Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds
Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, and Mark Bo
Verso: 2025
.
Cybercrime is big business, and some of its leading perpetrators have been operating in Southeast Asia, most notably in the border areas of northern and eastern Myanmar, and parts of Cambodia and Laos. It’s here that scam compounds—“where cyberfraud is practised on an industrial scale by a workforce that includes a significant number of people trafficked into forced criminality”—have mushroomed over the past five years.

The criminal endeavour has become so large that it has its own distinct supply chains, specialised service providers, vertical and horizontal diversification of activities, and even franchise operations that allow wannabe scam operators to acquire all the resources necessary—including handbooks on how to lure victims—to set up their own outlets. It’s also started to expand to parts of Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central America. A key factor driving this globalisation is the need to stay one step ahead of the authorities, which in turn spurs a search for local elites who can host and protect such criminal activity.

Recent months have seen an uptick in media attention and policing efforts. In early May this year, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Karen National Army (KNA) in Myanmar a transnational criminal organisation, while its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) identified the Southeast Asia–based Huione Group “as a critical node for laundering proceeds” of cybercrimes. Later that same month, OFAC sanctioned Philippines-based Funnull Technology for selling internet protocol addresses “in bulk to cybercriminals to operate scam websites”.

• Tags: Cambodia, China, Ivan Franceschini, Laos, Ling Li, Mark Bo, Myanmar, Nick J. Freeman, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand