Scam Factories is a podcast series from The Conversation Weekly taking you inside Southeast Asia’s brutal fraud compounds. It accompanies a series of articles on The Conversation.
Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam compounds. Many were trafficked there and then forced into criminality by defrauding people around the world via email, phone and social media.
The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Mark Bo, an independent researcher. They’ve spent the past few years researching the expansion of scam compounds in the region for a forthcoming book. They’ve interviewed nearly 100 survivors of these compounds, analysed maps and financial documents related to the scam industry, and tracked scammers online to find out how these operations work.
