Southeast Asia:
Scam Centers
—Mark of a Rotting Society

March 2, 2026

Online and social media scams have become a big business—scams operating out of Southeast Asia are thought to bring in around 65 billion dollars a year. U.S. residents are documented to have lost 16 billion dollars to online scams last year; Chinese victims lost even more. Tens of thousands work to carry out these scams, and criminal businessmen organize the work on an industrial scale.

Scammers often pose as young women who cultivate relationships with isolated, lonely older men over weeks or months. They eventually offer their targets opportunities to “invest” in a financial scheme, before taking the money and cutting off contact.

A large portion of the workers who carry out these scams are slaves. Many are young, educated people from countries like China, Ethiopia, Uganda, or Pakistan, where they find limited job prospects at home. The scam centers entice them with an offer of a high paying office job to Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, or Thailand. When they arrive, they are then bundled into a van, driven to the compound in a remote area, and their passport is taken. A quarter of a million scammers work out of isolated office parks in the borderlands of these countries.

These trafficked people are forced to work long shifts, scamming people thousands of miles away, according to set scripts. Workers who don’t meet their quotas are beaten, starved, subjected to solitary confinement or other tortures. The compounds are guarded and walled off with barbed wire, though some have escaped or been rescued by rebel groups.

Young people scammed into slavery, in order to scam money out of others—all for the profit of a few corrupt businesspeople. It’s a perfect reflection of the rot of this capitalist society.