Cyber Scamming Goes Global: Sourcing Forced Labor for Fraud Factories
Picture: Yurii Klymko/Adobe Stock
In an article by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Lauren Burke Preputnik, Julia Dickson, Aly Senko, and Andrew Friedman discuss the global expansion of cyber scamming operations, which increasingly rely on forced labor in "fraud factories" to carry out large-scale online scams, and they highlight the intersection of cybercrime and human trafficking.
So-called “fraud factories” have their roots in Southeast Asia’s gambling industry and are closely tied to Chinese organized crime groups. When the casinos built by Chinese transnational criminal groups were effectively shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic, the criminal organizations were forced to seek out other means of generating income. In many cases, abandoned casinos and hotels were converted into large-scale forced scamming centers, where trafficking victims are forced to scam unsuspecting individuals across the globe.
Victims of this form of trafficking are usually job hunters who respond to fraudulent employment opportunities in fields such as customer service, information technology (IT), and computer programming. Traffickers pose as job recruiters and target individuals with exploitable technological or language skills, convincing victims of their legitimacy with interviews and live communication. After the victims travel to the location of the “job,” traffickers confiscate their passports, lock them in heavily guarded compounds, and force them to conduct scams. For more information on the scams emanating from these centers, see part two.
Although the coordinated efforts of law enforcement agencies have successfully shut down some of these scam centers and rescued trafficking victims, criminal gangs are learning to adapt quickly and relocate their operations to evade detection and government crackdowns. Law enforcement must adapt as well, broadening their activities to include a wide range of partners—including other nations, civil society groups, and tech companies—implicated in this complex process.
