As the COVID-19 pandemic expedited a global shift towards digital reliance, organised crime followed. Criminal networks have leveraged the digital transformation into a tool for global exploitation. Illicit operations are being run out large-scale scam compounds, where hundreds of thousands are being trafficked into slavery operations for the purpose of defrauding victims worldwide. What has emerged is a rapidly expanding industry built on deception, coercion, and corruption, reshaping the global criminal landscape at unprecedented speed.
The growth of digital operations and network use, while vital for economic development, is a driving factor for the proliferation of cyber organised crime, allowing criminal networks to establish and expand their operations acrossborders.
Its exact economic impact is difficult to measure, but cybercrime is draining billions from economies and has been estimated to reach trillions in global costs by 2030.
Among the most pervasive and profitable iterations of digital criminal activities are cyber scam operations, which have reached industrial proportions. Known as “scam compounds”, organised criminal groups have established a multibillion dollar industry by converting existing facilities for the explicit purpose of forcing recruits into perpetuating online fraud on a global scale. Often taking the form of fake investment, romance, and cryptocurrency scams, recruits are instructed to build trust and long-term relationships with their victims. The final objective? To extract as much money from their victims as possible. The speed at which criminal networks have harnessed digitalisation has transformed the scale of crime: their access to viable targets is no longer bound by geographical limits.
In the case of Southeast Asia, this raises the question of dual victimisation. For more than a decade, cyberscams and online fraud have been a significant challenge in the Mekong. The origins of the industry can be traced back to Chinese-speaking communities across the region, driven predominantly by Chinese-speaking criminal actors, according to the GITOC research report, Compound Crime. Criminal networks have exploited digital transformation, corruption and bad governance, and the pandemic-driven economic disruption to grow their operations within loosely regulated political “grey zones” and across insufficiently regulated borders concentrated in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines. In the region, scam centres have “spread like a cancer” according to Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC Deputy Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The region serves as an interconnected ecosystem and criminal syndicates adapt quickly, moving across borders with little difficulty and rebuilding just as quickly as they are shut down.
Buildings left vacant due to travel restrictions and lockdowns were repurposed into industrial-scale fraud factories and now hold victims trafficked into an emerging form of modern slavery—forced to victimise others by committing cyber-enabled financial crimes. Post-pandemic socioeconomic vulnerabilities and high unemployment meant more people were looking for jobs online. Using legitimate employment search platforms and social media, such as Telegram and Facebook, traffickers pose as recruiters and target their victims with lucrative job offers in the IT, finance, programming, or customer service industry. Upon arrival, passports are confiscated and victims are trafficked to the compound where they are subjected to threats of violence, extortion, physical and sexual abuse, and torture if weekly objectives are not met. Trafficked women are at risk of sexual exploitation at these compounds, or forced into webcam pornography. As of March 2025, victims forced to work in these compounds have been traced back to over 65 countries across all continents, indicating the reach these criminal networks have. According to Interpol, an estimated three-quarters of these individuals are being held in Southeast Asian facilities.
Simultaneously, victims are being defrauded around the world by these “cyber slaves”. The typology of the scams run out of these compounds vary, ranging from impersonation and e-commerce scams, to online extortion. Relationship investment scams, often containing a romantic component, have become one of the most prevalent schemes. These have become known as “pig-butchering scams”. The scammer “fattens up” their victim by establishing and building trust over time, persuading them to invest incrementally larger sums in fraudulent investment opportunities, such as cryptocurrency scams. The “slaughter” occurs when the victim has been successfully defrauded.
According to a GITOC report, victims are not chosen based on demographics—reported incidents are spread across Australia, China, Europe, Singapore, and the United States among others—but rather apparent financial stability and life changes when initial contact is made through social media platforms. In the United States alone, the industry is defrauding Americans of nearly $10 billion per year. These scams combine the exploitation of financial ambition and emotional attachment. As a result, the consequences of the “slaughtering” are often dire—victims endure profound psychological harm as a result of the financial loss and the breakdown of their perceived relationship. Self-blame, depression, and embarrassment can prevent the victim from reporting the incident and, in some cases, lead to suicide after having lost life-savings to these scams, underscoring the duality in victimisation of these operations.
UN experts warn that the trafficking of persons into forced criminality across Southeast Asia has reached the “level of a humanitarian and human rights crisis”—with Hofmann describing the region as “the ground zero for the global scamming industry.” Indeed, continued reports are pointing towards an expansion beyond the region at an unprecedented scale. Similar sophisticated cyberscam operations have been observed across South Asia, the Middle East, certain Pacific islands, and West Africa, which Interpol has reported could be “emerging as a new regional hub” for scam compounds.
While the current cyber landscape has increased the scope and sophistication of operations, as well as access to victims (both to traffic and to defraud), systemic corruption and complicity from local elites and militias sustain impunity and remain key drivers for their expansion. GITOC’s Compound Crime suggests that the involvement of high-level actors, as well as the profitability of the cyber scam industry, may explain why regional government actors and law-enforcement safeguard and comply with organised criminal operations running these scams, noting that corruption and bribery appear consistently throughout the supply chain.
Take the case of Ukraine. The country was already vulnerable to cybercrime prior to the invasion, but following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, call centres have spread rapidly across the country. Rather than using deceptive means, these call centres have reportedly “exploited patriotic sentiment” to recruit predominantly youths (some as young as 14) as well as internally displaced persons, in order to run online scams as a way to undermine Russia and its economy. However, more recently, call centres have begun to target wealthier Europeans and Ukrainians abroad. While these centres have clear ties to organised criminal groups, operations are booming due to the involvement of “roofs”: corrupt police and law enforcement actors benefiting from the profits in exchange for supplying protection to these groups.
Conventional criminal justice measures and isolated, offence-focused strategies have shown themselves to be insufficient, requiring “a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach, supported by international partners,” according to Matthias Schmale, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine. The scope and complexity of the proliferation of cybercriminality demands that it be viewed as a transnational threat requiring coordinated international action.
Written by Alexandra Steinhoff, Edited by Rosey Holland
Photo Credit: Flyd (uploaded February 23, 2021) on Unsplash.
