Over the past few years, Southeast Asia has become a hotspot for a new and deeply concerning form of trafficking in persons: labor trafficking for forced criminality within scam centers. These operations are primarily concentrated in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and border areas in countries such as Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Myanmar, often operating under the cover of casinos, hotels, and business parks that facilitate large-scale cyber-enabled fraud schemes.

Unlike traditional forms of labor exploitation, victims in these scam centers are forcibly recruited, deceived, or coerced into committing illegal online activities such as investment fraud, “pig butchering” romance scams, and impersonation schemes. The UNODC (2023) report highlights that many victims are lured through fraudulent job advertisements and trafficked across borders, only to find themselves imprisoned in guarded compounds and threatened with violence, debt bondage, or torture if they fail to meet scam quotas. Victims are not only from the region; they come from over 40 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. The Inflection Point (2025) report notes that these scam operations are industrial in scale, with hundreds of thousands of victims forced to generate illicit profits—estimated in the tens of billions of USD annually—for transnational crime groups.

These operations are strategically situated in areas with weak governance, often under the influence of non-state armed groups or within loosely regulated SEZs, which create ideal conditions for both trafficking and money laundering. Criminal networks have established multilingual scam workforces, combining trafficked victims with complicit actors, and have rapidly incorporated technologies such as AI, blockchain, and cryptocurrency-based laundering into their operations.