'Las Vegas in Laos': The riverside city awash with crime
Shabby, mismatched facades –- including an Iberian-style plaza replete with a church tower, turrets and statues -- stand alongside high-rise shells.
The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) is the most prominent of more than 90 such areas established across the Mekong region in recent years, often offering people reduced taxes or government regulation.
Traffic signs in the GTSEZ are in Chinese script, while everything from cigarettes to jade and fake Christian Dior bags are sold in China's yuan.
Analysts say the towers are leased out as centres operating finance and romance scams online, a multibillion-dollar industry that shows no signs of abating despite Beijing-backed crackdowns in the region.
The GTSEZ was set up in 2007, when the Laos government granted the Kings Romans Group a 99-year lease on the area.
Ostensibly an urban development project to attract tourists with casinos and resorts, away from official oversight international authorities and analysts say it quickly became a centre for money laundering and trafficking.
The city has now evolved, they say, into a cybercrime hub that can draw workers from around the world with better-paying jobs than back home.
Laundry hung out to dry on the balconies of one high-rise building supposed to be a tourist hotel, while the wide and palm-lined boulevards were eerily quiet.
It is a "juxtaposition of the grim and the bling", according to Richard Horsey of the International Crisis Group.
It gives the "impression of opulence, a sort of Las Vegas in Laos", he said, but it is underpinned by the "grim reality" of a lucrative criminal ecosystem.
Horrendous illicit activities
In the daytime a few gamblers placed their bets at the blackjack tables in the city's centrepiece Kings Romans Casino, where a Rolls Royce was parked outside.
"There are people from many different countries here," said one driver offering golf buggy tours of the city, who requested anonymity for security reasons. "Indians, Filipinos, Russians and (people from) Africa."
"The Chinese mostly own the businesses," he added.
Cyberfraud compounds have proliferated in special economic zones across Southeast Asia, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
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