Scam Compounds

When most people think about online scams, they picture criminals sitting behind a screen and stealing from victims around the world. But in Southeast Asia, many of the people sending those messages are victims too. Some were promised legitimate jobs, flown across borders, trapped inside guarded compounds, and forced to scam others while trying to survive.

In this episode, I talk with Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the Center for Contemporary Chinese Studies Asia Institute. After years of studying labor rights, civil society, and Chinese investment in Cambodia, Ivan’s work led him to the online scam industry and the cybercrime compounds that have spread across Southeast Asia. He is the co-author of Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, and through the EOS Collective, he and his colleagues also help support people who have been trafficked into these operations.

I talk with Ivan about how small scam operations grew into large compounds, why COVID helped the industry expand, and how fake job offers are used to recruit people from around the world. We also talk about the blurred line between victim and criminal, the local economies that grow around these compounds, and what happens when people escape or are left stranded without money, documents, or a safe way home.

Show Notes:

• [01:27] Ivan Franceschini explains how his academic background in China studies and labor rights eventually led him to research scam compounds in Southeast Asia.
• [04:39] Early scam operations in Cambodia started as smaller setups in villas, apartments, and hotels before expanding into large, organized compounds.
• [07:53] COVID becomes a major turning point as isolation, financial desperation, and new technology help the online scam industry grow rapidly.
• [10:42] The industry expands beyond Chinese-speaking networks and begins recruiting people from many countries, including large numbers from Africa.
• [13:29] Criminal groups, businesspeople, local elites, and trafficking networks all play different roles in keeping the scam compound industry running.
• [15:50] Fake job offers are used to recruit people from abroad, with many victims believing they are traveling for legitimate work in customer service, teaching, sales, or other fields.
• [18:19] Recruiters use believable salaries and convincing explanations to lure people who may be desperate for work or unfamiliar with the region.
• [21:43] Many trafficked workers are not highly trained scammers, but poor or vulnerable people who are taught scripts, given tools, and assigned small parts of the scam process.
• [24:05] Language barriers are no longer a major obstacle because scammers can use translation tools, AI tools, and backstories that make mistakes seem believable.
• [26:40] Scam compounds become embedded in local economies through guards, cleaners, restaurants, construction workers, delivery services, and other support jobs.
• [31:22] Getting out of a compound can involve paying a ransom, escaping physically, or risking a message to an embassy, family member, NGO, or government official.
• [33:40] Some trapped workers are able to ask for help online, but contacting authorities can also be dangerous if local police alert the compound operators.
• [35:17] Crackdowns in Cambodia have left many people stranded without money, valid visas, housing, or a safe way to return home.
• [37:27] Survivors released from compounds may end up sleeping on the street, begging for food, and trying to find help while facing fines and deportation barriers.
• [40:14] Survivor support often means meeting immediate needs such as food, basic medical care, and flights home for people who have nowhere else to turn.
• [41:29] Ivan explains that sanctions and enforcement need to consider the human beings inside the industry, not just the money and criminal networks behind it.
• [42:49] Survivors often have valuable information about trafficking networks, scam techniques, and specific operations, but that intelligence is lost when they are abandoned.
• [45:15] Verifying survivor stories requires interviews, embassy coordination, compound maps, cross-checking details, and recognizing that victim and criminal roles can overlap.
• [48:53] Ivan shares where people can find his book, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, and learn more about the EOS Collective’s work.

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review. 

Links and Resources:

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• Easy Prey on Pinterest
• Ivan Franceschini – LinkedIn
• Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds
• EOS Collective

Transcript:

Ivan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thanks to you for having me. It's a honor.

Thank you. Can you give a little bit of background for me, the audience, about what you do and why you do it?

Well, my background is I'm an academic. I'm Italian. I'm an academic. My background is in Chinese studies. It seems quite unlikely for me with this kind of background to be on your show. But, you know, like I was working on labor issues in China for many years, on labor NGOs, migrant workers, social movements, and then like about 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, since 2013, I've been working in Cambodia. I started working in Cambodia around that time.

I was still working on Chinese investment and how it impacted workers in Cambodia, construction workers, garment workers. As part of my work that I was doing, surveys and research on construction sites in Cambodia, and some of the construction sites that I was working on at that time will turn out to be scam compounds later.

Places where scam will be done on an industrial scale. That was my introduction. I was working there. I was seeing these places being built. I had no clue what they were. I had no idea. I mean, like, I saw them, like, I saw these massive buildings. I had no idea what they were. But then when I realized what they were, I mean, it was not possible for me to endure them.

I had to start working on them. So from China studies, that's how I ended up working on scams. What I do now is basically I try to research, try to understand how the industry, online scam industry, works from the point of view of Southeast Asia, because I'm sure you and your audience know very well that is a global industry with different declinations in different regions.

My focus is on Southeast Asia, Cambodia mostly, but not only, but it's mostly Cambodia. I've been working on that doing research on this trying to make sense of how Southeast Asia will very quickly become this kind of scam hub, which is something we can discuss how it happened, if you want. And on the other side, I also try to do investigations. I collaborate with others, try to understand who are the actors behind these operations of the stadium.

And most importantly, we try to help the people who end up in these operations. When we talk about, when I think you also talk about scams, and you think about victims, you think about the scam victim, people targeted by the scams, right? I think that's the most immediate thought, which is normal, is natural. I have nothing against that, obviously, it's like they need sympathy and support and everything.

Our focus, however, is more on the other side, which is not complicated, right? We work on the people who do the scams, because many of them, not all of them, of course, but many of them are doing it against their will, they're trapped in these facilities. What we do is to try to get them out is a big goal. I mean, it's not very difficult, but we try to help them, at least when they're out, we try to get them home where possible.

It's a very difficult system to navigate, I can explain more if you want. To do this, I create, I co-founded with my friends and colleagues, we co-founded, it is called US Collective. And then we work on these issues, investigation and survival support.

Interesting. Let's talk about the full arc here. You were surprised at how fast these were built up in Cambodia. How fast did it build up? And why was that surprising to you? And kind of how did it happen?

OK, it was fast in a sense, but we knew that the online scam industry was in Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia from way before the news started reporting about it. So we knew from the early 2010s. I do remember when I moved to Cambodia in 2013, there were often reports in the media about rates, police rates, on scam operations in the city in the capital.

You will see these articles, short articles usually, and they described small operations in villas, apartments, hotels, you know, like various more scale operations, very dispersed. They were not really that they were not very well organized, like really small operation, mostly stuffed by ethnic Chinese, Taiwanese actors, or male and Chinese actors, so criminals. And we started saying that around 2011, that's the beginning of 2010s. What changed is the scale and the dynamic of the industry when I say it became so surprisingly big and so fast at the end of the decade.

Before COVID—around 2017, 18,19—you started seeing these facilities, these massive facilities, coming up out of nowhere in places like Sihanoukville in Cambodia, but other places in Myanmar and the border areas. And you saw these facilities where many different scam operations came together. They call us, they share the infrastructure, they share the protection, they share workforce.

They just achieve an economy of scale by coming together in these locations, the locations that are commonly known as scam compounds. When you think about scam compounds, you usually think about a massive facility with walls with barbed wire, cameras, people inside, forced to scam and everything, like thousands of workers doing scams day and night, OK, many of them under coercion.

But some of these operations are in hotels, casinos and everything. What they have in common is, like, yeah, the economy of scale, they're big, many of them are big. The size and change value is not the same all the time, but you have some very, very big ones. There's some smaller ones, of course, but many are big. Then what changed is also the reliance on this kind of workforce, a mixed workforce in which you have the usual scammers that you usually encounter in these operations that we need willingly.

But they work side by side with people who have been trafficked into these facilities and have been forced to do scams. That's what changed. And then these facilities, they came up very quickly in the late 2000s. Everything accelerated during COVID. COVID was a turning point. I think it's the same as in other regions. But for Southeast Asia, it was a massive turning point.

During COVID, you saw a lot like you saw the industry taking off. You saw it clearly. You saw human trafficking taking off on a scale never seen before. People started the traffic mostly from China and the sign of the world into Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the Philippines, the countries of the four countries that were there, that are the epicenter of the kind of industry in the region.

Then you saw the facilities proliferating, you see so many, and that’s, like, a trend that continues to this day. During COVID, just kept growing and growing because of course, COVID, everybody felt isolated, alienated, everyone needed connection, right? There was a need to feel. I think scams boomed in that period, not only Southeast Asia, but I mean, like because there was a basic need of communicate to feel close to someone.

Scammers were very ready to exploit. Technology was changing. As you know, the scam industry, online scam industry, is growing thanks to this illicit infrastructure, the global illicit infrastructure of illicit marketplaces, where you can buy everything. The threshold to enter the industry today as a scammer is very low. It's nothing like before, like you can just buy Facebook and tools, AI tools now to do deep fakes, change your voice, change your face.

It's really cheap, really accessible. Everything changed. You saw that, you saw this, I saw it very clearly. At the same time, you saw a lot of people losing their livelihood because of COVID or because of economic downturn. This is something that is going on to this day. You see on one side of people who are vulnerable to be scammed, because they feel lonely, isolated, alienated.

On the other side, you have people who are desperate for any type of job. So you see scam compounds, scam operation recruiting people who are desperate, who would fall, who would take anything you throw at them. Doesn't matter how unrealistic, how questionable it might be. They are not recruited most of the time as scammers for scam work, but they are recruited with jobs.

Sometimes they offer you a condition that are above average, like a salary slightly higher, visa paid, accommodation paid, whatever it is, and so they go. Normally, maybe people would be more careful, but I would say desperation, lack of opportunities, have driven tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in the industry on the scam side, doing the scams. We saw all of that.

I saw all of that, my colleagues too. At the beginning, it was mostly Chinese targeting Chinese-speaking people, Chinese nationals, and most of the stuff inside the scam compound was also Chinese or Chinese-speaking for ethnic Chinese, Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, diaspora and everything. Then what we saw in the past couple of years, the big transition is the globalization of the industry.

You still are in Southeast Asia, you still have these compounds, but right now we still have a lot of ethnic Chinese people inside. You have a lot of Indonesia, you have a lot of people from neighboring countries, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malaysian, but you have a lot of people from far away, far away. You have a lot of Africans from Commonwealth countries, not only Franco for the Francophone Africa.

You see really a workforce, which is extremely diverse. If you look at the interval numbers, they counted about 80 nationalities. They have 80 nationalities of people who are working inside a compound, who have been trapped inside a compound. My NGO, we also work with these people with survivors of the compounds. We used to work mostly with Chinese.

Right now, I will tell you, I will say the people we are helping right now, they are 99% from Africa. And when I say from Africa, it's all over Africa. I think I can name, I don't know how many countries really, but a lot. It's very—it’s become global. You think about a whole arch here. You start with small-scale operations in villas and apartments, big massive compounds that just pop up and they keep growing and produce mushrooms all over these countries.

And then you see the globalization of the industry. This is all in the boom, is in about 10 years, not even 2017. If you count the first operations of the states, it's 2011. There are criminologists from China who did some research, and they found the first repatriation deportation from China for cyber scams are from 2011 to China from Cambodia, the state 2011. I will say 2011 is the beginning for Southeast Asia. And then the boom is the past 10 years.

If you have the people that are working the call center, a large portion of them are trafficked, then you have some people that are doing it voluntarily. Who is running the compound? Was it organizations that just kind of were successful with the villas and they got bigger and bigger, or is it being run by pre-existing cartels?

They are not pre-existing cartels. I mean, like prior to the organization that have a long history are involved clearly, but it is a business-oriented criminal group. You have all sorts of businessmen who are making money. It is a financial crime, financially motivated, right? It's an easy buck to make.

It's quite easy if you have protection, which is the precondition for the industry, you need to have protection to be able to operate. As I said, the pressure to enter the industry is very low right now; it's quite cheap, right? Once you have the infrastructure, it's just an easy way to make money. You have a lot of different criminal groups working side by side, businessmen that just set up their own operation in order to make money.

And of course, they are criminals, they are criminal operations clearly. But I wouldn't call them pre-existing Chinese mafia or riots. Riots are involved and there are some actors who have documented ties to riots, but it's really an industry that is an easy buck to make. Then I've attracted people from really everywhere.

It remains dominated by ethnic Chinese criminal groups, but they're not the only ones. You have to think that they need the protection. The local elites, political, economists that benefit. You have to think that human trafficking side, like it's not always run by these, the same groups that are running the scam operation, right?

They sublet, they have to import people from Africa. You will have maybe a criminal group in African country providing the workforce to compounding Cambodia or southeast state, right? It's very diverse. But it's very diverse. I wouldn't call it, yeah, I'm always very hesitant to call Chinese mafia, riots, riots, very diverse.

And with bringing people from so many different countries, are they smuggled into Southeast Asia? Do they have a visa passport, and they're flying in thinking they're coming for a job, and then they get taken across a border? How do people end up? What's the cycle of people from hearing about this fake job opportunity to actually getting into the call center or this compound?

Kidnapping human trafficking platform is a text; it exists. Like, if you are from China, for instance, there were a lot of kidnappings, like people were, like, people from the countryside, people like construction workers, they were lured to some city or town near the border with maybe Vietnam. And then they were kidnapped, and then they were trafficked across the border, across land or on boats, down to Cambodia, through Vietnam, to Laos.

That is possible. But it's not, I wouldn't say right now is the most common way for people to be tricky to train to spread traffic entertainers. Right now, when we talk with African nationals, for instance, most common way is for them to get offered jobs. They are offered jobs in their home country. Sometimes they are recruited by friends.

They have friends who are already in Southeast Asia. They say, “I have a job for you. You will earn these, and these are scummy, and then you will be happy.” Or they just see announcements online, ads here and there, and they reply, and they are directed to Telegram groups. And from the moment they enter to the moment they are moved to Southeast Asia, it's very fast. It's just a matter of day.

They provide a passport to get a visa. These jobs usually are in every sort of sector. They're not IT jobs—some of them are—but you have really sales, you have customer service, bartending, DJing, you have agriculture, you have everything. It's like you don't have to think about these people as having an IT background, many of them don't.

Some of them do, but so they receive the job offer, they apply, and then they give you all the information, including the passport, and then they are put on a flight, sometimes to Cambodia, but not often. In most cases, they fly to Thailand or to Vietnam. Then when they are taken on minivan, and they put minivan or motors in Vietnam, and then they may cross the border to Cambodia or Myanmar by land.

They are traffic at that point. And then it's very well coordinated, very well organized, because at every step of the way, they have to take selfies, and there is somebody at the airport maybe giving them cash or taking it back when they arrive, of course, that would be in the compound. But it's very structured, very organized, with complicities in immigration, bureaucracies in the countries. They wouldn't be able to work without those. We hear it all the time about that. And think about also the salaries they offer.

That's why I was saying about we need to think about misery and the background of these people. These people, in most cases, the people we deal with, who are the people who are trapped in these compounds, they are offered jobs that might pay you, let's say, $800 to $1,200 US dollars per month, which is not a crazy amount.

I mean, like, coming from that background, yes, but it's not that crazy as to be, as crazy as to be unrealistic. It's not that they're offered $5,000. They did do that before at the beginning with Chinese victims and everything, but it's a reasonable amount. Not reasonable if you know Cambodia, but these people don't even know Cambodia. Cambodia is on the map, right?

They believe they might be doing customer service for $1,000 a month, which is very unlikely in Cambodia, but they don't know. And then, you know, like, they are told, “Well, I mean, Thailand, they don't speak English, so you're from Uganda, Commonwealth. You're a native speaker, so there is need for people like you, so teachers.” A woman I know, she was offered a job in China, a black woman from an East African country.

She took it. “I'm going to teach in China, do some sort of job, this kind of.” She's like, “OK.” They gave the passport, and the passport came back with a Vietnamese visa. That's what I said. It's like, “Wow, why? I mean, I'm going to China, where are Vietnamese visa?” “Oh, yeah, because, you know, like Chinese are racist. They don't give visa to black people.” I think, “OK.” I mean, that's not true, obviously, but it's in the realm of the possible that there is a common knowledge that racism is common.

OK, so the only way to get to China is through the back door. You have to fly to Vietnam and then enter China by land. Until the moment she arrived in a compound in Cambodia, she believed she was going to China. Another guy was offered, another guy from Congo. He was a war refugee, had to run away from civil war, and he doesn't even know if his family is alive.

And then he was in a neighboring country. And then he received an email one day saying, “OK, that is the job, $2,000. We pay the flight and everything.” It was a generic email. We’re not targeting him. And he replies. I look at a very young guy, early 20s, alone in the world, doesn't know anyone ever before. And he replies and I look at, “Is it not for me? I mean, you must have the wrong person here. I can't do that.”

And they reply, “No, no, sure, come. We will. You are still fine. We can hire you.” Whatever. And then I was on a plane a few days later, and he ended up in a compound in Cambodia that was bombed during the border skirmishes with Thailand, right? This guy was running away from the war in his home country. And he ended up being bombed in Southeast Asia. And he told me like, I mean, like, I couldn't believe that. I mean, I was running away from war. And then I ended up being bombed on the other side of the world.

A guy is still stuck in Cambodia at the moment, has no country to go back to. It's an extreme case, of course. But just to tell you, I mean, like, these are the kind of techniques they use. This connects to a point that when you think about scammers, you think about people who might be skilled, might have a high level of education, they might have a deep understanding of the human mind of how to manipulate you and everything.

They must know language, because they're scamming people in English or other languages, right? And that leads to a lack of sympathy for the people who find themselves in situations, because they must know what they're getting into, they must be educated, right? In my experience, that's, yeah, there are educated people. We have people with IT backgrounds, and maybe didn't even know what they were getting into, but they do.

But many of the people we have been dealing with are this kind of people from very poor socioeconomic background, with low level of education, who have never left the country before, who if you talk to them, you say, “How would they ever be able to scam anyone?” They wouldn't. They wouldn't be able, unless they were trained, and they were given techniques and tools and phrasebooks, which is what is the scam today.

The scam today is an industry, right? It's not creative. It's not creative. You can see, OK, amazing. There's so much, so many varieties. Yeah, sure. That's amazing. I mean, you understand. I mean, I don't mean in a positive way, but it's very diverse, very creative. But the people doing the scans, they are cogs in a machine. The creativity is minimal. They are trained to do a task, a section of the scam, right?

That's why, and that's how you can help people, construction workers or people who, you would, who are not really skilled, maybe at interpersonal relations, like you would think a scammer should be. You see them doing scams. Then you have the whole side of the scammers. We can discuss more if you want, but it's very fragmented. Everyone is in charge of a part of the process, right? Then you see there is a job for everyone. That's how you see really poor people doing this type of work.

Are they primarily—it’s kind of like the minimum criteria is you speak English, or is it, “We don't really care what language you speak. We will use you to target people that speak your language”?

OK. The language barrier is not really a barrier anymore. I mean, like you can create a persona in which you are not a native speaker. Maybe I am a woman. I'm studying Italian and the Italian market. If I make mistakes, it's fine, right? It’s, like, credible still, like you can create a background story in a way that makes sense. Then you can see people who don't speak a word of Italian for it's targeting Italians.

It's very easy right now with the tools at their disposal and everything. It's like a ChatGPT,  Google Translate, everything. It's like, it's very basic. Sometimes you see, it's like they use the tools, what we use. You ask them, “How do you communicate or Google Translate?” It's not that transcendental. The language barrier is not there anymore as it used to be.

And then of course, the industry is global. It's not they used to be mostly targeting, they used to be targeting the Chinese market, Chinese-speaking market right now is truly global. When you teach us very serious political implications, you can imagine, I mean, like the state idea, OK. The US, UK are vulnerable, because they just speak English. A lot of people speak English. Europe believed that they were immune.

We've asked the Italian, how many people speak Italian or Estonian or Croatian. That doesn't work anymore. They have really a workforce which is very diverse, plus the tools. It's, again, there is a job for anyone. I think also a lot of people enter willingly, like AI. Right now, one of the common jobs that you find in the scam compound is AI model.

They're recruiting people, European, Caucasian, people you would imagine to find that kind of situation. And they go there willingly. They enter this operation, their job is to be models. Because when you have a scam, you scam. The industry is mostly men. Most of the people we meet are men, adult men, right, which is another problem when you talk about victims.

About men, able-bodied, about adult men, they don't look like victims. When they do the

scam, they do it in writing, it's chats, mostly Telegram, WhatsApp, everything. But the people at some point, we want to have a video call. They have a role in the scam operation, which is the AI model. They're mostly willing models, well-paid men and women. They have their own studio and equipment and everything.

Their job is to take calls. Usually when you look at scam, they take time to get a call because they have to book the model. They need to find a time slot. Anyway, that is a good point is there is a job for everyone willing and willing to find something for you to do.

I suppose it must create, it must be sort of interesting. I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this that doesn't sound promotional of the spam of these compounds. They must, like, have a substantial impact on the local economy. Because if they're buying utilities, they're feeding people, they're like, it is a workforce that must have a positive impact on local communities.

That's one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to eradicate them, right? Because when you attack them, when you crack down, you just, like, eradicate a source of income for a lot of people, not only the criminals, right? Even the people inside, the people who were trafficked. Like many of them, they get nothing. They haven’t even paid, but some of them, they do get some. They promise maybe 800 and they get 400. Then they manage some back at 400 homes.

It's something. But think about the security guards. Security guards are mostly local. Somehow, we hear about bouncers and security guards brought from other countries. We hear a lot about Egyptian bouncers, which is something, well, OK, that's new. But they are mostly security guards and mostly locals, cleaners, delivery workers, the compounds that they need are a huge amount of food.

They have their own kitchens and everything. But they order from outside, right? Delivery workers, restaurants around all that is local economy, or businessmen maybe from neighboring countries. Like if you have a lot of Indonesian workers in a compound, and it's common, you will have Indonesia restaurants around the compound, right? When the moment you close down the compound, the local economy suffers.

Who is building the compound? Construction workers. Construction workers are local. But I will tell you a story. I met a security guard in one of the biggest compounds in Santa Cruz and Cambodia. And then he was working in this compound. I can't remember how much he was running. That must have been around 300, which is a fair amount, given the job in that context.

And his wife was also working in that same compound as a cleaner. She was running like 250 a month, which is above average for a cleaner in Cambodia, right? They were both working on the compound. When the Cambodian government cracked down, they both lost the job. She lost it first, and later, right? When she lost the job, she was over 50. She couldn't find another job. She couldn't go to work in a factory, government factory, she couldn't do anything.

She was picking up plastic bottles and garbage on the beach for a few dollars. He was worried about losing his own job. He was a guard. He was a team leader of the guard in this compound. It's not really a nice job. It was not a good job. It's not a good guy if you want to put it in black and white. But what's the problem here? It's not just us. OK, we go from 500 to 300 to zero.

People in Cambodia, they mostly take out microloans to be able to buy a motor, a house. These two people had bought a house. They had taken out a loan to be able to build their own house in another province. And they had to pay back to the microloan, the agency, whatever. They had to pay back, like, every month, like 500 or something. That's quite common. I think when they lose their income, they go into debt, they lose the house, they lose the land, and they multiply that for I don't know how many people. They are still in the economy.

That's a big deal. And it's not black and white. These people are not criminals. These people are just providing services if you want. They are not torturing people. Sometimes they are. But in most cases, they are not. That's one of the challenges, right? They are really embedded. You think about scam compounds. You think about, OK, ethnic Chinese criminals come into Cambodia or Myanmar, and they take over.

They do not take over. They just insert themselves with local protection that is benefiting from these enterprises. Then you have local communities that also lack other opportunities, probably, who are taking advantage, benefiting from this. It's a whole ecosystem that goes from the dark, black, to the gray. The white is a spectrum, right?

I've done lots of episodes on what happens about the scams themselves. How do people end up getting out of these compounds? If they've been trafficked in, are they allowed to get out? And if they get out, “Well, I'm now in a country that I didn't legally enter. How do I get out of it?” It sounds like even if they could get out willingly, they're still stuck in a country that they probably weren't expecting, that they hadn't originally planned to be in.

If they come out willingly, they probably have a way to leave the country. Probably, they were paid at some point. I think in that case, they might find a way to get home. I think there are several ways. One way would be to pay a ransom. When you are brought into a compound, you're trafficking, “OK, we pay all the flights. We pay everything for you. Just come, and then we pay you a lot of money.”

But when you arrive, the first thing that I tell you is if you want to leave, you have to pay back all the expenses, which is thousands, right? All the human trafficking costs, the flights, and everything. That part of the process is put on you. It's a burden, it's a debt. Then every day you spend in a compound, you are charged for the food, you're charged for the keyboard you're using, for the space you're occupying, for the bed you're sleeping, for the toilet, for the air you’re breathing, in some cases. It’s insane.

Your debt grows. One way to get out would be to pay back the debt, crazy as it is. Your family might be asked to pay a ransom, which there's called compensation, which it varies. The amount is very different. It depends on the time, the location, the operation, the nationality. So I wouldn't be able to tell you precisely what it is, but it can go from a few thousand to a few times of thousands.

It can be really substantial. And then even if you pay, you are not certain that they will free you, right? The family can pay, and then they can still sell you, right? But that's possible. Another thing that they can do is they can try to escape. They can try to jump out of windows. There was a time in Cambodia, which was very common to see people jumping out of windows, breaking their legs, their spine, everything was very, or dying.

That was one way. They would, because scamp compounds, they have bars on the windows so that you can jump only from the higher floors. That would be one way for people to get out—try to run away. Another way would be to seek help, right? That's the paradox, one of the paradoxes of the scamp component, that you have slaves that are connected to the internet constantly.

That’s monitored, but they still have access to the phones, and sometimes they risk getting out a message, the embassy, NGO, family, everything. Sometimes they used to, in Cambodia, it was common for them to leave messages on the webpage, Facebook pages, of political figures, like the provincial governor, the minister of interior, “Please come to help me. I'm here. Come to get me out.”

Then I thought there were two situations in your case. Sometimes the embassy's family managed to put pressure on the government and police. There were some extractions, which was very puzzling, because you had compounds with like 1000 people in the same situation, and the police would go to take out one person and leave all the others. That wasn't quite incredible. It was very common.

But there is a risk when you do that, and you reach out maybe to the Ministry of Interior or everything, like they will call down to the police at the local level. You don't know who you can trust. It was very common for the police to just pick up the phone and call their scam buses and tell them, “Look, we have this problem. Make it go away.” And people will disappear, get tortured and everything.

You can try to do it that way. It might work. Sometimes it works. It does work. Sometimes it doesn't. What we see in Cambodia right now is a different dynamic. There was at least a crackdown. There had been a crackdown since January. A lot of gun operation have opened the doors. They’ve left. Some of them have been raided, but most of them have just been warned and they left.

When they left, they took away with them some of the stuff, but most of them have been left behind. And the people who have been left behind, as you say, they have no documents, they do passport most of the time, but they don't have visas. They don't have money, they don't speak Khmer, Cambodian, they don't have connections with people, there are no embassies, there are no consulates in Cambodia for any African countries.

The representation is all over the place of Beijing, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, so we deal with embassies from all over. And then they find themselves stranded. They can't leave the country because they don't have documents. And in Cambodia, there is the law is that if you overstay your visa, you have to pay a fine of $10 US dollars per day. There is no cap.

If you stay there for six months, you will have to pay $1,800. Your first step when you come out would be to negotiate, to get your embassy to negotiate for you, a waiver of the fine, right? That way you can leave. So that's OK. Fine. You can, the embassy will do that. It takes time. It might take weeks to get the list of people and send it to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Interior. The bureaucratic process is long.

But where do you think these people will stay in those weeks? They may want to go to a hotel, but Cambodia has a new rule from January this year. If you are, if you don't have a visa, you can't go to any hotel or private housing or anything. If the owner is found, they are fined $1,000 per person. Nobody wants to host them. There is only one shelter for victims of human trafficking in the whole country. They can host up to 100 people.

We have thousands, thousands of people in this situation. Indonesians alone were over 8,000. Chinese, we don't know. They were queuing, they were camping outside the embassy. They have been put in some separate facility. Africans, 1,000. And this started in January. Now we are in late June, when we are recording this, we still have hundreds of people, African nationals stranded in Cambodia with no way to go back that are literally thrown on the street.

They have no money for food, they are begging for food, they are begging for medical care. They need support. They just want to leave the country and they are not allowed. Because even if you manage to waive the overstay fine, you see all the deportations that Cambodia is doing, you see all these, Cambodia is doing an amazing crackdown, deportations of many criminals.

Who is paying those flights? They are required to pay those flights. You negotiate a waiver, you don't have a place to stay, you have a whole sort of altitude, you have been on the street for months. The moment you get a waiver, maybe you are given like three weeks to leave and then you can't find the money to buy a flight. That's what my NGO does; we buy flights. It's one of the things we fundraise for. We buy flights for some of these people.

But think about, you have been trafficked. You went there only because they paid your flight. You believe you were a teacher. You believe you would be anything. Then you get out and you find yourself on the street, nobody's helping you. The police is coming to any guest house willing to host you. They will come and they radiate and they bring you in the tension.

They put a tension or they will throw you on the street. We know people who had a flight for like a week later, thrown on the street. They have all their condition from the embassy, their own lists, have acknowledged victims of humanitarian. There is no protection. There is no victim identification. There is no support. And again, we are talking about thousands of people now, hundreds in Africans, but it's incredible.

Nobody is talking about, there is some media attention. I wouldn't say nobody's talking about it. But the scale of the misery that I'm seeing, I've been seeing over the past six months, is beyond anything that you wouldn't imagine. It's a tourist place and then you have tourists side by side with complete misery. We have women raped on the street because there's no place to go. And they just are left there.

Anyway, this is another side of the scam industry. It's beyond anything. It's getting worse under one of the detention center. It’s very dark. There is one scam compound, one of the biggest in Cambodia, probably not one of them, but a very big one called Mango 2. Then it was raided by the government, shut down, whatever. Then they turned into the detention center, a pre-deportation center.

A lot of the people who were trafficked and during the police raids and the gas stowages at homes, they are taken and they're brought to this form as scam compounds. They text people like me. There’s a message, “Oh my God. I don't know where they're taking me. Look at this. This is the photo. This is the location.” Yeah, I know the location. It is what it looks like. It's exactly a form of scam compound.

Anyway, this is the situation you deal with. This is the type of situations you are dealing with. Now, when I talk about survival support, this is the job, trying to get food, get medical care, some basic medical care, and mostly penny flights. 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. They'll be stuck there for six months. They will be stuck there for much longer. And it's just awful. Very low. That's awful.

If listeners want to help, how can they help?

How can they help? Well, right now it's mostly like, as I said, it's a matter of repatriating the people, right? The main issue is to donate for funding for repatriation, or if you have connections to your own governments and embassies and representation, point out to them that there is this situation, that they need to put pressure to own the local authorities in these countries.

In this case, I'm talking Cambodia, about Cambodia, to deal with these type of situations. It's not when you crack down on the online scam industry, and the US is big, right? I've been sanctioning your—the US government has been sanctioning actors linked to the compound. I've been doing a lot, right? But I mean, when you do that kind of actions, which is very important, I'm not criticizing it.

It's really important. You just look at the money side, and you put pressure on certain types of actors, right? You need to connect that kind of sanctions and that kind of pressure with attention to the human beings that make up the industry. Some are criminals. Of course, I'm not saying, “Oh, well, there are poor guys, some are criminals.” But the criminals are not the ones suffering on the street.

They leave, they have money, as I say, they can't just leave. The ones suffering on the street are the ones who are left behind. I also think, so it's not a message that would be important to get across beside the money, talking to policymakers, make them understand there are human beings here from many different countries. Make people understand that this is a global challenge, that it's not only US center, and everything is really a global issue that we are all dealing with, right?

I think that if you talk about the policy level, these people, they are huge. They have so much intelligence they want to share. They want to talk about what happened to them. They want to share everything about the techniques, the people who traffic them, what they were doing. Some of them even know who they were scamming, right?

When you do a successful scam, when you're doing something in a big scale, right? A pig butchering, right? I know the term is controversial, I understand, but that's how they call it, right? When you do that type of scam, and you know, like, you manage to scam someone out of a million, two million US dollars, and it happens, right? It's not that, OK, yeah, it's that every day is like that. It’s not. It’s something that gets celebrated.

The whole company, the operation talks about it, they just, you know, like, you become the employee of the month and everything. We hear people. We can connect scam victims to specific operation and specific scammers, thanks to the testimonies of these people, it's possible. But you know, if nobody talks to them, if they're left on the street, if they're not provided any protection and support, all that intelligence is lost.

Think about just the scam industry in general, like East Europe, West Africa. It’s mostly composed of call centers, and sometimes, like, the shift between legal and illegal. People are doing willingly. They’re paid and everything. They don't want to talk about it. It's a criminal activity that they're willingly engaging, so they hide it, right?

Here, you have tens of thousands of people who have been drafted that cannot wait to share with you what happened to them. It's cynical to say, but it's also an unprecedented opportunity, because we can see precisely how things work inside.

As an academic, when you're interviewing people, separate out, at times people can exaggerate stories, because they're looking for sympathy, or whatever the circumstances. They just want to get home, and if I tell a worse story, maybe I'll get home sooner. How do you kind of separate out that sort of thing? Because if people are desperate to get home, I could see some, it would not be unreasonable for someone to exaggerate a story in hopes to kind of jump the line or get more help.

That's something, like a lot of the burnout that we are experiencing right now is from these kind of situations, trying to understand who is to prioritize, who is really seriously sick, who is seriously experienced. The kids say the experience is not easy. We try to work with embassies, so we ask embassies to give us list of priority cases and everything.

We do interviews in person as much as we can, trying to understand you can get a sense when people are lying, that you always get surprises. But we do our best to do assessment in collaboration with embassies and try to understand who is, what is, what isn't. We check the names of the, we have maps of the compound, and we try to cross-check the location, and everything.

Sometimes you just can triangulate things and try, it makes sense, like you hear the same stories about a similar operation in the same location, things check out. We try to do our best, but that's one of the biggest challenges. It's like, also because it's not, it's also not that simple. You have criminals and you have victims, right? There's a whole spectrum in the middle, right? So, you have people entering willingly and then getting stuck inside.

Would they admit that they entered willingly? They wouldn't. Could they move on simply, right? And how do you do that? How do you verify that? Or you have victims who become criminals, because they make money, and they start recruiting others, you know. We have all sorts of dynamics. We try to do our best, trying to understand this, just like it really leads to a lot of open questions sometimes.

We just get in definitive answers. It's difficult, rare. You kind of get a sense. You can triangulate, but it's just like, yeah, as you say, the tendency to exaggerate is there, right? I have no doubts. I saw scars. I saw, like, electrocution is common. You see a lot of physical consequences, but a lot of the torture experience is not even that kind of physical torture. It's not that they get maybe the nails taken out already.

It's mostly psychological, standing under the sun for hours, or deprivation of food, water, that kind of, that doesn't leave signs, right? They know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. That's the thing. Like this would require effort, more effort. It should be done in the open. It should be done in collaboration with the police, which is done in Thailand. It is done in Thailand.

They're doing it so much better. Places like Cambodia, all these people are criminalized. The assumption is they're all criminals. Everything you do is, like, you do your best, but there is no institutional support, collaboration. You have to do everything. Like you can't even just—let’s say I have 20 people on the street and I don't have 20, I have 200. I want to put a guest house. I mean, like, it might be cheap for me to rent a few rooms.

But the next day the police will come and raid and throw them on the street. Again, you lose the money. And then if I could instead, if we had a guest house and we sit down with them, we talk with them, we establish a relationship, we bring the police in, let's talk together. Or like in Thailand, for instance, NGOs do an assessment and they do a recommendation to police.

The police do their own interrogation and everything. There is a system. Places like Cambodia, there isn't. Your question is very spot on. But what I would say, embassies, triangulations, it gets us as far as we can in the first circumstances. But yeah, it's not perfect. I would say it's perfect.

As we wrap up here, if people want to read more about your studies and what you've learned, what's the book and where can people find it?

My colleagues, Ling Li and Mark Bo, we together, we wrote a book called Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, published by Verso in 2025. It's a book in which we try to track, to describe, how Southeast Asia became this scam hub over the past few years. So that's available in the US for sure, the international. My colleagues and I, we have published several papers, articles, some of them are very much public-oriented.

We try to, not to write all different academic orders. So we try to disseminate as much as we can. And then also, we have this small NGO, as I mentioned, called EOS Collective. Then we do this kind of work. I think soon, we have so much information. But I think soon we will try to start to put out some reports again, because we really are sitting on a lot.

Right now, the situation is so bad, like the survival support situation is so bad that all our time is going into that. We don't have a moment of break. It’s, like, insane. It's getting worse. But once we manage to sit down, we will try to make sense of this huge amount of data that we have, intelligence stuff. We start to put out things right now, difficult.

And if people want to learn more about the EOS Collective, where can they find information about that?

We have a website, which is pretty basic. We need to build it. Again, we have just tried scrambling, trying to do stuff. The whole organization is built by me, as an academic, my colleagues, also journalists, people working on scammers. We also have our daily job. None of us is employed, but this organization is purely a vehicle for us to try to help.

I'm not trying to brag here, but it was built with these people in mind that we really don't have a chance to build it into this kind of structure, NGO, as you could imagine it. Anyway, we have this website, and we hope to develop it further soon. Right now, we are in emergency mode, trying to help as many people as we can.

But hopefully, soon, we will be able to do something more, some kind of more, some institution building, because right now we are.

Ivan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing the story. I appreciate that we can look at this issue from multiple angles and not just, “Oh, everyone's a horrible scammer, and they're just taking advantage of everyone,” which there's bad things happening, but to realize those people on the other side that are also being taken advantage of, and it's not as simple as just, “Well, just shut down the facility.”

Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. A pleasure.