According to recent estimates, the cyber-enabled fraud industry operating out of the Mekong sub-region may now boast a labor force in excess of 350,000. Who are these people exactly and what is to be done about them?
The early days of Southeast Asia’s “scamdemic” were dominated by horrific reports of abuse emerging from counter-trafficking advocates and media reports. It is fair to say that the issue initially rose to global prominence largely on the back of these shocking stories, which were frequently supported by disturbing visual evidence.
As the world begins to better understand the industry, it is now abundantly clear that these are not isolated cases. The scam industry is following a well-established pattern of rampant abuse, which defines the bottom of the pyramid in a wide array of criminal industries.
“Forced criminality” is the technical term used to describe such cases and according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)’s most recent GLOTIP Report, 15 percent of all detected human trafficking cases globally involve trafficking for forced criminal purposes. Notably, this report relies on data that predates the explosion of Southeast Asia’s forced scamming phenomenon.
Compulsory and marginalized labor is a defining feature of scam “compound capitalism” as well as drug cultivation and smuggling economies, wildlife trafficking rackets, illegal mining, and a host of other predatory and illicit industries.
Yet, an increasing number of actors are now making public claims that undermine evidence of widespread abuse within scam compounds. As we evaluate these claims, it is important to consider the conflicting (frequently perverse) incentives guiding these actors as well as the glaring capacity and knowledge gaps facing would-be responders today.
Perhaps the most vocal and adamant voice against trafficking victim testimony has been and continues to be the Cambodian government. For instance, Cambodia’s National Committee to Counter Trafficking (NCCT) has stated that over 90 percent of all forced scamming victim claims are false. NCCT spokespeople and other government mouthpieces regularly denounce victim testimony and defame the victims themselves as “liars,” “attention seekers,” and the like. Such ad hominem attacks extend beyond victims to essentially anyone reporting on the issue, and seek to paint the story as something of a global conspiracy to undermine Cambodian tourism and/or delegitimize the Cambodian government.
The best explanation for this bizarrely defensive posture is the well-established reality of heavy Cambodian ruling party elite involvement in this criminal industry, an industry that likely accounts for more than half the country’s GDP. Given the nature of the Cambodian political-economic settlement, formal state positions reliably follow the interests of ruling party scions. In this light, claims that serve to obscure the nature of a “too big to fail” industry and ensure its perpetuation in Cambodia must be viewed as overtly disinformative and designed to directly abet the crime.
A second primary source of victim under-reporting is the Chinese government. As of this writing, at least 60,000 people have been removed from regional scam compounds and forcibly returned to China. Amongst these, there are only a few isolated cases where the individuals were transparently and formally classified by the Chinese government as victims. This reality emerges from a model of law enforcement engagement which, as suggested in a recent report from the Global Initiative to Combat Organized Crime, tends toward the projection of strength and the leaving in place of elite perpetrators who might later serve the interests of the party. Centering widespread claims of victimization would have the potential to undermine both aims, problematizing the image of Chinese law enforcement success and calling into question the role of complicit local elite actors in perpetuating crimes against Chinese nationals (for instance, legally embattled Prince Group Holding’s Chen Zhi in Cambodia).
Beyond the Cambodian and Chinese governments, statements from other regional governments increasingly gloss over the existence of victims in the compounds. A bias for under-reporting from these stakeholders may be explainable via several key factors.
First, given the volume of the scam workforce coming from some of the key source countries, states may be hesitant to take on the burden of a potentially massive number of victims entitled to government support. Calling them criminals alleviates this burden. Beyond pragmatic calculations, there are also significant, often profound, capacity gaps in formal victim identification processes across the region that cripple well-intentioned efforts to respond. Lastly, in Cambodia specifically, there is a perverse incentive for embassies to corroborate the Cambodian government’s propaganda about victims in order to secure the cooperation of complicit state apparatus. An anonymous source at a regional embassy in Phnom Penh confirmed that disputing Cambodian government-designated victim classifications consistently resulted in stone-walling from the regime on rescue requests for their nationals.
Beyond the region, recidivism rates for people removed from compounds are also increasingly being used to argue against the appropriateness of assigning them victim status. For instance, a U.S. law enforcement official speaking at a conference in Australia in November claimed that eight in 10 people emerging from the compounds choose to return to them after their release.
However, according to local civil society operating both on the Thai-Myanmar border and in Cambodia, such claims do not reflect the ground reality. While NGOs in both contexts acknowledged the existence of recidivism, they suggested that the claims of 80 percent were dramatically overstated.
Mina Chiang, founder and CEO of Humanity Research Consultancy, which has worked heavily on the issue over the past three years, added further context to the recidivism discussion, saying that many of the people inside these compounds “are extremely vulnerable in their home country settings.” She suggested they often lack supportive family systems and carry minor criminal records that undermine their economic opportunities and limit their agency.
This reality is not unique to forced scammers and is observable across many forms of forced criminality. Moreover, revictimization into situations of human trafficking and modern slavery is quite common across all industries and geographies and does not in itself undermine the case for abusive practices.
While the barriers against effective and good-faith victim reporting are staggering, it also bears noting that not all the people working inside these compounds are victims. This is a thriving and highly profitable criminal industry and there are certainly willing actors within the compound walls.
Given the specific complexities of identifying victims inside these compounds, the UNODC has created a list of “Key Indicators of Trafficking in Persons for Forced Criminality to Commit Cyber Enabled Crimes.” This useful document lays out the principles needed to approach a meaningful capacity building effort, and several key NGOs in the space are beginning to engage in such work. These responders are up against significant challenges – both those common to traditional capacity building campaigns as well as the specific incentive misalignments noted above which are somewhat unique to this space.
As elsewhere in the counter-trafficking world, the majority of formal responders have taken a credible approach to their work identifying and caring for victims. Well-intentioned actors in the space should continue to be careful to allow for nuance in their advocacy and strive for continued improvement in their victim identification work. Doing otherwise presents a disservice to victims and the broader movement, aiding those pushing for various reasons the idea that victim claims are just another form of scam.
The debate about the scale of scam-trafficking victimization is now raging and will have serious implications for how and how well the world responds to this crisis. The lack of systematic data on the sector confounds our ability to speak with absolute authority on either side of that debate. This data gap produces an over-reliance on anecdotal evidence, introducing room for malign actors to influence the narrative via repression and disinformation. Yet, we can counter that tendency by recognizing the clear existence of a pattern that spans eras, industries, and geographies: large, marginalized populations are always bound up in the lower rungs of massive criminal enterprises.
The fraught 50+ year history of the “war on drugs” is emblematic of the need for a rights-respecting response to the criminal epidemic of cyber-enabled fraud facing the world today. Militarized approaches to criminal industries ossify criminal economies at the national and regional levels and neglect the impact on workers with limited agency, who make up the bottom of the criminal pyramid. It is well established that it is these vulnerable workers – trafficked, abused, or otherwise marginal – who typically bear the brunt of a scorched earth law enforcement response. This has been the case in the global response to illicit drug cultivation and trafficking and it is easy to see a similar pattern beginning to emerge in our approach to organized cybercrime.
As we develop a more comprehensive approach to “the most powerful criminal network of the modern era,” it is certainly appropriate for counter-trafficking activists to share the wheel with law enforcement. Yet, it is equally imperative that we not push aside the lessons we have learned about the nature of the industry or the people who make it up. We owe this understanding largely to the work of a small number of repressed independent journalists, cash-strapped NGOs, and courageous survivors willing to share their stories. Accordingly and regardless of the precise scale, recognition of the significant presence of vulnerable people in these compounds is paramount as a global law enforcement response gathers steam.