20 November 2025, NIICE Commentary 11948
Ritika Suneja
In a recent repatriation exercise, about 125 Indian nationals successfully returned to India after being released from the scam centre in Myawaddy in Myanmar. The scam centre in Myawaddy operates at the junction of the Myanmar-Thai border, and the Indian government worked closely with the Indian embassy in Thailand in rescuing Indian citizens who were lured with fake job offers and made to engage in cybercrime and fraudulent activities. In an official post on X, the Indian Embassy in Bangkok stated “125 Indians released from scam-centres in Myawaddy in Myanmar, were repatriated from Mae Sot in Thailand by a special flight operated by the Indian Air Force. With this, a total of 1500 Indians released from scam centres in Myanmar have been repatriated through Thailand since March this year”.
While the figures so mentioned are alarming in themselves, what’s more disturbing is that the trend of cyber fraud cases is that it is no longer a domestic concern but a glaring consular crisis that knows no boundaries. So much so that, according to the official data, around 2471 Indians were rescued from the scam centres in Southeast Asia in the period from 2022 to May 2025.
While these numbers only tell about Indian nationals, one could easily imagine the hundreds and thousands of individuals from China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Africa, and Latin America, among other nations, that are trapped in the pretext of job offers promising lucrative IT or marketing roles.
How do Scam Operations Operate on Southeast Asian soil?
According to the report prepared by the Global Initiative Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC)’s Observatory of Illicit Economies in Asia-Pacific, cyber scam operations in Southeast Asia are fluid and take on different forms depending upon the space available in different contexts (context here refers to functional spaces unique to each country). These operations, particularly in the parts of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines, are conducted on scam compounds that are basically repurposed hotels, loosely regulated casinos, and private spaces, which are managed by criminal networks that exploit people.
The traffickers engage victims through fake job advertisements, and once they fall into the trap, the victims are flown to regional hubs like Bangkok, then trafficked overland and forced across borders into Myanmar or Cambodia. The compounds in these regions are secured by high walls and armed guards, where victims’ passports are subsequently confiscated and they are told that they’ve been sold and must work to pay off their debt; that involves enduring 12-hour workdays of running online scams. Those who refuse face torture, beatings, electric shocks, starvation, and solitary confinement.
These criminal networks take advantage of areas where state control is limited or has been co-opted by criminal groups, especially in the border areas where law enforcement is weak, and border officials are unable or unwilling to enforce the law. Such areas attract and base large scam operations, more so because of their proximity to human trafficking routes and the relative ease of relocating compounds across borders amid government crackdowns. From these compounds, a series of scams is orchestrated. These include convincing impersonation scam where scammers pose as officials, company executives or financial agents and deceive the victims; gambling scams wherein scam centres are involved in illegal gambling operations and run alongside legal gambling businesses; and the pig-butchering scam wherein scammers build long-term emotional and trust-based relationship with the victims, persuading them to invest in fake cryptocurrency and investment platforms, and after siphoning off the money, they butcher the victims leaving them vulnerable.
According to Benedikt Hofmann, the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) Deputy Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the situation becomes worse with the boom of artificial intelligence (AI) as scammers easily target people across the world through translation tools aided by AI. “Technology, like generative artificial intelligence (AI), is evolving so quickly, and that will really change the way these places operate by creating new opportunities for scammers to make money. You’re not going to need a thousand people to run scams on a text-based cell phone; you just need a well-programmed application to do it for you”, Hofmann shared.
However, even as scam grounds operate in the Southeast Asian space collectively, different criminal networks have their own distinct way of harbouring these compounds as we move from one territory to another. For instance, in the case of Cambodia, spaces owned by politically connected businessmen and foreign operators who are granted citizenship and honours carry out these operations under heavy protection. Repurposed casinos or “special economic zones” in Sihanoukville, Bavet, and O’Smach in Cambodia are glaring examples of how casino-driven settlements shift towards online scams. Similarly, in the case of the Philippines, the proliferation of illicit operations, known as scam farms, has often operated alongside legal gambling businesses. In Laos, these centres operate in the Golden Triangle Special Economic zone that functions like a semi-territory for online fraud that includes human trafficking and forced labour. And in the case of Myanmar, which was recently published in the news, the border areas of Shew Koko and KK park in Myawaddy are the hotspot of large scam compounds that function under the protection or complicity of armed groups or militia forces. The infamous KK Park is part of a wider constellation of fortified compounds that have proliferated along the borders of Myanmar. These networks rose considerably after the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 military coup, which has weakened state capacity, giving rise to grey zone areas.
On the face of it, these scam centres may appear to be operating from a compact space along the border regions of Southeast Asia, but in reality, they constitute a very integral non-traditional security threat emanating from the Indo-Pacific region. The growing extent of these compounds gives rise to illicit economies that undermine state authority (in those cases where the state is not sponsoring them!) and hinder regional development.
The nature of these operations is such that they are a complex interplay of criminal activities such as human trafficking, money laundering, and financial cybercrimes- thereby fueling the intensity of these ills not only individually but also collectively. On one hand, this has a humanitarian cost considering the extent of the people who have become targets of these organised crimes, either in the form of forced labour or abused foreign victims. On the other hand, the financial ramifications of these crimes entail exploitation of weak regulatory systems, informal money transfer methods and unlawful use of cryptocurrency channels, leading to a complete erosion of digital infrastructure across the region and beyond. The destabilisation of financial systems creates opaque spaces for non-state actors, including terrorist groups, to seep into the fabric of civil society, leading to additional problems of misinformation and disinformation. Moreover, the presence of these compounds in strategic border regions, for instance, the Mekong sub-region, challenges regional cooperation and law enforcement coordination, especially when it comes to conducting cross-border investigations, extraditing formalities, or dismantling networks due to overlapping jurisdictions and varying political interests. This weakens the broader Indo-Pacific effort of building a secure rules-based environment, and instead gives rise to diplomatic tensions and complicated bilateral relations.
Conclusion
While governments are responding to this menace, as in the case of United States, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on several scam networks operational across Cambodia and Myanmar for their role in cyber fraud and human trafficking; search activities such as Operation Seagull led by China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam included the arrest of 70,000 cyber scam suspects and rescued 160 human trafficking victims from six countries; as also the ASEAN led law enforcement operations that aims to hunt down and investigate the primary suspects of these syndicates –but unfortunately the effectiveness of these retaliatory measures have fallen short of what is required. These operations enable the rescuing of the victims and discovery of existing set-ups, but do not dismantle the root cause of these networks and organisations. Even if a network is busted at one place, the mobility of these syndicates is such that they reconstitute their base at newer places, leading to the expansion of their network. In such a scenario, it becomes important that governments work in tandem with civil society actors and create awareness among the citizenry, in a way that it reaches the remotest part of the country, including children who are the worst of the victims. This will lead to an informed public opinion, which will bring about a systemic change, which is the need of the hour. The curbing of such organised crime at the domestic level can only prevent a large-scale consular crisis because it is the weak law enforcement mechanism of individual member countries that eventually gives rise to transnational threats and emergencies.
Ritika Suneja is a Research Intern at NIICE, Nepal. She has completed her Master's in Politics and International Relations from Pondicherry University, India.
