"Opinion: The Guardian view on the online scam industry: authorities must not forget that perpetrators are often victims too", 13 October 2025

Chinese court … sentenced 11 people to death over their roles in a illegal scam empire along the border with Myanmar. But it won’t end a noxious multibillion-dollar industry that devastates the lives of two sets of victims. The first are those cheated out of money, often by people posing as potential romantic or business partners in what are known as “pig‑butchering” schemes. The second are those who are forced to cheat them, working in conditions amounting to modern slavery.

The recent study, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, by Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo, paints a terrifying picture of the sector. Workers are trafficked into heavily guarded, prison-like compounds, where they are routinely abused and tortured for failing to meet targets, or extorted for ransoms. Others take the jobs willingly, but find that they cannot repay ruinous charges for food and accommodation. Their work requires them to be connected to the outside world round the clock, yet they are too terrified to seek help because of the surveillance and violence they endure…

But scam centres have now been identified in Serbia, Peru, Pakistan, central Africa and most recently Timor-Leste. One NGO worker told the authors of Scam that a common scenario might be “a Chinese perpetrator residing in Cambodia [using] a trafficked Filipino individual to deceive a US citizen, using credit cards from Dubai for money laundering”.

The trafficking of Wang Xing, a Chinese actor, to Myanmar in January highlighted the brazenness of these criminals. But as China and others turn up the heat, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime warns that syndicates are targeting individuals from countries with limited diplomatic or consular resources, citing more than 700 Ethiopian nationals rescued in Myanmar this year. Satellite internet services and solar power have allowed operators to move to remoter areas. Deepfake technology is opening up new avenues for scamming…