The online scammer targeting you could be trapped in a South-East Asian fraud factory

Every year, Australians of all ages and backgrounds are scammed out of billions of dollars, with fraudsters developing more sophisticated and persuasive tactics all the time. But the financial and emotional devastation wreaked on victims of scams only tells half the story. All across South-East Asia, heavily guarded, sinister compounds have sprung up to house these industrial-scale scam operations – and to trap people forced to work for them in terrifying conditions.

“Online frauds have become a cottage industry in South-East Asia, where crime syndicates employ thousands in conducting online scams. They have corporate-like organisations, political connections, professional money-laundering networks, and increasingly global reach. They have refined social engineering techniques to defraud and extort via cryptocurrency,” says Jan Santiago of the Global Anti-Scam Organisation (GASO), which was set up in June 2021 to support people around the world who have fallen prey to scammers. Its Singaporean founder, Jessica Lin, was herself a victim of online scams.

Documents shared with The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age by a cybersecurity researcher at Vietnam’s National Computer Security Centre, known by his “ethical hacker” name Hieupc, who managed to gain access to information and back-end systems used by scam centres in Cambodia, show how these criminal organisations operate.

Floor by Floor, Country by Country

Space within each scam complex is divided between different criminal outfits, with teams of people from various countries, such as Vietnam or China, located on different floors, given a script and tasked with scamming people who speak the same language. Depending on the scam, this might involve persuading people to play online casino games (which never cash out), or using chat apps to lure people into high-yield digital investment platforms, many of which are essentially pyramid schemes. Every few months, the websites or apps used for the scam are shut down and the criminal group switches to a new one with a different name and design – but which functions in the same way. Scammers find victims through social media or by paying YouTubers to advertise their platforms, Hieupc says, and each small company has racked up millions of dollars.

While some people working at these scam centres choose to defraud strangers for a living, crime bosses have found it too difficult to source enough workers willing to run their scams, and have increasingly resorted to tricking people with fraudulent job ads – or even kidnapping them off the street. In South-East Asia’s sprawling compounds, many are now trapped in modern slavery conditions – and subject to horrific treatment if they try to leave.

“With billions of dollars in revenue and protected havens in SEA, these ‘fraud factories’ has spawned a secondary industry of human trafficking to feed their labour-intensive criminal enterprises, resulting in large-scale torture, rape, and other abuses,” says Santiago.

Broken Leg

Hieupc’s findings tell the same story. The Chinese and Taiwanese scam bosses running these operations are “dangerous and evil”, he says. They exploit naive people looking for a legal job, keep them captive inside the compounds, force them to work every day from 8am to 11pm, and beat or threaten them if they don’t make enough money. Trying to get out is incredibly dangerous, too. Last year, a 25-year-old Vietnamese man who had been secretly helping Hiepc to hack into a management system and shut down scam operations from the inside managed to escape by jumping from a window, but broke his leg in the process. In January 2021, a group of Vietnamese trafficking victims tried to break out of a compound in Sihanoukville, Cambodia – but while some told Hieupc they had managed to escape, it “turned out like a war with blood and violence”, he says, with several trafficking victims killed and others recaptured by the scam companies.

Some experts estimate that thousands of people are being held against their will and forced to work as scammers in Cambodia. However, our visits to some of the massive, sprawling sites known to be used for online scams in Cambodia and Laos indicated that these numbers may be the tip of the iceberg. In remote, heavily guarded compounds like the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) in Laos – a casino enclave nicknamed Kings Romans – we were shown row after row of newly constructed tower blocks surrounded by barbed wire, which locals and survivors say function as dorms for scammers. Clothing hanging from every window suggested these buildings were fully occupied – meaning the number of people kept in modern slavery conditions in just this one site could stretch into tens of thousands.

Mega-casino towns

Meanwhile, stories of similar, giant scam operations have emerged from mega-casino towns recently carved out of the jungle in Myanmar. In Cambodia alone, media reports and accounts from survivors, rescuers and Thai authorities suggest that workers are crammed into repurposed casino-hotels, sprawling dormitory buildings and isolated office blocks throughout the country, including gambling hubs in Sihanoukville, on the coast; Thai and Vietnamese border towns like Poipet and Bavet; and new hubs, like the sleepy tourist town of Kampot, which are being identified all the time. Given the scale of these sites, there are likely hundreds of thousands of people being forced to work in scam centres – and that means potentially millions more people targeted by financial scams in Australia and around the world.

“Malicious cyber activity against Australians is increasing in frequency, scale and impact,” said a spokesperson for the Australian Federal Police in Cambodia, adding that the AFP was working proactively with Cambodian law enforcement to tackle transnational crime such as cybercrime. The AFP was increasingly seeing the use of the internet and digital platforms to recruit and exploit trafficking victims, he said, while scam groups launder their profits online through cryptocurrencies, “which makes it easier for traffickers to receive, hide and move large amounts of money with less risk of being detected.”

However, it seems local police and government officials are too scared – or unwilling – to shut these operations down.

Police have to bribe to enter

Owners of these casino-hotels and compounds tend to be extremely well-connected. Take KB Hotel in Sihanoukville, where survivors say they were trafficked and sold to online scam companies. Director Chen Al Len is a business associate of the prime minister’s nephew Hun To, with whom he is listed as a co-director of three companies: Heng He (Cambodia) Commercial Bank, registered in Phnom Penh, and Heng He Ju Long Town Real Estate and Heng Zuan Yule (Ju Long Town), both close to Bavet. Chen Al Len is also reported to be a co-owner of Heng He Casino in Bavet, inside which a newly arrived worker was found hanged inside in June. However, Hun To, who divides his time between Cambodia and Melbourne, does not not have a direct stake in either KB or Heng He Casino.

Some Cambodian police reportedly insist that because workers have signed contracts (albeit to commit crimes) the bosses aren’t holding them captive, they just “do not allow them to leave” – or even that companies whose workers owe them money or time left on these contracts have the right to detain them. The Interior Minister also downplayed a recent rescue operation as settling a “labour dispute”.

Other governments have tried to intervene without much success. In April, Thai police conducted raids on a string of locations in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and Sihanoukville, accompanied by local police. The Thai authorities were hoping to rescue up to 3000 Thais believed to have been tricked into working for scam operators and held against their will. They managed just 66 – not least, according to the Thai police’s own statement, because of local corruption and resistance on the Cambodian side. At one gated building in Sihanoukville, rather than the Cambodian police demanding entry on their behalf, the Thais had to spend eight hours negotiating with the Chinese owners before paying $1 500 to be allowed in and retrieve just 24 workers trapped inside.

Full story SMH

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