The Places Where the Scammers Might Also be Victims
When you think of scammers, you probably think of criminals – people who are happy to commit crimes if there’s money in it for them. But not every scammer wants to scam. Some of them are victims of human trafficking. They were snared, flown across the world, locked up, and forced to scam until they pay off impossible debts. The uncomfortable truth is that the line between scammer and victim is blurrier than we like to think.
See Scam Compounds with Ivan Franceschini for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.
Ivan Franceschini is an Italian academic with a background in Chinese studies. In 2013, after over a decade researching labor issues and social movements in China, he started studying how Chinese investment affected construction in Cambodia. Part of that work involved being on construction sites. Then, he had no idea what the massive structures were for, but he later learned they were scam compounds – places where scamming happens at an industrial scale. Once he discovered that, he couldn’t tolerate that those places exist.
Now, Ivan researches the scam industry from the perspective of Southeast Asia. He focuses mostly on Cambodia, trying to make sense of why and how it became a scam hub. His most recent book, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, looks at this topic. Also, and most important, he tries to help the people trapped in these operations. He works with people who do scams, many of whom are doing so against their will. Along with friends and colleagues, he founded the EOS Collective, which tries to get these victims out and get them home.
We work with the people who do the scams, because many of them … are doing it against their will, they’re trapped in these facilities.
Ivan Franceschini
A History of Scamming in Southeast Asia
The scam industry has been in Southeast Asia for a while before the news started talking about it. Ivan has been aware of it since the early 2010s. When he moved to Cambodia in 2013, there were often media reports about police raids on scam operations. But those articles described the operations as located in villas, apartments, or hotels. They were small, spread out, and not very well-organized. They were also staffed by Chinese criminals.
The big change is in the scale of the industry. It became very big, very fast towards the end of the 2010s. Between 2017 and 2019, massive facilities popped up in Cambodia, Myanmar, and various border areas. These facilities were generally a bunch of smaller scam operations working together. By coming together in these big scam compounds, they could share infrastructure, protection, and workforce. They weren’t always big concrete buildings with barbed wire and armed guards, either. Some of them were in hotels or casinos. Another change was a move towards a mixed workforce – people who were doing it willingly working side-by-side with trafficking victims being forced to scam.
Covid was a big turning point for scammers. Scams boomed because everyone felt lonely and pandemic stress made people vulnerable. To exploit this, scammers started human trafficking at unprecedented scale. Scam compounds popped up all over the place, and that trend continues to this day. Changing technology has made it easier to become a scammer – all the tools you need are easy to find and cheap to buy. Scammers were ready to take advantage of all of these changes and exploit vulnerable people in all kinds of ways.
The threshold to enter the industry today as a scammer is very low.
Ivan Franceschini
Snaring People and Forcing Them to Scam
The economic downturn that came with covid was an opportunity for scammers on both sides. On one side, people were vulnerable to scams because they felt lonely and isolated. On the other, people were vulnerable to trafficking because they were desperate for any job. Scam compounds took advantage of that desperation to lure people in.
People who are desperate for a job are more likely to overlook warning signs. Most of the time, scammers don’t advertise the jobs as scamming. They recruit with legitimate-sounding jobs, sometimes even with conditions that are better than average. They often advertise slightly higher salaries or benefits like paid visas or paid housing. Maybe in normal circumstances, people would have been more careful, but desperation has driven hundreds of thousands of people into trafficking.
At the beginning, most of the scamming in Southeast Asia was targeting China. The head scammers were Chinese, the people they trafficked were Chinese, and they targeted Chinese-speaking people with their scams. But during covid, it became much more global. There are still a lot of ethnic Chinese people in these Southeast Asian scam compounds. Right now, most of the people the EOS Collective work with are from all over Africa. Internal numbers suggest there are people from eighty different countries trapped in scam compounds and forced to scam.
Who’s Involved in Scam Compounds
Scamming is a financially-motivated crime – it’s an easy way to make a buck. Business-oriented criminal groups tend to be involved. All sorts of businessmen can make money in the industry. These operations need protection to operate, but if you have that protection, the barrier to entry is extremely low. Once you have the infrastructure, it’s easy to make money. A lot of different criminal groups operate side by side, and some businessmen set up their own small operations within these compounds to make an extra buck.
Obviously these are criminal operations. But it’s generally not existing cartels or mafias running them. There definitely are people involved with scam operations who have ties to the Chinese mafia. But that’s not because the mafia is particularly involved, but just because it’s an industry where it’s really easy to make money so it’s attracted people from all over.
These scam operations are still dominated by Chinese criminals, but they’re not the only ones. And the human trafficking side isn’t always run by the same people running the scamming aspect, either. Especially when trafficking people across borders, it’s often easier to subcontract. Criminal groups in other countries may provide many of the people being forced to scam. It’s a very diverse operation.
How People are Trafficked and Forced to Scam
Sometimes people are kidnapped and trafficked. A lot of Chinese trafficking victims are just kidnapped and taken across the border. But it’s not the most common method. The most common way it happens, especially for African people, is through a fake job. Sometimes they get people already in these scam compounds to contact friends back home with fake job opportunities, or sometimes they just post fake job ads online.
From hearing about the job to the scammers flying these victims to Southeast Asia is usually just a matter of days. The fake jobs are in every sector – not just IT, but also sales, customer service, agriculture, bartending, DJing, and everything you can imagine. A common one is language teaching, especially for native English speakers. Victims get told there’s a need for native speakers to teach English in Southeast Asia.
These people apply and get a job offer quickly. The scammers get them visas and put them on flights. Often these flights land in Thailand or Vietnam, and the scammers put people in a van and drive them to Cambodia or Myanmar. It’s very well organized, and these operations have local governments on board – otherwise they wouldn’t be able to do it so successfully.
Stories from Victims Forced to Scam
One victim Ivan worked with was a black woman from an east African country. The fake job she got was teaching in China. They gave her a passport, and it came back with a Vietnamese visa. When she asked why, they told her that the Chinese are racist and they don’t give visas to black people, so she would have to fly into Vietnam and go to China over land. That isn’t true, but racism is common, so it sounds within the realm of possibility. Until she arrived at the scam compound in Cambodia, this woman thought she was going to China.
Another man Ivan worked with was in his early twenties, a refugee from a civil war in his home country, and didn’t know if his family was still alive. He received a generic email with a job offer for $2,000 a month. When he replied that they must have the wrong person, they said they could still hire him. A few days later, he was on a plane to Thailand. He also ended up in a compound in Cambodia.
Most people think of scammers as educated people with a deep understanding of manipulation. This leads to a lack of sympathy because we assume they must have known what they were doing. But a lot of these victims that get forced to scam are from poorer backgrounds and have little education. They get training and playbooks to do it. They become cogs in the machine, trained to do their specific part of the scam and nothing more.
The scam today is an industry … the people doing the scams, they are cogs in a machine.
Ivan Fanceschini
Anyone Can be Useful in a Scam Operation
There is a job for everyone in these scam compounds. Anyone can be forced to scam. It doesn’t even matter what language they speak – there are always scenarios where the person isn’t a native speaker and it can still make sense and be believable. And tools like ChatGPT and Google Translate make translating quick and easy.
The scam industry is global now. For a while, there was an idea that the US and UK are vulnerable because they speak English, but other countries are less vulnerable because fewer people speak languages like Estonian and Croatian. But that isn’t true anymore. With a diverse workforce and lots of tools, scammers can target anyone.
There are also lots of people who enter this industry willingly. A big job right now in scam compounds is models. The scams happen mostly over text, but at some point, potential victims want to do a video call (sometimes based on the now-outdated idea that if they show themselves on video, they’re not a scammer). These models are well-paid, often European and Caucasian men and women, and their job is to take thee video calls. Scammers often have a delay between agreeing to a call and actually doing it because they have to book a time slot with a model that fits their story. But the point is that there’s a job for everyone in a scam operation. If you’re willing, they’ll find something for you.
Scam Compounds and the Local Economy
One of the reasons it’s so difficult to get rid of scam compounds is because they don’t just affect the people inside – they also have a big impact on the area around them. Getting rid of them removes income for a lot of people, not just criminals. A lot of the people being forced to scam don’t get paid. (Some do, but it’s always less than they were promised and not enough to pay off their “debt.”) But the security guards, cleaners, delivery workers, construction and maintenance workers, and others are locals just doing a job.
One of the people Ivan met in his work was a security guard at one of the biggest compounds in Cambodia. He made around $300 a month. His wife worked at the same compound as a cleaner and made around $250 a month. He knew what his job was and that in black-and-white terms he wasn’t a good guy, but they needed the money. When the government cracked down and closed the compound, they both lost their jobs. His wife couldn’t find another job and ended up picking up plastic bottles on the beach for a few dollars. Ultimately, they lost their house.
When it comes to the impact on local economy, it’s not a straightforward issue. These people aren’t criminals – they’re just people who need a job, any job, so they can afford to live. Mostly they’re not torturing people, and they’re not being tortured or exploited, but their lives are entwined with the scam compound. Taken as a whole, the ecosystem around these scam operations is a spectrum, not a clear matter of good and evil.
It’s not black and white. These [scam compound workers] are not criminals. These people are just providing services.
Ivan Franceschini
How People Forced to Scam Get Out
There are several ways that trafficked people being forced to scam can get out. One is to pay the “debt.” The scammers pay for everything to get them into the compound, and they say to leave, they have to pay back all of the expenses. That’s not just the visas and flights to get them there – it’s also expenses accrued within the compound. Food, space, their bed, the computer they use to scam, toilet access, even the air they breathe in some cases, the charges are ridiculous and grow every day. One way to get out is to pay off that debt. But even if you do, there’s no guarantee they’ll let you go.
Another way to get out is to escape. For a while in Cambodia, it was common to see people jumping out of windows to escape. The compounds had bars on the lower windows so they could only jump out of higher ones, and people would break their legs or spines or even die in the attempt. But it is one method to try to get out.
A third option is to seek help. One of the paradoxes of these compounds is you have people being held against their will and forced to scam, but they are also constantly connected to the internet. They’re being monitored, but sometimes they will risk trying to get out a message. In Cambodia, it’s common for them to comment on political figures’ Facebook pages asking for help. But that can be risky, because if it does get attention, it usually gets delegated to local police. And it’s common for the local police to be in league with the scammers and just tell them to make the problem disappear. Sometimes it does work and people get rescued, but it’s a risk.
It’s Still a Struggle Once They Get Out
The dynamic in Cambodia has changed recently. They’ve cracked down on scam compounds, and a lot of them have closed and left. When they did, they left most of the people behind. These victims often have their passports but no visas, have no money, and can’t speak the language. A lot of the victims are African, and there are no African countries with embassies in Cambodia.
Cambodia has a law that if you overstay your visa, you have to pay a fine of $10 US per day, with no limit. So the first step for these victims would be getting an embassy to negotiate a fine waver. An embassy can do that, but it takes time – bureaucratic processes aren’t fast. And these people have nowhere to stay in the meantime. A new law makes it illegal for anyone without a visa to stay in a hotel or private housing. If found, the owner would have to pay $1,000 per person. So no one wants to host them, and there is only one shelter for victims of human trafficking in the whole country.
Thousands of people who were trafficked and forced to scam are now on the street. It’s illegal to house them, and they can’t leave the country without visas. Even if they manage to get the overstay fines waived, they still have to pay for their own flights, and they have no money. Even though they’re acknowledged trafficking victims, there’s no protection or support available. The EOS Collective provides survival support for these people – food, basic medical care, and flights so they can get home.
It’s a very uninteresting kind of activity from a philanthropic point of view, buying flights for people. But if you don’t, these people will be stuck there.
Ivan Franceschini
Helping Victims and Stopping Scammers
Right now, the issue Ivan is working with is getting people home. The problem isn’t with Cambodia cracking down on scammers, but how they are dealing with the victims who have been forced to scam. The US government has been sanctioning actors linked to scam compounds, and that’s important. But we need to combine that pressure with attention to the humans involved in the industry. Some of the people involved are criminals, sure – but the criminals aren’t the ones suffering on the streets. This is a global issue, and the victims are from all over the world.
These victims are also extremely valuable to the fight against scams. They have experience with the industry from the inside. They want to share what happened to them and what the scammers were doing. Some of them even know who they were scamming. We can connect victims to specific operations and scammers thanks to these people’s testimonies. But if they’re left on the street in Southeast Aisa, all of that valuable information is lost.
We can connect scam victims to specific operations and specific scammers thanks to the testimonies of [scam compound victims].
Ivan Franceschini
As cynical as it sounds, these victims are an unprecedented opportunity. Tens of thousands of people were drafted into scamming against their will, and they can’t wait to share what happened to them. We can get firsthand accounts of exactly how things work inside. But we have to support and protect these victims to do that.
Ivan Franceschini, along with his colleagues, wrote Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, to track and describe how Southeast Asia became a scam hub. You can also learn more about the EOS Collective on their website, eoscollective.net.
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