Across Southeast Asia’s grey zones of criminal economies, stories of enslavement and escape from scam compounds have become chillingly common. In Cambodia, the Philippines and now Myanmar, the cycle repeats: young people, tricked by false promises of good jobs, get locked up and forced into digital fraud or sex work. But buried under the headlines is a more complex truth, especially in Myanmar’s lawless, conflict-ridden self-administered zones (SAZs), where Vietnamese nationals—both victims and willing participants—have built makeshift lives.

Over the past two years, I’ve embedded myself in virtual communities spread across Facebook, Telegram and Zalo (Vietnam’s domestic social media platform) to observe how Vietnamese migrant labour communities live within Myanmar’s scam compounds and KTV brothels. What I’ve found is a nuanced picture of survival, complicity, longing and contradiction, involving individuals trapped not only by geography but also by networks of exploitation.

The 2021 coup in Myanmar triggered widespread resistance that escalated into a civil war, fragmenting the country into enclaves controlled either by the military junta, the People’s Defence Force (the armed wing of the National Unity Government) or various ethnic armed groups. Meanwhile, a series of infrastructure investments under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—like the notorious Yatai New City in Shwe Kokko or the Myitkyina Economic Development Zone in Kachin State—have been exploited by junta-backed local authorities to facilitate criminal operations run by Chinese syndicates, particularly along the China–Myanmar and Thai–Myanmar border. Within these zones, Chinese criminal enterprises have constructed casino cities and compounds that double as scam and trafficking hubs.[wcm_nonmember][box border_color="#000000" border_width="thin"]To read the rest of this article, and to access all Mekong Review content, please subscribe. If you are an existing subscriber, please login to your account to continue reading.[/box][/wcm_nonmember][wcm_restrict plans="print-digital","institutional-print-digital"]

These scam centres or compounds are large, often heavily guarded complexes where workers—many of whom are trafficked or coerced—are forced to carry out online fraud schemes on social media and communication apps like Facebook, Instagram and Telegram. Common scams include impersonating customer service agents, romantic catfishing and investment fraud, targeting victims around the world. Workers are typically assigned quotas and punished if they fail to meet them. Punishments vary from company to company but are known to include violence and abuse.

Such scam operations are tolerated, even openly supported, by Myanmar’s military regime. Other groups have been implicated too: the Karen National Union (KNU), an ethnic political organisation whose armed wing has long been in conflict with the Myanmar military, has reportedly been entangled in these criminal operations. In February 2023, a group of Karen organisations issued a statement demanding an investigation into whether KNU leaders were involved in a Chinese new city project in KNU territory, in which human trafficking and scam operations had been identified. Although the KNU has denied involvement in any illegal activity, they also did not explicitly commit to taking serious action against organised crime in the region.

This environment of state collusion, militia complicity and international indifference has turned parts of Myanmar into a sanctuary for transnational crime. According to conversations in the Vietnamese online communities I’ve been following, some scam ‘companies’ migrated to SAZs in Myanmar for more ‘protection’ after police crackdowns on scam compounds in Cambodia and the Philippines. They brought their loyal employees with them—including Vietnamese recruits.

It is this diverse demographic of Vietnamese workers that sets the scam operations in Myanmar apart from those in Cambodia and the Philippines. Some of these Vietnamese people were trafficked, attracted by fake job offers before being beaten, imprisoned and stripped of their passports. But others arrived voluntarily, fully aware of the scams they’d be participating in—if not of the extent of abuse and danger they’d face—but drawn by promises of better pay than they would have been able to earn at home. Many Vietnamese women also voluntarily travel to work as hostesses or sex workers in the KTV bars and spas often located within or alongside scam compounds, placing them within the broader ecosystem of informal and exploitative labour in these zones.

Life inside a scam compound is marked by strict surveillance, gruelling work hours and deeply unequal treatment. Most workers, both in scam and sex businesses, live in packed dormitories, sharing rooms with four to ten other colleagues. For many trafficked workers—especially those who try to resist or fail to meet their quotas—life includes beatings, food deprivation, solitary confinement or even torture. Movement is often restricted and phones are confiscated to prevent escape or contact with the outside world. Victims who try to escape could be tortured or even killed, if caught. But not everyone is treated the same. Those who arrive voluntarily may be allowed to keep their phones, move around more freely and negotiate better conditions, especially if they perform well and build trust with their employers. This disparity in treatment creates a confusing moral landscape, where some workers end up staying willingly or even returning after short visits home, seeing the compounds not as prisons but as places of opportunity despite the risks.

A new phenomenon is also taking root: the emergence of Vietnamese scam bosses. Having learned the trade as employees in Chinese-run operations, some former workers now run their own businesses, focusing on Vietnamese targets and recruiting fellow citizens via online communities. Among them is a Facebook account operating under the name ‘Hạnh Trần’, apparently run by a woman who has used the platform to hire staff for her husband’s scam business, promising better pay and treatment compared to the Chinese-owned compounds. She previously posted a job recruitment call offering a salary of 100 to 500 million Vietnamese dong (US$3,830 to US$19,150) a month. The current average income in Vietnam is 8.3 million dong (US$317) a month; low earners might only receive 4.36 million dong (US$166) a month. Hạnh Trần also claimed that her brother was the chief manager of the scam operation, overseeing employees from both Vietnam and China.

Another noteworthy observation is the overlap between Vietnam-based sex work brokers and the online communities of Vietnamese workers in Myanmar. In several Zalo group chats used by Vietnamese migrants in Myanmar’s self-administered zones, I found invitation links to separate Zalo groups operated by sex work brokers based in Vietnam. These brokers actively posted job offers—such as gigs at KTV lounges or in massage parlours in Vietnam—directly into the Myanmar-based Vietnamese chats. This suggests that these migrant communities aren’t just isolated enclaves but are digitally connected to broader transnational networks of illicit labour. It also indicates that some SAZ-based Vietnamese labourers may be coordinating with domestic brokers, extending their influence back into Vietnam’s underground economy.

[dropcap]There’s a striking paradox in these virtual Vietnamese communities. On the one hand, they function as informal alert systems, sharing information about recent trafficking scams, abusive bosses and opportunities for escape. But on the other, they’re hotbeds for recruitment; traffickers and scam companies are constantly on the lookout for targets in these group chats and comment sections.

Ko Peter (not his real name) is the administrator of the Facebook group ‘Community of Vietnamese in Myanmar’, which has approximately 19,500 members. “Most real trafficked victims are locked up and can’t even access their phones,” he says. “The ones who can still post online are most likely not trafficked and came to Myanmar voluntarily. But sometimes they fake being victims to scam money from sympathetic members of the group.”

Moderation, he says, is a non-stop game of cat and mouse. Despite his best efforts to remove suspicious posts and block recruiters, most scams happen out of sight. After spotting vulnerable users in the comments, recruiters tend to message them directly; these one-on-one exchanges then take place outside the control of group administrators.

“When people reach out for help, I mainly tell them not to transfer money to random people because most of them are scammers,” Ko Peter says. “If they want to be redeemed, they must work directly with the bosses, not through any intermediary, or they’ll be scammed again. Occasionally, I still approve one to two posts of fake victims as a warning about the danger of going to work in Myanmar for community members. Sometimes they get fooled, but sometimes it has to be like that to warn people off.”

As contradictory as that answer may sound, my personal observation is that admins of community groups with thousands of members simply can’t keep track of all the interactions in these spaces. They don’t necessarily want to, either; they usually founded such community groups to promote their own businesses in Myanmar, not raise awareness about human trafficking. Their efforts toward content regulation are inconsistent at best.

Catering specifically to Vietnamese migrant labourers in SAZs or regional criminal networks are Telegram channels like ‘TIN TỨC – 新闻 (News)’, a bilingual news hub operating in Vietnamese and Chinese. Such channels provide daily updates about events like water festivals—holidays in Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand—and also police raids and crackdowns on compounds in Cambodia, the Philippines and Myanmar. Apart from entertainment, these updates help those working illegally to avoid detection and navigate transnational migration within the underworld of scam operations. If a compound becomes too abusive or at risk of police raids, workers try to jump ship, escaping and moving to another compound or even another country. This isn’t an easy thing to do, especially for those under tight surveillance or whose documents have been confiscated. In some cases, workers negotiate their release by paying a “transfer fee” to their current employers or bribing local militia who control the area. Others coordinate their escape through smugglers, often with the help of contacts on encrypted messaging apps. If caught, they can face violent retaliation or be resold to even harsher compounds.

Unsurprisingly, there are also smugglers who pretend to provide undocumented transportation services out of the SAZ, only to sell their hapless victims on to other scam companies or disappear the moment they receive payment. Video advertisements of undocumented transportation services on Zalo group chats often feature snapshots of clients boarding buses and boats at the Thai–Myanmar border, with onscreen text promising comfortable journeys with “no forest-trekking or river-swimming” to get into Thailand. The majority of the routes between Vietnam and Myanmar SAZs involve crossing the Moei River at the Thai–Myanmar border in Mae Sot before flying back to Vietnam from Thailand.

Over time, an entire ecosystem has developed to serve the growing number of Vietnamese scammers. Vietnamese-run businesses—offering everything from Vietnamese food, clothing and beauty services to immigration services, sex and drugs—have popped up within scam compounds. Their business activities aren’t just present on closed messaging platforms like Telegram but also on less secure apps like Facebook Messenger and Zalo. While operating in the shadow of criminal syndicates, these mini-communities provide a strange comfort: spaces where migrants connect over language, food and shared hardship. During their breaks from running scams or working in KTV pubs, Vietnamese workers hiding behind anonymised social media accounts form intimate bonds over exploitative working conditions and a yearning for home and community.

In Telegram groups like ‘Hội Người Việt tại Yatai (Association of Vietnamese People in Yatai)’ and Zalo’s ‘Người Việt ở Khu tự trị Myanmar (Vietnamese in Myanmar Self-Administered Zones)’, the tone can be almost domestic. Members trade stories about the best Vietnamese restaurants, clothing stores and services; sometimes, they vent about homesickness and seek comfort. But recruiters lurk there too—I see scammers advertising “better jobs” across the border in Cambodia. Moderators like Ko Peter might sometimes catch and ban them, but in many instances, they slip through and find gullible, or perhaps willing, recruits.

This tangled web of community and exploitation turns the very notion of rescue into a moral dilemma. There are, of course, victims who are subjected to abuse and are desperate to go home. But not everyone wants to be liberated from these compounds. Some of them might even return to Vietnam briefly, only to go back to Myanmar for another round. Most of these people who choose to work for criminal syndicates are socioeconomically marginalised and struggling in Vietnam. For them, scamming offers financial autonomy, an illusion of freedom from the rule of law and, sometimes, even a sense of belonging that they had not been able to secure in their home country.

The ongoing civil war in Myanmar, China’s leniency (or even complicity) and the struggle for survival among Vietnam’s lower classes have combined to create a complex system that must be assessed beyond black-and-white generalisations portraying ‘victim’ and ‘scammer’ as mutually exclusive categories. Not everyone inside a scam centre is a victim, but that doesn’t mean that migrant labourers should be dehumanised and vilified for their choices. It’s easy to enter these compounds while chasing promises of quick money; once inside, it’s much harder to escape from a cycle of abuse, debt and addiction. When one lives in these in-between spaces, community can be both a trap and a lifeline.

I ask Ko Peter how the Vietnamese embassy in Myanmar responds to the presence of their citizens in these scam centres. “When people seek help in the group, I advise them to contact the embassy. Before, the embassy supported everyone, but you have to understand that many people went there voluntarily and illegally—how could they ask the embassy to help them?” Ko Peter is aware of maybe two or three repatriations during the Covid-19 pandemic but says those were all female sex workers, most of whom chose to work in Myanmar.

For human rights workers, journalists and even governments, the answer isn’t as simple as gaining access to an SAZ and picking out ‘real victims’ to save. Any lasting solution requires listening to the stories of the people who have chosen to stay and understanding why they made that decision. It also means confronting a grim truth: in the shadow of global development and economic integration, the neglect of vulnerable populations and regional political dynamics creates opportunities for transnational crime to flourish.

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• Tags: Issue 40, Myanmar, Vietnam, Ying