By Gemma Ware, Justin Bergman & Matt Garrow*
Scam Factories is a special multimedia and podcast series by The Conversation that explores the inner workings of Southeast Asia’s brutal scam compounds.
Multimedia series
‘We could hear the screams until midnight’: life inside Southeast Asia’s brutal fraud compounds
People around the globe are swindled out of billions of dollars a year in scams. The scammers, though, are sometimes victims, too. Many are often duped into jobs, then trapped in compounds and subjected to unspeakable violence.
From empty fields to locked cities: the rise of a billion-dollar criminal industry
Online scam operations are booming in Southeast Asia due to lax regulations, organised crime networks and corrupt local officials. Our authors are on the trail of the powerful, shadowy figures at the top.
Are they victims, perpetrators, or both? For scammers, freedom comes at a cost
Escaping a scam compound is rife with risk. Those who succeed then face persistent questions from authorities and their families about whether they are truly a victim.
Podcast series
Listen to Scam Factories on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Credits
The lead authors of the series are Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne; Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; and Mark Bo, an independent researcher.
The podcast series was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design by Michelle Macklem. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin was our Chinese translator. Photos by Roun Ry, KDA, Halima Athumani and Ivan Franceschini.
Justin Bergman at The Conversation in Australia edited the articles in the series and Matt Garrow worked on the multimedia elements of the stories. Series oversight and editing help from Ashlynne McGhee.
*Gemma Ware, Head of Audio, The Conversation UK, The Conversation; Justin Bergman, International Affairs Editor, The Conversation, and Matt Garrow, Editorial Web Developer, The Conversation.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
1 Comments
This has been very big news in Thailand recently with these scam centres just across the border in neighbouring Myanmar and Cambodia, just a few hundreds metres from the international boundary.
The perpetrators behind these scam towns are mostly Chinese who have paid off local law enforcement. A lot of the people in there are recruited in Thailand including Thais and foreigners in Thailand. It's been the leading news story on and off in Thailand for a few weeks. Thailand became so aggravated about what was happening that they cut off electricity supplies to towns on the other side of the border which buy their power from Thailand.
It's a very nasty business indeed and is huge with a number of these scam towns set up where there are hundreds, if not thousands of people trapped and forced to work for these scammers.
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