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The industry received unwanted attention in January after a young Chinese actor disappeared from Bangkok while pursuing a seemingly lucrative gig. His girlfriend raised the alarm on Chinese social media, resulting in an enormous outcry and threatening to tank Chinese tourism to Thailand. Unlike their response in most other cases, the Thai police quickly located and rescued the actor. Feeling the heat, a local Myanmar minority army“liberated” several thousand others held by the scammers.

After the publicity died away and the Thais had turned off cross-border power and internet services, the largest Myanmar scam center, Shwe Kokko, was soon reported back in business using generators and Starlink connections. A recent raid by the Myanmar authorities netted 30-some Starlink devices (resulting in Starlink disabling 2,500 more) and the arrest of thousands of foreign cybercriminals. Over 1,000 workers in the scam operations fled to Thailand, most of them Chinese, Indians and Southeast Asians.

But strife-torn Myanmar is not the center of the industry. It lies in Cambodia where there is excellent internet connectivity and the industry enjoys political connections and some protection through state-exercised sovereignty.

The torture and death of a young Korean whose body was discovered in Cambodia in August inflamed Korean public sentiment and brought the repatriation of dozens of Koreans. Many were willingly scamming and those have been criminally charged, but others had been kidnapped and forced to work.

Koreans, however, are only a small segment of the perhaps 200,000 people working in Cambodian scam centers. While dealing with the problem, Korea has tried gingerly not to damage its diplomatic relations with Cambodia.

Emboldened by their profits, the scammers have widened operations. International counter-measures have been fragmented, reactive and episodic. Without a vigorous, sustained and truly international effort, this ruthless industry will only grow.

Because the original perpetrators as well as labor and targets have been Chinese, China has been the nation most focused on counter-measures, but its efforts are mainly designed to protect its own citizens while not undercutting diplomatic relations with the host countries. In the process, they have tended to target lower-level criminals and encourage the scammers to look for less well-defended countries.

One such country is the United States, which until recently had not paid much attention. A July report by a US Congressional commission found US defenses“fragmented and under-resourced.” But while most of the estimated $50-75 billion scam take still come from Asia, some $10 to 12.5 billion in 2024 may have come from the US. Unless addressed, this will inevitably become a much larger American problem.

Thus, China and the US have a responsibility to their own citizens and the world to work as co-leaders of a sustained campaign against scammers and illicit drug dealers, encompassing both the fraud and fentanyl issues.