Take a look at ‘scam farms’, where scripted romance, crypto bait and digital impersonation are industrialised – and victims worldwide are stripped of life-changing sums
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It’s a very 21st-century con trick, using online technology and information to woo and entrap the lonely hearts, the recently divorced or bereaved, or those simply desperate for money.
The bait is companionship, seductive cryptocurrency scams or, more mundanely, an appeal to human nature – that their newfound, seemingly genuine friend just needs a bit of cash to bail them out. Once snared by digital deceit, victims are entangled in a world of illicit marketplaces and unlicensed payment processors, extortion and impersonation scams – their money gone for good.
Check out our related reads on scam farms…
- The village that turned phone fraud into a business
- China’s influence in the world of scam farms
- Is it possible to crack down on scam centres?
The phrase for one of the preferred techniques is appropriately grisly: pig-butchering. It’s a long, drawn-out process, using scripts and established narratives to build trust. The main approaches involve seeking to strike up an online romance, invest in cryptocurrency schemes, or throw money at illegal online gambling sites.
‘The victim is allowed to make good money on their first investment or gambling game, in order to draw them in,’ says Xu Peng, Hallsworth research fellow in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester.
‘They’re emboldened to reinvest, then they lose a bit of money, and lose more the time after that. The scammers feed them, fatten them up and then hack off the flesh, bit by bit. They know not to go too hard, too fast; it is all rather like a play.’ Humiliated and embarrassed, most victims are reluctant to contact authorities.
The basis for many scams is jigsaw identification – the building up of a profile of a potential victim from a variety of sources, some legitimate, others illegal.
‘It is so easy to build up a profile of someone from legal sources, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or WhatsApp. There is so much leaky information about you out there – about your family, friends and interests,’ says Peng. ‘Scammers can plausibly pretend to be an old friend, or a friend of a friend, mention personal details, email correspondence, that make them seem genuine.’ In addition, personal data gets hacked and traded among scam farms.
Hundreds of thousands of nationals from at least 77 countries have been lured, recruited or otherwise trafficked into scam compounds. The majority of scammers are Chinese nationals, but the recruitment net is cast far and wide, and Ethiopian nationals and other African and Indian citizens are among those identified as working in scam farms.
It’s not about your nationality, it’s your linguistic and communication skills that are key, higher education can also be an advantage’ says Peng. The scam companies place adverts online asking for people with good English, targeting countries with high unemployment rates or a surplus of tech-savvy graduates – people who may feel they have nothing to lose by giving the jobs a go. Salaries are in the region of US$1,000–2,000 a month. ‘That’s not enough to appeal to people in the West, but it is extremely attractive to graduates in the global south,’ says Peng.
Bordering Thailand, the Karen State in Myanmar is a hub for scam centres. In large compounds such as KK Park and Shwe Kokko, as many as 100,000 people are employed. According to the NGO International Justice Mission, each individual is pressured to generate US$400 per day through scams.
The NGO estimates they generate a mind-boggling US$23billion a year – roughly 50 per cent of GDP in Cambodia. In Laos, says Kristina Amerhauser, of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), scam farms are reportedly spreading beyond the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone and can be found in Vientiane, among other locations.
The footprint of these scam farms is extraordinary. According to GI-TOC, ethnic militia groups partner with Chinese mafia groups to operate some 40 scam compounds along a 200-kilometre stretch of the Myanmar–Thailand border. In total, Amerhauser estimates that there are well over 100 known compounds across the three epicentre countries of Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.
‘Conditions for individuals inside the scam operations are deplorable,’ says Amerhauser. ‘If they fail to meet targets or break draconian rules set by the scam managers, they are subject to extreme torture, including food and sleep deprivation, beatings, rape and sexual violence, electrocution, water torture and other cruel forms of punishment. Murders are frequent inside scam compounds, as are suicides.’
Most scammers arrive at regional airports, such as Bangkok, where their new handlers immediately seize their passports. The Chinese mafia groups involved are known for coercion, physical abuse, sexual violence and the use of weapons. Scammers work 18 hours a day, synchronising work with time zones around the world. No one is able to simply hand in their notice and walk away. A high number of media reports document cases of white-collar Chinese workers being lured to the region under false pretences and then trafficked into Myanmar. They include curious cases of celebrities, including models and actors, being duped in this way and taken for scam-centre training.
‘Workers are frequently rotated, recruited, trafficked or sold from one kind of compound to another,’ says Amerhauser. ‘The compounds are the infrastructure – with scams and workers continuously changing.’
Civil society groups based in Thailand argue that the majority of scammers are themselves captive – victims of human trafficking, kept against their will. Others are more unsympathetic and feel the demarcation line between entrapment and personal choice can often be blurred. While Peng acknowledges that seizures of passports and trafficking, torture and other abuses take place, she struggles to see this applying to the majority of scammers.
‘Trafficking does happen between scam farms – scammers get traded,’ she says. ‘But the impression I get from police and lawyers is that scammers will say they have been coerced in order to escape conviction by the courts. Some will be naïve and find themselves out of their depth, but many know exactly what they are going to Myanmar or Cambodia to do. When they arrive in the country and see how things are at the border, speak to other people, they know they are not there to sell car insurance.’ In some Chinese cases, police and lawyers say individuals repatriated from scam compounds may claim coercion in court as part of their legal defence; but trafficking and abuse remain very real features of these operations.
People involved in cyber scam operations ‘fall along a spectrum of complicity’, says Amerhauser. Many of the people conducting scams are forced to do so and are exploited for the purpose of forced criminality. But people who conduct scams also include lower-level criminals that enter this business willingly and know they are conducting scams. Then there are those who may enter voluntarily but later try to leave and cannot.
While conditions in the scam centres can be grim, life can be good for the successful scammers, says Peng. ‘The farms are huge, seven to ten floors high. They have karaoke, nightclubs, restaurants, even swimming pools. Successful scammers earn a lot and are happy to stay. For others, it is miserable,’ says Peng.
The scam farms of Southeast Asia haven’t sprung out of a vacuum, and they thrive in frontier areas, where central authorities struggle to exert control. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that poor governance, absence of governance and fraught politics facilitate transnational criminality.
The region has a long history of drugs production, weapons smuggling, human trafficking and illegal gambling – a symptom of deeper systemic issues afflicting the region, like corruption, stagnation, authoritarianism and conflict, according to IISS in a paper published last year, The Geopolitics of Southeast Asia’s Cyber Scamming Crisis. The February 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar left a further major security vacuum in the region.
Profit is made for crime bosses from China and their associates, and scams take place at the intersection of the regional criminal underworld and the upper world of business and politics, according to GI-TOC’s Amerhauser. ‘Many scam operations are able to hide behind a façade of businesses that look legitimate and profit from an ecosystem of corruption and the protection of state-embedded actors,’ she says. Individuals in major companies, such as Chen Zhi, the head of Prince Holding Group, a Cambodian conglomerate, have been implicated.
The problem area is Myanmar, and in particular the latter’s riverine border with Thailand, where the River Moei is harder to police than a land crossing. ‘In northern Myanmar, the [growth of] scamming has generally been a progression from gambling activities such as opium smuggling,’ according to Peng, a specialist in ethnic conflict and organised crime in Southeast Asia/China, who has watched the trade grow since first visiting the region in 2018. During the Covid-19 pandemic, China erected a border fence to restrict the spread of the virus, bringing all trade – legitimate and illegal – to a jarring halt.
The fence remains in place and is harder to penetrate; Peng says it’s still ‘almost impossible’ for ordinary people to cross informally from China into Myanmar. China’s closure of its borders created a major problem for businesses in northern Myanmar, especially illegal-gambling dens and brothels that relied on clientele from Yunnan. In response, non-state armed groups and criminal syndicates began to diversify, including setting up online cyber-scam operations in the newly empty casinos and hotel rooms.
To the south, and in contrast, Thailand’s river border with Myanmar is porous, and the ease of crossing is enhanced by the melee of routine trade and the chaos of refugees moving east from Myanmar. In such circumstances, it’s easy for foreigners and trafficked workers to be moved the other way – west, into Myanmar – assimilating into groups of refugees, itinerant traders and aid workers, and transported to the scam farms.
Scam farms aren’t found exclusively in Southeast Asia. In India, a long-term hotbed of online scamming has thrived in the eastern district of Jamtara. Exploiting the rapid digital explosion across India, scammers, many of them farmers and agricultural labourers, have duped millions of Indians and broadly managed to evade the law for the best part of 15 years.
