OMG…we are seized by mega scam states around us, why hah?

[k1976]

Age of the ‘scam state’: how an illicit, multibillion-dollar industry has taken root in south-east Asia​

Tess McClure
6 min read

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Compounds inside KK Park, one of the major hubs for scam centres and human trafficking in Myawaddy, Myanmar. The site was raided, but its operators were long gone.Composite: Jittrapon Kaicome/The Guardian
For days before the explosions began, the business park had been emptying out. When the bombs went off, they took down empty office blocks and demolished echoing, multi-cuisine food halls. Dynamite toppled a four-storey hospital, silent karaoke complexes, deserted gyms and dorm rooms.

So came the end of KK Park, one of south-east Asia’s most infamous “scam centres”, press releases from Myanmar’s junta declared. The facility had held tens of thousands of people, forced to relentlessly defraud people around the world. Now, it was being levelled piece by piece.


Related: Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people

But the park’s operators were long gone: apparently tipped off that a crackdown was coming, they were busily setting up shop elsewhere. More than 1,000 labourers had managed to flee across the border, and some 2,000 others had been detained. But up to 20,000 labourers, likely trafficked and brutalised, had disappeared. Away from the junta’s cameras, scam centres like KK park have continued to thrive.

So monolithic has the multi-billion dollar global scam industry become that experts say we are entering the era of the “scam state”. Like the narco-state, the term refers to countries where an illicit industry has dug its tentacles deep into legitimate institutions, reshaping the economy, corrupting governments and establishing state reliance on an illegal network.


The raids on KK Park were the latest in a series of highly publicised crackdowns on scam centres across south-east Asia. But regional analysts say these are largely performative or target middling players, amounting to “political theatre” by officials who are under international pressure to crack down on them but have little interest in eliminating a wildly profitable sector.

“It’s a way of playing Whack-a-Mole, where you don’t want to hit a mole,” says Jacob Sims, visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Centre and expert on transnational and cybercrime in the Mekong.

In the past five years scamming, says Sims, has mutated from “small online fraud rings into an industrial-scale political economy”.

“In terms of gross GDP, it’s the dominant economic engine for the entire Mekong sub-region,” he says, “And that means that it’s one of the dominant – if not the dominant – political engine.”

 

[k1976]

Government spokespeople in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos did not respond to questions from the Guardian, but Myanmar’s military has previously said it is “working to completely eradicate scam activities from their roots”. The Cambodian government has also described allegations it is home to one of “the world’s largest cybercrime networks supported by the powerful” as “baseless” and “irresponsible”.
Morphing in less than a decade from a world of misspelled emails and implausible Nigerian princes, the industry has become a vast, sophisticated system, raking in tens of billions from victims around the world.

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At its heart are “pig-butchering” scams – where a relationship is cultivated online before the scammer pushes their victim to part with their money, often via an “investment” in cryptocurrency. Scammers have harnessed increasingly sophisticated technology to fool targets: using generative AI to translate and drive conversations, deepfake technology to conduct video calls, and mirrored websites to mimic real investment exchanges. One survey found victims were conned for an average of $155,000 (£117,400) each. Most reported losing more than half their net worth.


Those huge potential profits have driven the industrialisation of the scam industry. Estimates of the industry’s global size now range from $70bn into the hundreds of billions – a scale that would put it on a par with the global illicit drug trade. The centres are typically run by transnational criminal networks, often originating from China, but their ground zero has been south-east Asia.

By late 2024, cyber scamming operations in Mekong countries were generating an estimated $44bn (£33.4bn) a year, equivalent to about 40% of the combined formal economy. That figure is considered conservative, and on the rise. “This is a massive growth area,” says Jason Tower, from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime. “This has become a global illicit market only since 2021 – and we’re now talking about a $70bn-plus-per-year illicit market. If you go back to 2020, it was nowhere near that size.”

 

[k1976]

In Cambodia, one company alleged by the US government to run scam compounds across the country had $15bn of cryptocurrency targeted in a Department of Justice (DOJ) seizure last month – funds equal to almost half of Cambodia’s economy.

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With such huge potential profits, infrastructure has rapidly been built to facilitate it. The hubs thrive in conflict zones and along lawless and poorly regulated border areas. In Laos, officials have told local media around 400 are operating in the Golden Triangle special economic zone. Cyber Scam Monitor – a collective that monitors scamming Telegram channels, police reports, media and satellite data to identify scam compounds – has located 253 suspected sites across Cambodia. Many are enormous, and operating in public view.


The scale of the compounds is itself an indication of how much the states hosting them have been compromised, experts claim.

“These are massive pieces of infrastructure, set up very publicly. You can go to borders and observe them. You can even walk into some of them,” says Tower. “The fact this is happening in a very public way shows just the extreme level of impunity – and the extent to which states are not only tolerating this, but actually, these criminal actors are becoming state embedded.”

Thailand’s deputy finance minister resigned this October following allegations of links to scam operations in Cambodia, which he denies. Chen Zhi, who was recently hit by joint UK and US sanctions for allegedly masterminding the Prince Group scam network, was an adviser to Cambodia’s prime minister. The Prince Group said it “categorically rejects” claims the company or its chairman have engaged in any unlawful activity. In Myanmar, scam centres have become a key financial flow for armed groups. In the Philippines, ex-mayor Alice Guo, who ran a massive scam centre while in office, has just been sentenced to life in prison.


Across south-east Asia, scam masterminds are “operating at a very high level: they’re obtaining diplomatic credentials, they’re becoming advisers … It is massive in terms of the level of state involvement and co-optation,” Tower says.

“It’s quite unprecedented that you have an illicit market of this nature, that is causing global harm, where there’s blatant impunity, and it’s happening in this public way.”

The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know.

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[k1976]

Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people​

Rebecca Ratcliffe, south-east Asia correspondent
Mon, 8 September 2025 at 7:01 am GMT+8
6 min read

KK Park, one of the major scam centres on the Moei River, which forms the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Some of the compounds reportedly have armed guards, watchtowers and checkpoints.Photograph: Jittrapon Kaicome/The Guardian
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Five years ago, the land now home to KK Park – a vast, heavily guarded complex stretching for 210 hectares (520 acres) along the churning Moei River that forms Myanmar’s border with Thailand – was little more than empty fields.

Set against rugged mountains south of the town of Myawaddy, KK Park, with its on-site hospital, restaurants, bank and neat lines of villas with manicured lawns, looks more like the campus of a Silicon Valley tech company than what it really is: the frontline of a multibillion-dollar criminal fraud industry fuelled by human trafficking and brutal violence.

Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run complex online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits.

 

[k1976]

There have been some attempts to crack down on the centres and rescue the workers, who can be subjected to torture and trapped inside. But drone images and new research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveal that the number of such centres operating along the Thai-Myanmar border has more than doubled since Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021, with construction continuing to this day.

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Data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute(Aspi), a defence thinktank in Canberra, shows that the number of Myanmar scam centres on the Thai border has increased from 11 to 27, and they have expanded in size by an average of 5.5 hectares a month.

Drone images and photographs of KK Park and other Myanmar scam centres, Tai Chang and Shwe Kokko, taken by the Guardian in August show new features and active building work.

At the Tai Chang complex, additional structures have emerged over the past year, including a floating dock that was built in recent months to allow supplies to be brought in more easily from Thailand. The Guardian’s drone footage also shows white squares visible on the roofs of both Tai Chang and KK Park, which are likely to be satellite internet receivers. These are to allow them to stay online after Thailand cut off cross-border supplies of electricity, internet and gas to areas hosting scam centres earlier this year in an attempt to disable them and halt the criminal gangs.

 

[k1976]

Thai authorities have previously stated that Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, is being used by scam compounds, and have intercepted smuggled terminals they believe to be heading across the border.

Drone and satellite imagery seen by the Guardian of other scam centres inside Myanmar show strong fortifications and security systems. The Dongmei Park compound is surrounded by fencing and guarded by a checkpoint and perimeter watchtowers, according to analysis by Aspi.

 

[syed putra]

Where did they get electricity from in myanmar?

 

[k1976]

Where did they get electricity from in myanmar?

U know de loh

 

[face the facts]

evil never rest......close down one and it will sprout elsewhere
we need 1000 dirty harrys in peesai and not some pen pushing yes men as senior officers

 

[k1976]

evil never rest......close down one and it will sprout elsewhere
we need 1000 dirty harrys in peesai and not some pen pushing yes men as senior officers

Greed is the root of all evil