When the bombs detonated, they destroyed vacant office buildings and ruined echoing, multi-cuisine food courts. Dynamite brought down a four-story hospital, silent karaoke venues, empty gyms, and dorm rooms.
In the days leading up to the explosions, the business park began to empty.
This marked the end of KK Park, one of southeast Asia's most notorious "scam centers," as proclaimed by press releases from Myanmar's junta. The site housed tens of thousands who were forced to defraud people across the globe incessantly. Now, it was being dismantled bit by bit.
However, the operators of the park had long vanished: seemingly alerted to an incoming crackdown, they were busy establishing operations elsewhere. Over 1,000 laborers had escaped across the border, and around 2,000 were detained. Yet, up to 20,000 workers, likely trafficked and abused, disappeared. Away from the junta's scrutiny, scam centers like KK Park continued to flourish.
The global scam industry's monolithic nature has experts suggesting we are entering the era of the "scam state." Similar to the narco-state, it refers to countries where an illicit industry has deeply embedded itself into legitimate institutions, reshaping the economy, corrupting governments, and establishing state reliance on an illegal network.
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The raids on KK Park were the latest in a series of widely publicized efforts to clamp down on scam centers across southeast Asia. However, regional analysts argue these operations are mostly for show or target minor players, serving as "political theater" by officials who face international pressure to take action but have little intent to dismantle a highly profitable sector.
"It's like playing Whack-a-Mole, where you don't actually want to hit the mole," says Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Asia Centre and an expert on transnational and cybercrime in the Mekong region.
Sims explains that in the past five years, scamming has evolved from "small online fraud rings into an industrial-scale political economy."
"In terms of gross GDP, it's the dominant economic engine for the entire Mekong sub-region," he says. "And that means that it's one of the dominant—if not the dominant—political engines."
Government representatives in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos did not respond to the Guardian's inquiries, but Myanmar's military has previously claimed it is "working to completely eradicate scam activities from their roots." The Cambodian government has described accusations that it harbors one of "the world’s largest cybercrime networks supported by the powerful" as "baseless" and "irresponsible."
Transformed in less than a decade from a world of misspelled emails and implausible Nigerian princes, the industry has become a vast, sophisticated system, amassing tens of billions from victims worldwide.
At its core are "pig-butchering" scams—where a relationship is nurtured online before the scammer persuades their victim to part with their money, often through a supposed "investment" in cryptocurrency. Scammers have utilized increasingly sophisticated technology to deceive targets: employing generative AI for translation and conversation, deepfake technology for video calls, and mirrored websites to mimic authentic investment exchanges. One survey found that victims were swindled for an average of $155,000 (£117,400) each. Most reported losing more than half their net worth.
The significant potential profits have driven the industrialization of the scam industry. Estimates of the industry's global size now range from $70 billion into the hundreds of billions—a scale comparable to the global illicit drug trade. The centers are typically operated by transnational criminal networks, often originating from China, but their ground zero has been southeast Asia.
By late 2024, cyber scamming operations in Mekong countries were generating an estimated $44 billion (£33.4 billion) annually, equivalent to about 40% of the combined formal economy. That figure is deemed conservative and on the rise. "This is a massive growth area," says Jason Tower, from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. "This has become a global illicit market only since 2021—and we're now talking about a $70 billion-plus-per-year illicit market. If you go back to 2020, it was nowhere near that size."
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In Cambodia, one company accused by the US government of operating scam compounds had $15 billion in cryptocurrency targeted in a Department of Justice (DOJ) seizure last month—funds accounting for almost half of Cambodia's economy.
With such vast potential profits, infrastructure has quickly been developed to support it. The hubs prosper in conflict zones and along lawless and poorly regulated border regions. In Laos, officials have informed local media about 400 centers operating in the Golden Triangle special economic zone. Cyber Scam Monitor—a collective that tracks scamming on Telegram channels, police reports, media, and satellite data to locate scam sites—has identified 253 suspected locations across Cambodia. Many are enormous and operate in the public eye.
The size of these sites itself signifies the extent to which the states hosting them have been compromised, experts claim.
"These are massive pieces of infrastructure, very publicly established. You can visit borders and see them. You can even enter some," says Tower. "The fact this is happening publicly shows the extreme level of impunity—and the extent to which states not only tolerate this but facilitate these criminal actors to become embedded within the state."
Thailand's deputy finance minister resigned this October following allegations of involvement with scam operations in Cambodia, which he denies. Chen Zhi, who was recently sanctioned by the United Kingdom and the United States for allegedly orchestrating the Prince Group scam network, served as an adviser to Cambodia's prime minister. The Prince Group has stated it "categorically rejects" claims that the company or its chairman engaged in any illicit activity. In Myanmar, scam centers have become vital financial resources for armed groups. In the Philippines, former mayor Alice Guo, who operated a massive scam center while in office, has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
Across southeast Asia, scam leaders operate on a very high level: obtaining diplomatic credentials, becoming advisers, and more. "It is significant in terms of the degree of state involvement and co-optation," Tower explains.
"It's quite unprecedented for an illicit market of this nature, which causes global harm, to exist with blatant impunity and operate so openly."
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