MYANMAR: Days before the explosions began, the atmosphere around KK Park felt eerie. Workers who once bustled around the business park had quietly drifted away. Offices sat hollow, food courts echoed with nothing but the buzz of fluorescent lights, and the karaoke rooms—once stuffed with the sounds of forced gaiety—stayed dark. When the bombs finally fell, they tore through buildings that had already been emptied of life. The Myanmar junta hailed the spectacle as the dramatic end to one of south-east Asia’s most notorious scam hubs, a place where tens of thousands of trafficked people had been forced to trick strangers across the world.
However, the truth was far less triumphant. Long before the cameras arrived, those running the complex had slipped away. Warned that a crackdown was coming, they simply moved their operations elsewhere. More than a thousand workers managed to escape across nearby borders, another two thousand were detained, but an estimated twenty thousand people vanished without a trace. Even as debris still smouldered, scam compounds just like KK Park continued to operate, mostly untouched and very much alive.
How scamming became a political engine
Experts now say we have entered the age of the “scam state.” The term echoes “narco-state,” but instead of drugs, the engine is digital fraud—an industry that has entwined itself with government structures, shaped national economies, and created dangerous dependencies on criminal money.
In recent years, countries across the Mekong region have made a show of conducting raids and issuing stern warnings, but analysts argue that most of these crackdowns are designed to be seen rather than felt—performances intended to assure the outside world that something is being done, even as the real machinery powers on behind the scenes.
And that machinery is enormous. Cyber-scamming has surged from small, scattered fraud groups into a sprawling, industrialised economy worth tens of billions. By late 2024, scamming operations in the Mekong countries were estimated to be pulling in US$44 billion (S$56.9 billion) a year—close to 40% of their combined formal economic output. Technology has only turbocharged the industry: AI-crafted conversations, deepfaked faces, and investment platforms that look terrifyingly real all contribute to “pig-butchering” schemes that can drain victims of their savings, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands.
Behind the scenes, transnational criminal networks—many linked to China—run these compounds with chilling precision. In Cambodia, a single company implicated by the U.S. Department of Justice was connected to a staggering US$15 billion in cryptocurrency, nearly half of the nation’s annual economic output. The very visibility of these massive compounds suggests something deeper and more troubling: state structures that have been compromised or co-opted.
A public crime with powerful friends
The physical landscape of scamming tells its own story. These operations thrive in borderlands where the rules are thin, in conflict zones where oversight is nearly nonexistent, and in special economic areas with loose regulation. In Laos’s Golden Triangle, officials estimate roughly 400 scam compounds are active. In Cambodia, investigators have identified more than 250 suspected sites—many so large they can be spotted from nearby highways.
Their candidness is not done by chance. It’s a symptom of political protection. Con leaders have fostered impact at the highest echelons—getting diplomatic designations, functioning as consultants and mentors, and striking coalitions and partnerships with influential political personalities. Recent scandals read like a map of the region—Thailand’s deputy finance minister stepping down after alleged links to Cambodian scam lords, a Cambodian tycoon sanctioned by the UK and US for running criminal networks while advising the prime minister, a former Filipino mayor receiving a life sentence for operating a scam centre from within her own jurisdiction.
All of these point to a reality: The scam economy is no longer something hidden, fringe, or underground. It has grown entangled with the social, political and economic fabric of nations. Specialists caution that the world is seeing something extraordinary and unparalleled—an unlawful international business operating with staggering directness, everything out in the open, restructuring cultures in real time, and leaving millions of sufferers and fatalities in its wake.
