Inside the brutal scam centres of southeast Asia

Yahoo

26-03-2025

The penalties were brutal. Unless Ariyan could raise £15,500 each month by scamming people across the world online, he would be beaten, electrocuted and locked inside a pitch black cupboard for 24 hours.
'I went into the dark room two times because I didn't reach my target,' the 25-year-old told the Telegraph. 'They would then come, and give kicks, electric shocks, and punches. I was just crying afterwards and praying to God.'
Life in the concrete compound was a world away from the well-paid role Ariyan had expected when he first applied for the job.
A political science graduate from Bangladesh, he had been working in Dubai since leaving university, earning roughly £230 a month in hospitality amid limited job opportunities at home. Then, in August 2024, came the prospect of quadrupling his pay as a computer operator in Thailand.
But the role never existed. Instead Ariyan and four friends were whisked across the Thai border into conflict-ridden Myanmar, where they were forced to work in one of hundreds of cyber scam centres defrauding billions from unsuspecting victims across the globe.
'People with me were from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Japan, Brazil, South Africa – we all had fake promises of a good salary in Thailand,' Ariyan said. 'Scamming people online, it's not feeling good. But it's hopeless, we didn't have another option.'
It's hard to underestimate just how vast and lucrative these forced labour camps have become in southeast Asia as criminal syndicates, armed groups and corrupt officials have exploited power vacuums left by weak governance and war.
Most are found in the Mekong region of southeast Asia – mainly in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
At least $43.8 billion (£33.8bn) is being stolen each year by scammers based in these countries alone, according to a report from the US Institute of Peace (USIP), a figure roughly equal to 40 per cent of their combined GDP. It's estimated that at least 300,000 people are trapped inside.
The scams they run reach every corner of the world, with hundreds of thousands of individuals and businesses defrauded in a wide variety of internet-based frauds, entrapment and blackmail schemes.
The most common is called 'pig butchering', where scammers build relationships, romantic or otherwise, before feigning a crisis and asking for money. The FBI estimates $4 billion was extracted from tens of thousands of Americans through pig butchering in 2023 alone.
In more than a handful of cases, people have not only lost large sums of money to the scammers but their lives, after financial losses or the threat of humiliation in sex scams have lead to suicide.
For instance, Dennis Jones, an 82-year-old grandfather in Virginia died by suicide last year after losing his life savings to a woman called 'Jessica' online.
The explosion of internet fraud factories in southeast Asia owes much to the export of Chinese gambling and criminality across the Mekong region.
When Covid-19 hit and physical trade became more difficult, many gambling and other vice operations went online.
In Laos, a riverside casino empire run by Chinese gangsters is now also a booming scam hotspot dubbed a 'sin city'. In Cambodia, the coastal resort of Sihanoukville has become a hub. And in Myanmar, which has descended into lawlessness since the 2021 military coup, fraud factories have infiltrated borderlands.
'Cyber scam centres have really only appeared and become a major problem in the last four or five years,' said Morgan Michaels, a research fellow for southeast Asian security and defence at the Institute for Strategic Studies. 'But they've already become billion dollar operations – criminal enterprises with cartel-like characteristics.'
But now the tide may be turning.
Last month a joint operation from China, Thailand and Myanmar rescued some 7,500 people from fraud factories around Myawaddy – a border town in Myanmar that is a notorious crime hub.
The operation was one of the largest rescues of people trapped in forced labour in modern history, with those extracted coming from over 30 different countries.
The crackdown was triggered by the high profile disappearance (and subsequent rescue) of a Chinese actor, called Wang Xing, in January. His case went viral across China, prompting authorities to take action.
Richard Horsey, a Myanmar researcher at the Crisis Group thinktank, said the scam centres had become a 'major headache' for China, not least because many of its own citizens were falling victim to both kidnap and the scams themselves.
'These cases have become very, very prominent in China on social media… so there is a sense it will harm the Community Party if it doesn't show it's able to do something about this.'
Thailand, under pressure from Beijing, has cut cross-border electricity, fuel and internet supplies to several towns in Myanmar known to host compounds.
Meanwhile the Thai army and police have ramped up patrols and roadside checkpoints at strategic locations across the porous 1,500 mile border with Myanmar, and any foreigners arriving at Mae Sot airport – a key staging point for people smugglers to Myawaddy – are pulled aside for questioning.
Ariyan's friends were among those rescued recently from one of the scam centres in Myanmar, arriving back in Bangladesh last week after a month in an ad-hoc holding centre on the border.
Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said last week that roughly 4,800 people have now made it back to their home countries – including roughly 3,600 Chinese citizens transported on chartered flights.
But thousands more of those freed are still being held in overcrowded and unsanitary camps in Myanmar, amid difficulties repatriating them home. Photos taken by the Associated Press show people huddling in front of armed guards, wearing surgical masks to cover their eyes, noses and mouths.
Recalling his time in captivity, Ariyan told the Telegraph he first realised he had been tricked when he arrived in Thailand from Dubai, but by then it was already too late.
With others he was moved by a gang to a compound near Kyaukhat in Myanmar, 25 miles south of the Myawaddy – where drugs, prostitution and cyber scams are booming.
The compound sat at the base of a mountain and was surrounded by forest and patrolled by armed guards. It housed seven multi-storey buildings, each the size of a warehouse, with tall windows. Footage shared with the Telegraph shows the building in various stages of construction.
Ariyan said he was forced to sleep in a dirty dorm with nine others in bunk beds. His days were spent at a computer, chatting to up to 50 people around the world online each day in a bid to suck them into various scams.
The 'office' he worked from resembled many around the world, he said, with bright white lights and water bottles on desks.
In 14 hour shifts, he posed as women on Instagram and Facebook. One account he created went under the name of 'Arlene', an attractive blonde whose 'favourite hobby' was travel.
Using the fake persona, he would then trawl fan pages of football teams like Barcelona and Real Madrid, looking for European men to suck in.
Once an online friendship or romance was well established, he'd ask for money to help with a crisis, or talk up fake investment opportunities. If anyone called, he would use AI tools to alter his face and voice.
Ariyan's most successful fraud made roughly £42,000 – making his 'Chinese bosses very happy', he said. He was given a mobile phone as a reward.
But his freedom was curtailed and brutality was never far away.
In one photo shared by Ariyan with the Telegraph, a person's entire back is shown red raw and peeling after being doused with boiling water by 'the bosses'. Other footage shows people's buttocks covered in deep purple-black bruises after being scolded with hot pans. The images are in keeping with similar abuse reported by other news organisations and NGOs.
Two months after arriving at the scam centre, Ariyan saw a chance to break free, when his boss told him to accompany a Pakistani man who had a heart attack to a clinic near Kyaukhat.
'When I came out of the hospital, I just ran and jumped into the river,' he said. 'A guard shot [at] me, but my God saved me.'
Three weeks later, Ariyan was on a plane to Bangladesh. But fearing for his friends, he took out a loan and returned to Mae Sot in January, where he put pressure on NGOs, the police and the embassy in Bangkok to help free his friends and 13 other Bangladeshi men.
They were eventually rescued in February, and finally made it home safely on March 18.
Despite the recent progress, experts say the authorities in the region are a long way from winning the war against the scam centres.
Even as some camps are being closed down, construction on others in Myanmar is visible from the Thailand side of the border, while none of the major players behind the criminal networks have been arrested this year.
'We are seeing several thousand individuals coming out of scam centres, but these are largely individuals who want to leave and who are not really bringing in much revenue,' said Jason Tower, the country director for the Burma program at USIP.
'New recruitment continues as this disruption goes on – and the 7,500 brought out so far represents only 7.5 per cent of the entire number of scam syndicates just in Myawaddy'.
It was, he added, just a 'surface level crackdown'.
For the Thai authorities, even the rescue efforts so far have proved a logistical nightmare.
Officials are working with embassies around the world to coordinate the release and handover of people – including interviews to establish who is a victim of human trafficking, and who may have gone voluntarily.
A complicating factor is the involvement of militia groups in Myanmar – some who work with criminal cartels in running the camps. For them it makes sense as a means of raising funds with which to continue to fight against the country's military junta.
'[Military groups] are basically in a poker game with the Thai authorities and are upping the ante. They're saying, 'okay, if you want to crack down on us, fine. The consequences are that thousands of foreign workers will be streaming back into Thailand, see how you deal with them',' said Mr Horsey.
'They are betting that Thailand doesn't have the stomach and the fortitude to really see this through, that at a certain point things will move on and China will start focusing on another issue – and then it will be business as usual again,' he added.
There's also a sense that the region faces a game of 'whack a mole' which cannot be solved until the civil war ends in Myanmar, or corruption and weak governance regionally are tackled.
'If we keep focusing on one area, operations will just move to another area,' said Kristina Amerhauser, a senior analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 'We actually need a regional or global approach to this, and not just say that this week we focus on Myanmar, next week we focus on Cambodia.'
For Aryian, the future remains uncertain. He is now back in Dubai job hunting, but is struggling to support his family.
'I made sure my friends were freed but I am still very sad right now, and my financial situation is not okay,' he said. 'I do not know what the future holds, it is very difficult.'
But there's one thing he is sure about: 'I know I will never return to Thailand.'
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