Inside Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds

Rejecting calls from an unknown number, blocking suspicious accounts on social media, turning down a job offer too good to be true: these days, almost all of us have had some interactions with online scams. With luck and vigilance, this amounts to little more than a nuisance; yet, for the many who fell victim to the schemes, the consequences can be devastating. In recent years, cyber scams have taken on an industrial scale, and Southeast Asia has emerged as a global epicentre. This is the subject of a timely and fascinating new book, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds (Verso 2025, with forthcoming editions in Chinese, Bahasa, and Vietnamese). Who works at these compounds, and under what conditions? When the perpetrators of online scams are also victims of human trafficking, how should the authorities deal with them? What are the common misconceptions about the scam industry, and in what ways does it reflect features of legitimate businesses? For Episode 4 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with two of Scam’s co-authors, Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li.