Cambodia and Myanmar by the promise of high-paying jobs, only to end up working in an online scam industry bilking billions of dollars from Americans, Chinese, and others in schemes run by Chinese criminal gangs that operate throughout Southeast Asia. 

A study last year found that these so-called “pig-butchering” schemes stole more than $75 billion from victims around the world between 2020 and 2024. 

The industry, which has exploded over the past five years in the region, centers on Cambodia and Myanmar but also includes Laos, Thailand, and the Philippines, and is estimated to have involved as many as 1.5 million workers, the United States Institute of Peace says. 

It is “a growing threat to global peace and security,” it wrote. 

Often, those who are recruited – from China, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, as well as India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, and Ethiopia – are held in prison-like compounds surrounded by barbed-wire fences, high walls, and armed guards.  

In Cambodia alone, investigators from Amnesty International identified 53 prison-like compounds that house online scamming operations, as well as 45 “suspicious locations,” it wrote in a new report.  

There, those recruited contact foreigners and pose as potential romantic partners, offer fake investment opportunities or sell goods on marketplaces such as eBay or Facebook that will never appear. 

Nearly all the victims Amnesty International interviewed after they were freed in raids by local police, described conditions it called “slavery,” where poor-performing workers were even sold to other gangs and from which “escape was impossible.” 

“Human trafficking, forced labor, child labor, torture and other ill-treatment, deprivation of liberty and slavery are being carried out on a mass scale in scamming compounds located across the country,” it wrote.  

It added that the government supports the industry. 

“The Cambodian authorities know what is going on inside scamming compounds, yet they allow it to continue…,” it said. “(It) could put a stop to these abuses, but it has chosen not to. The police interventions documented appear to be merely ‘for show.’”  

However, that began to change earlier this year after China got involved – again.  

A new crackdown by the country – it tried before in 2023 – was sparked by the January abduction of Wang Xing, a Chinese actor, who flew to Bangkok for a supposed casting call and disappeared. He was trafficked to Myawaddy, Myanmar, to work at a scam center. After his girlfriend pleaded for help on social media in a post viewed by hundreds of millions of people and reported by state newspapers, the outrage prompted the Chinese government to act, initiating his rescue, CNN reported.  

China began putting pressure on Thailand and Myanmar to shut down the scam centers. As a result, Thai officials have made it more difficult to get to Cambodia via Thailand and cut off electricity, Internet, and gas supplies to several areas in Myanmar near the Thai border that host these scam centers.  

In February, more than 1,000 Chinese nationals who had worked at online scam centers in eastern Myanmar were freed and repatriated. It’s estimated that 45,000 Chinese nationals have been rescued over the past two years from the scam centers across the region.  

Meanwhile, the plea also set off petitions from more than 1,200 Chinese families with missing loved ones to the government to intervene and return their family members.  

In spite of the rescue of thousands, many of whom face large hurdles in trying to return home, thousands more remain enslaved, wrote Radio Free Asia.  

“What is extraordinary about Wang’s case is not the fake job ad, the kidnapping or the cross-border smuggling into a compound filled with thousands of victims from around the world,” it said. “Rather, it is his rescue…”