The world of online scams is far bigger than people realise, says Alexander Clapp in the London Review of Books. If cybercrime were a national economy, it would be the third largest (behind the US and China), with 15% annual growth. By 2027, scams are expected to cost the world $27 trillion a year. Roughly a third of the global population – any English or Chinese speaker with email or a phone – is a potential victim. To make all this possible, cybercrime syndicates have built up a vast industry, with hundreds of thousands of desk workers toiling around the clock in slave camps hidden in the lawless rainforests of southeast Asia.

Over the past decade, scam centres have appeared in large numbers across the borderlands of Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. Most of those working in them have been scammed themselves: the Chinese, Ethiopians, Ugandans, Filipinos, Czechs, Pakistanis and others who do the grunt work have generally been tricked, kidnapped and enslaved after responding to fake job ads on TikTok or LinkedIn. They are met at the airport, bundled into a van and deposited at a camp, where troublemakers are kept in line with electrified cattle prods. An astonishing 150,000 people are held in scamming compounds across Cambodia, with as many as 120,000 in Myanmar and tens of thousands more in Laos and Thailand. Segregated by nationality and divided into groups of around seven to make them easier to control, they sleep in dormitories, eat in cafeterias and follow a strict corporate hierarchy. They have managers, cleaners, tech support, childcare, accountants and sometimes brothels. Anyone who tries to make a run for it is hunted through the bush by locals, who are paid a bounty for those they return. As one Chinese man says: “It is not possible to escape.”

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