25-06-2025
The Asian ‘cyber slaves' forced to scam you – or face horrific torture
If you, or anyone you know, have fallen victim to an online scam, you're unlikely to have wondered whether the con artists themselves were having a difficult time. Yet, as Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo show in their fascinating new book Scam, if the perpetrators are operating out of South-east Asia, there's a high likelihood they'll be tortured themselves if they don't successfully trick enough people out of their data or cash.
Scam, subtitled Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds, details how hundreds of thousands of people are working in makeshift prisons to commit cyberfraud 'on an industrial scale'. They're victims of 'cyber slavery', a term that sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel, but is depressingly real and horrible.
For, over the past decade, criminal gangs from China and Taiwan have set up 'compounds' in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines, where the regulations and policing around these operations are lax. Here, thousands of workers – most of whom are trafficked from China – are made to work with 10 phones, 17 hours a day, attempting to con people around the world out of their money. In the process, the criminal bosses make billions of dollars, and use some of that money to line the pockets of politicians, police or local communities that might try to stop the operations.
The compounds, as Franceschini and co describe them, sound like places of complete misery and terror. Workers who are able to achieve certain targets for their bosses – such as, say, generating more than $10,000 a month through scams – are given rewards such as money, or better food, or even a brief spell of leave from the compound. For those who underperform, however, life becomes 'a nightmare'. Most are tortured, which can range from severe beatings to electric shocks, sexual abuse and fingernail extraction. 'We could hear the screams continuing until midnight,' a Chinese worker who escaped a Cambodian compound tells the authors. 'They [the compound managers] made sure you understand that you do not want to be the next one to end up in the punishment room.'
Although these workers are paid a salary, when their work begins they're usually made to sign a document that puts them in significant financial debt to the compound operators, a debt that's then repaid through the conducting of scams. Sometimes workers might be sold onto a different scam company in another country; they might even be sold several times over. They have no say in the matter. As a Ugandan man who'd been trapped in a Myanmar compound explains: 'They just tell you: 'We own you, we bought you… It's takes you back to the ages of the slave trade in Africa.'
While a number of press articles have been written about this issue, Scam is one of the first books to provide a comprehensive overview of this alarming criminal industry and its 'annexed humanitarian crisis'. The authors are well placed to provide this, having spent years studying this industry: between 2022 and 2024, Li alone conducted 96 interviews with survivors of the compounds.
Yet for such a shocking topic, the book can feel a little academic in its tone; it often reads more like a textbook than the gripping non-fiction it could be. I never felt fully immersed in this world; I wanted more on daily life in the compounds. The quotes from the survivors are just snippets, whereas it would have been more interesting to have an account of someone's entire journey, from being tricked into working at these compounds, to the hell they faced inside and what their captors were like, and onto their eventual escape.
Nonetheless, Franceschini and co do provide an excellent breakdown of how hard it is to get out of these operations. The compounds, which are sometimes repurposed office blocks, hotels or casinos, and sometimes entire villages, are largely self-sufficient: they have their own canteens, dormitories, supermarkets, hair salons, pharmacies, even brothels. They're also surrounded by five-metre high walls that have 'high-voltage electricity cables on top and armed sentries monitoring the perimeter… [and] checkpoints every few hundred metres outside'. And even if you do escape all this, it'll be a long time before you're likely to feel safe. Passports, personal phones and other identification documents are taken away from workers when they enter the compound.
Local politicians and police in countries such as Myanmar and Cambodia largely turn a blind eye to these operations; as above, they may even themselves benefit financially. Scam quotes one man who escaped a compound in Cambodia and ran to the police, only to realise that they were in the pockets of the compound owners: the latter collected him from the station and then filmed themselves viciously beating him, sending the video to his family to ask for more money, by way of a ransom, in order to secure his release.
It's estimated that 120,000 people have been held in such situations in Myanmar, and another 100,000 in Cambodia. Some victims have been kidnapped and sold into the operations; others are willingly brought in from countries such as China, naively believing they're getting a highly-paid job. They might have responded to a dodgy job advert, or been tricked by someone they met online – even on a dating app.
In 2025, a few high-profile stories appeared in the Chinese media, about victims from that country who'd been tricked into working at these compounds. It led Beijing to issue an official statement outlining efforts to address the problem, and that compelled the authorities in Myanmar to raid some large compounds and release thousands of trapped workers. Franceschini and co, however, make it clear that the 'industry is here to stay'. There's evidence of scam compounds now appearing in Serbia, Turkey, Georgia, South America, India, and Central and West Africa. These horrible operations, they write, have 'gone global'.
★★★★☆
