For days before the explosions began, the business park had been emptying out. When the bombs went off, they took down empty office blocks and demolished echoing, multi-cuisine food halls. Dynamite toppled a four-storey hospital, silent karaoke complexes, deserted gyms and dorm rooms.
So came the end of KK Park, one of south-east Asia’s most infamous “scam centres”, press releases from Myanmar’s junta declared. The facility had held tens of thousands of people, forced to relentlessly defraud people around the world. Now, it was being levelled piece by piece.
Related: Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people
But the park’s operators were long gone: apparently tipped off that a crackdown was coming, they were busily setting up shop elsewhere. More than 1,000 labourers had managed to flee across the border, and some 2,000 others had been detained. But up to 20,000 labourers, likely trafficked and brutalised, had disappeared. Away from the junta’s cameras, scam centres like KK park have continued to thrive.
So monolithic has the multi-billion dollar global scam industry become that experts say we are entering the era of the “scam state”. Like the narco-state, the term refers to countries where an illicit industry has dug its tentacles deep into legitimate institutions, reshaping the economy, corrupting governments and establishing state reliance on an illegal network.
The raids on KK Park were the latest in a series of highly publicised crackdowns on scam centres across south-east Asia. But regional analysts say these are largely performative or target middling players, amounting to “political theatre” by officials who are under international pressure to crack down on them but have little interest in eliminating a wildly profitable sector.
“It’s a way of playing Whack-a-Mole, where you don’t want to hit a mole,” says Jacob Sims, visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Centre and expert on transnational and cybercrime in the Mekong.
In the past five years scamming, says Sims, has mutated 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 engine.”
Government spokespeople in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos did not respond to questions from the Guardian, but Myanmar’s military has previously said it is “working to completely eradicate scam activities from their roots”. The Cambodian government has also described allegations it is home to one of “the world’s largest cybercrime networks supported by the powerful” as “baseless” and “irresponsible”.
