Sarah, in the U.S., is one of many victims of online romance fraud. After falling in love with a man she met on a religious dating site, she was groomed over months into handing over $100,000 to help him out.
“Sara,” from South Africa, is one of many victims too — but from the other side. This is a pseudonym for a woman who lost her job as a tutor during the Covid-19 pandemic, and then was recruited to work in a customer service job in Thailand. As told to the Economist podcast Scam Inc, this was all a ruse. Instead of freely taking up legal work in Thailand, Sara was smuggled at gunpoint into a scammers’ compound in Myanmar.
There, she was forced to create social media profiles, in the guise of a rich Asian woman living in California. She was given a script and made to memorize small details of life in California, like the names of a local supermarket and hospital. She could even appear to be an Asian woman in video calls, through the company’s computer system. “You need to be in that woman’s shoes,” in Sara’s description. “It was too much that you stop forgetting your own life. You know, you’re just living in this dream world, like in an entirely different world.”
What Sara had to do with this information was to identify lonely-seeming middle-aged Americans online. Her job was to build relationships with these strangers and lower their guard. She was instructed to eventually milk them for money. Though she was monitored by cameras and armed guards, Sara tried in her own way to resist the terrible labor that she’d been forced into. “One thing I tried to do was to try and warn people in a way that they wouldn’t be suspicious. I would write these long sentences and I would even tell to them, before you go on with this, you need to just investigate, just check if it’s something you would like to do. So to them, they thought I was building more trust, but for me, I was trying to warn this person that, please don’t do this.”
Sara was lucky to get out eventually. Worldwide, approximately 200,000 people are currently believed to be held within these complexes worldwide. “This is huge,” Sara warns. It’s bigger than the world thinks it is.”
Indeed, such business is transacted every day, from “scam compounds” spread across several Southeast Asian nations. Many of the workers typing away for long hours inside these compounds have, like Sara, been tricked into working there, typically after responding to Facebook ads for legitimate-seeming jobs overseas. Now the abductees are required to trick others in turn.
Scam compounds are especially prevalent in special economic zones of Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, there are hundreds of industrial-scale scam complexes, making almost US$ 40 billion a year.
In Myanmar, where Sara was held, criminal organizations seek out riverside locations that can hold and surveil many workers. These scam centers mushroomed especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, when Chinese criminal syndicates found a new use for empty casinos and hotels.
The work is brutal and gruelling, both psychologically and physically. The workers may be shackled or handcuffed, and torture is not uncommon. Sometimes they’re forced to beat each other. The victims even include children.
What Can Be Done
Because of the narrow margins in cybercrime perpetrated from Cambodia, it’s hard to keep the business going without forced labor. According to Cambodian human rights activist Samady Ou, the Cambodian government is sensitive to how this type of crime is portrayed abroad. Scam centers were one point of contention in recent tensions between Cambodia and its neighbor Thailand. Citizens of richer countries, like South Korea, have been ensnared and tortured in Cambodia’s scam compounds, though the Cambodian National Police deny this. This is part of a pattern of limited action on cybercrime, and denial of the problem, by Cambodian law enforcement. While in July the Cambodian government reported that at least 2,000 people had been arrested in relation to scam compounds, those arrested appeared to be workers (and thus likely victims) rather than bosses.
But in the Philippines, which has been both a source and a destination of labor trafficking, concerns about online fraud have gone all the way to the top. There, Senator Risa Hontiveros has investigated trafficking of Filipinos into scam hubs. In November 2022, three Filipinos who had been trafficked into a scam hub in Myanmar testified before the Philippine Senate about their experiences. They shared gruesome photos of the large red welts on their legs and backs that had been inflicted on them for not meeting their quotas.
In 2024, President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. banned the Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs) that gave rise to such scam hubs. Philippine law enforcement are now even using one former POGO compound as an office. Its torture room remains intact, though no longer used.
“We are adopting a whole-government approach,” says Eric Dolette, director of the Bureau of Migrant Worker Protection, part of the Department of Migrant Workers. For instance, local government units might run seminars to raise awareness of trafficking risks. And the Department of Justice might conduct surveillance of unlicensed companies that may be involved in trafficking.
The Migrant Workers Protection Bureau, for its part, has been monitoring scam compounds since 2022. The bureau continues to receive more complaints from victims of overseas scam compounds over time. Of the 1,120 Filipinos who reported having been trafficked to Laos, Cambodia or Myanmar by April 2025 (including those who had been trafficked to other destinations than scam compounds), most have been repatriated, according to the bureau. It supports victims not only with return to the Philippines, but shelter, psychological first aid, job training and financial assistance. The aim is to avoid re-traumatizing the victims, who may have undergone physically and psychologically arduous journeys since escaping the scam compounds.
Dolette was part of an early rescue operation that fetched 18 people from Thailand. “You can see the joy, you can see the relief on their side,” he reflects. He had mixed feelings: sadness at what they’d been through, but also hope at seeing how they’d found the courage to make it to Thailand and contact the Philippine embassy.
The Department of Migrant Workers also pursues cases against traffickers, though this isn’t possible with every complaint. For instance, victims who have only interacted with traffickers online, before being handed off to scam compound operators, may not be able to identify their traffickers. Importantly, these prosecutions don’t extend to the workers, Dolette says. “We always treat the worker as a victim.”
Not all countries do the same. “Compared to other countries, I think the Philippines is more active,” Dolette comments. He believes that some other nations may be reluctant to admit that there’s a problem, but of course the problem can’t be solved if it’s not even recognized. It’s very hard for the Philippines’ government to carry out rescues in Myanmar, where many Filipino trafficking victims remain, because of the ongoing civil war there. When coordination between countries is tricky, the Philippine authorities may pursue backdoor channels to protect their nationals.
In general, authorities face an uphill battle, as fraud operations can pop up elsewhere, within the same country, in a neighboring country or beyond. Asian crime groups are responding to crackdowns by spreading further afield, including Africa and the Americas.
Making it even harder to fight the fraud syndicates is the reduced involvement of the U.S., even though it is home to many of the fraud victims.
This is the second in a series of articles about transnational romance fraud. The first article explores links between West Africa and the U.S.
