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In the past few years, the online scam industry has undergone seismic changes. After emerging in Taiwan and mainland China in the 1990s, in the 2010s scam operations began to relocate servers and offices to Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia and the Philippines. While initially the majority of operations were small-scale and largely hosted in apartments, villas, and hotel rooms, in the second half of the decade they began to assume industrial dimensions, coalescing into bigger walled compounds often hosting dozens of companies, many staffed by workers held against their will and forced to perform scams. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and a set of in-depth interviews conducted with survivors of scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, this paper offers the first in-depth examination of the political economy of Southeast Asia’s scam industry, arguing that these operations should be framed as part of compound capitalism, a new manifestation of predatory capital.

Compound Capitalism: A Political Economy of Southeast Asia’s Online Scam Operations