This Is Not A Scam

Asia’s Global Anti Scam Summit (GASS) in Singapore kicked off with a prank. Attendees of the conference were offered access to a ‘fast track’ to collect their badges. In the opening session, we were told 50 people had scanned a QR code on entry, hoping to jump the queue. In their impatience, they had demonstrated how easy it was to fall prey to ‘quishing’ (phishing, via QR code). This was a theme throughout the event: the scam victim was an everyman, essentially honest but vulnerable to manipulation. Even the attendees of a conference on fraud could be defrauded. But Jorji Abrahams, managing director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, reassured us: the QR code did not infect our phones with malware or steal our credit card information. In fact, it did nothing at all. 

Real scams, however, are a big business. As digital communication has been woven into every area of our lives, so too have online scams. According to the National Crime Agency, fraud is now the most common crime in the UK. On a global scale, it is estimated that fraud costs $1.03 Trillion annually, a figure larger than the GDP of Switzerland. The attendees at GASS were mostly from finance, tech, and law enforcement – as a cultural studies scholar, I was something of an outlier – and the opening speaker, Singapore’s Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information, Tan Kiat How, referred to us all as ‘the justice league, the scambusters, the good guys.’ Over the course of the summit, ‘good guys’ featured heavily. Scams were understood to be driven less by the pursuit of profit and more by a generic evil, by bad guys exploiting ‘universal human frailties.’ Scams, we were told, are as old as humanity itself. But through ‘partnership and collaboration’ we could fight back. A representative of Global Telecom cheerily announced, ’We are all friends on a mission here’. The self-declared ‘good guys’ were on the stage, talking about consumer education, awareness raising, and information sharing. Who were the bad guys? Who were the scammers? 

The current global scam epicentre is Southeast Asia, where internet fraud operates on an industrial scale. You likely receive regular messages from unknown numbers, offering you a job, claiming you need to pay postage on a package, pretending to be a family member in crisis, or making one of a dozen other bids for your attention. There’s a good chance those messages are sent from inside a scam compound, a concrete tower block, in Myanmar, Cambodia, or Laos. Inside the compounds, the situation is dire. While some enter the industry knowing they will be involved in fraud, many have themselves been lied to, responding to offers of legitimate work. Even those aware of the nature of the work are likely deceived in terms of the conditions. The recruitment process resembles ordinary business practices (applications, interviews, competency tests), and many arrive, often to a third country such as Thailand, expecting to be employed there as customer service agents or digital marketers, only to be driven across the border into Myanmar or Cambodia. At the compounds, they find themselves trapped – the sites are heavily guarded, with the watch posts facing inwards, to prevent escape rather than entry. When people try to leave, they are told they owe a debt to their captors: reports from former victims suggest that the price depends, at least in part, on nationality. Those whose governments are unlikely to rescue them fetch a higher price. If they can’t access funds from outside – most can’t, or they wouldn’t have migrated for these jobs in the first place – they must work to pay off their debt. For those who refuse, try to escape, or are simply bad at the job, there are ‘dark rooms’ where they are held without food, beaten, or stunned with electric batons. Suicides are not uncommon.

Getting out of the scam centres is not easy. Some eventually access funds from family or friends to pay the ransom for their freedom; others are ‘sold’ between compounds; and a handful are rescued after taking the risk of contacting embassies and NGOs. Dozens of Vietnamese workers have been rescued after the influencer Phong Bui paid their ransoms, generating video content that attracted millions of views and turned Phong Bui into a YouTube star. For those who can’t capture the attention of an influencer, hopes are pinned on law enforcement. But it’s common for local police to be paid off by the bosses, so rescues are small in scale, and rarely lead to the compounds being shut down. Those who are rescued or escape often end up in immigration detention or find themselves prosecuted for crimes committed under threat of torture.

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It’s estimated that there are in the region of 400,000 workers inside scam compounds in the region, with 100,000 in Cambodia and over 120,000 in Myanmar, so even the rare, large-scale operations that rescue hundreds of people still only scratch the surface. In theory, you can use your wages and commission to pay your way out of the compounds, but this is difficult. The wages are paltry compared to the ‘debt’, which grows and grows as captive workers are charged for food, a bed in a dormitory, the use of their workstations, and even access to toilets. Many other industries also profit from confining migrant workers in cramped living conditions, separate from ordinary citizens. Indeed, just 30 kilometres away from the Suntec convention centre where the Anti-Scam Summit was held, the Tuas View Dormitory houses almost 16000 migrant workers, essential to Singapore’s construction industry, and unable to access ordinary residential housing. In the scam compounds, there are leisure facilities (cafes, bars, brothels) that also need to be staffed, sometimes by locals who are free to come and go, and sometimes by other migrant workers, deemed unfit for scamming. As the scam workforce grows, so too does the internal economy of the compounds. Goods sold within come at an inflated price charged in USD regardless of the location. 

The rise of these scam compounds coincides with the dramatic intensification of digital fraud since 2020. At the summit, Matthew Killian, senior foreign affairs officer at the US state department, rehearsed the received wisdom that lockdowns drove people online at their most isolated and lonely, generating easy targets for scammers. But we were all already glued to our phones in 2019. Covid-19 was a catalyst, but for a different reason. As gambling is illegal in mainland China, casinos opened in the rest of the region – in Cambodia, the Philippines, Laos – to cater to the Chinese market, and often run by Chinese entrepreneurs. When the pandemic hit, China’s closed borders and protracted lockdowns undermined the profitability of these ventures. As many gambling operations already ran a sideline in online fraud – indeed, gambling and fraud have been intertwined since the early days of the internet – the infrastructure could be quickly converted into offices equipped with banks of phones and laptops, with each room or floor dedicated to a different con or converted into dormitories for the workers. Business boomed and new compounds shot up, concentrated in border regions – in the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos and Vietnam meet; in Cambodia’s coastal Sihanoukville; and in Myanmar, wracked by the ongoing civil war. Google Satellite images of the Myawaddy area bordering Thailand and Myanmar are instructive: in early 2020, it’s farmland; by 2021, there are a few buildings; by 2022, a few more. In 2023, multi-storey compounds ringed in barbed wire take over the fields. The images are a testament to the economic viability of the industry; each new building is a sign of the influx of new capital, the reinvestment of profit, and, likely, the expansion into new markets.

The work inside these buildings is dull, repetitive, and emotionally taxing. Like the recruitment process, the operations resemble a regular call centre or office. There is a training process: for between a week and a month, workers must familiarise themselves with the relevant software and scripts. A manual titled ‘Phrases for Love, Friendship and Gambling’ recovered after a raid was labelled as version 3.23, suggesting these materials are regularly updated. Beyond training, there are perks, rewards, promotions and even, improbably, an HR department. Workers usually start at the bottom, sending those familiar phishing messages. The primary target markets are in the USA, UK, and China, so working hours are aligned with distant time zones, with shifts lasting up to 16 hours. Once a mark bites, they tend to be passed up the chain to a more skilled or experienced scammer. Using translation software, ‘deepfake’ AI, and the instruction manuals compiled by the managers, conversations are sustained, intimacies are forged, and money is extracted. Manuals suggest that targets are referred to as ‘clients’ or ‘customers’, betraying the ways in which these operations have grown out of call centres and outsourced customer service operations. 

The resemblance to a regular workplace was not lost on the conference attendees in Singapore. As Jeff Kuo from Gogolook observed to the audience, ‘These are well organised companies, like yours.” Of course, organised crime has always resembled ordinary business. G. Robert Blakey, the lawyer who drafted the USA’s notorious RICO legislation, observed that the mafia was ‘the mirror image of American capitalism.’ While organised crime is notorious for murderous conflicts over territory and control, so far, those at the top of the scam industry in the region have moved towards specialisation rather than competition. Individual compounds master a particular aspect of the business, then sell their skills, software, data or product to others. A human rights researcher informed me that one of the sites on the Thailand-Vietnam border almost exclusively opens fraudulent bank accounts. Thai captives are not recruited for their labour but for their faces, which are used to open accounts that can be used for money laundering by other players in the industry. Through outsourcing and specialisation, the industry makes use of the same division of labour that powers platform capitalism writ large. 

In his 2020 ethnography of Montego Bay’s phone scammers, Jovan Scott Lewis observes that the rise of the lottery scam, in which Americans are persuaded that they have won a huge cash prize that will be released if they pay a small tax, is a direct outgrowth of ordinary business. Call centres had been outsourced to Jamaica to undercut the cost of running them in the USA, and the scammers took the accents, phrases and habits taught to call centre workers, and used them to their entrepreneurial advantage. In their impersonations of ‘call centre workers, US bank employees and other characters of Western capital,’ Lewis argues that the poor but resourceful scammers are engaged in a kind of satire. But in the industrial scam centre, the impersonation is drained of its creative flair – the scripts are written by management, a single character is operated by dozens of workers, and strict discipline is used to intensify productivity. No longer a practice from below, the scam centres are closer to pastiche, flatly citing ordinary business operations. At the conference, this likeness could be wryly admitted, but a deeper imbrication could not.  The scam centres are more than a mirror for platform capitalism – they are a metonym, inextricably enmeshed in its circuits. 

In Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds, the only book-length study of the scam compounds, Mark Bo, Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li use the term ‘cyberslavery’, drawing out ‘the paradoxical nature of a situation that brings together the epitome of post-modernity, the internet, and something as brutal and primordial as slavery.’ In this way, the compounds are themselves compounding, fusing old and new methods of extracting value. What capitalism supposedly evolved beyond – slavery, piece work, the company store, debt bondage – is concatenated within the circuits of digital accumulation. It’s not only that what appears frictionless to the user relies upon layers of hidden exploitation; rather, ceaseless communication, transaction and circulation create new opportunities for exploitation, whether within or beyond legal limits. The scam centres deploy the same tactics as the platforms on which they run, combining highly personalised attempts to capture attention with low-cost blanket approaches. Because there is no ceiling on communication, there are also never-ending involutions of extraction. The deterioration of digital life– what a Data & Society report describes as ‘the inherent “scamminess” of the contemporary internet’ – offers the perfect cover for more targeted forms of fraud. In a digiscape of memes, fly-by-night crypto exchanges, and AI slop, scam content is easily camouflaged. 

Just as the factory, the call centre or the AI annotation facility bring with them infrastructural investments, so too do the scam compounds come with new roads and high-speed internet. As they take over farmland, generate new service jobs (such as food delivery, taxi driving or security), and bring an influx of violence, they reshape the local economy in their own interests with a workforce brought in from across the globe. We might think of the scam compound as the kind of ‘transitional form’ that Leon Trotsky identified as the hallmark of uneven and combined development. Where different forms of accumulation fuse, we can see ‘the real connections and consecutiveness of a living process.’ As the authors of Scam put it, ‘there is something new – and uncanny – in the phenomenon of individuals held in conditions of slavery while being almost perennially connected to the outside world through the internet.’ Industrialised scamming takes the tools, logic, organisation and values of the platform economy and ‘hacks’ them, disrupting the disrupters. The human labour that the platforms hide becomes visible in the scam, in the poorly worded phishing message or the clumped fingers on the hand of a deepfake video. But the platforms, with their ceaseless speed and endless innovation, quickly cover the tracks of the scammers as well as themselves. Though the compounds can be located on a map, driven past in a car and photographed by a drone, they are protected by their enmeshment with both the state and the platform. To obscure this imbrication, the tech industry must continue to tell the story that scams are an unfortunate but inevitable predation on inherent human weakness.

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I went to the GASA summit to find out what tech and finance had to say about scam centres. I sat through many panel discussions about information sharing and cooperation, customer education and awareness raising. I tried to keep a straight face while people showed me the computer game, app or checklist they had developed to educate consumers. In the air conditioned Suntec city conference centre, in Singapore’s clean and orderly downtown core, it was nearly impossible to articulate the obvious: scam centres are driven by global inequality. The person who is deceived into debt bondage by the offer of a job paying $200 USD a month is someone with no better options available, whereas the person who loses their life savings has some savings to lose. Most attendees of the conference had made careers out of smooth transactions, instant communication and algorithmic targeting: their fluent empty corporate-speak struggled to conceive of the bonded workers in the scam compounds, only able to say that ‘they were victims, too.’ When a rogue attendee – from a scam victim’s group, rather than tech or finance – suggested that perhaps Meta ought to create jobs in countries targeted for scam compound recruitment, they were treated as a crank. But whether the tech industry thinks, global inequality means new centres are popping up everywhere – in the UAE, Namibia, Zambia, Serbia, Georgia.  A list of rescued victims counts citizens of 66 countries, from Somalia to Singapore, Mongolia to Brazil. Wherever scam compounds appear, a global workforce, desperate enough to take a chance on a job offer in a foreign country, is likely to follow.  

But freelance scammers, working in a looser fashion and off their own steam, are perfectly aware that the scam is a response to the global wealth gap: indeed, they justify their work as reparations. In Ghana, romance scammers are known as ‘sakawa boys’, in Nigeria, ‘yahoo boys,’ and popular music (scam rap) pays homage to their wealth and style as righteous compensation for Europe’s crimes. As institutional demands for reparations are often met with scorn or silence, there is something compelling about the idea that individuals are clawing back the stolen wealth of empire, one romance scam at a time. But this story is too simple. A presentation by Paul Raffile from the Network Contagion Research Unitbrought to light the astonishing number of suicides by teenagers targeted by sextortion scams that are often operated from West Africa. Though Raffile made no reference to the conditions under which a teenager in Lagos might target a teenager in Ohio or Antwerp for a few hundred dollars, the brutal consequences of sextortion complicate any easy claims about the scam as reparations. In the end, no moral schema that rehearses the same ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ logic as the tech companies, however inverted, can adequately orient us here. 

The summit finished as it started, with unshakeable faith in the digital platform as the natural home of the good guys. The keynote at GASS was given by Jim Browning, a YouTuber whose channel boasts 4.4 million subscribers. Browning is perhaps the most famous ‘scambaiter’ – a mild mannered ‘white hat’ hacker who uses his skills to monitor scammers, gain access to their systems, warn victims and make wildly popular videos. He has collaborated on TV programmes with the BBC and Canada’s CBC, and trained O2’s ‘Daisy’, an AI voicebot that speaks in the persona of a hapless grandmother, keeping scammers on the phone by chatting about her cat. Should the workers captured by the scam compounds pin their hopes on content creators? Unlike Vietnam’s Phuong Bui, Browning’s concern about scams doesn’t extend to paying the ransoms to free the workers. In fact, in response to an email from a man freed from a compound in Dubai after a police raid, Browning says, ‘‘I’d normally have sympathy for someone who travelled abroad to get a better job, but when you’re involved in stealing money from other people you lose all my sympathy.’ Browning’s video shows grainy footage of hundreds of workers being piled onto police buses, awaiting deportation. The video has 2.8 million views, which likely earned the creator a few thousand dollars in revenue. At every juncture, there’s money to be made: by local police, tech companies, and the YouTube vigilante, as well as organised crime.

The workers who do escape often find themselves in immigration detention. There, while they wait for government support via the local embassy, they must pay for their food, water, bed, everything – just like in the scam compounds. After everyone has taken their cut, what’s left for the scammer?

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