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

Franceschini, Ivan ; Li, Ling ; Bo, Mark (2023) — Critical Asian Studies

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DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2023.2268104 (opens in a new tab)

Type:   Journal Article
Country:   Global
Tags:   Forced Criminality, Forced Labor, Human Trafficking, Online Scam Compounds, Organized Crime, Pig Butchering Scams, Political Economy, Southeast Asia
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Synopsis

            
This publication assesses the rise of online scam operations in Southeast Asia as a distinct political economy phenomenon. The authors aim to understand how scam compounds operate at scale by tracing their evolution from small, apartment-based setups to industrial-scale facilities housed in walled compounds. They ground their analysis in three years of fieldwork in Cambodia and in-depth interviews with survivors, complemented by NGO and media sources, aiming to illuminate the structures, incentives, and actors that sustain these operations. The study portrays scam compounds as highly coordinated workplaces that blend predatory criminal networks with local elites and increasingly diverse labor forces. Key elements include extreme labor discipline, captive living arrangements, and the coercive extraction of data and profits, often under threat of violence. The authors document how compounds organize labor across floors and sections dedicated to training, operations targeting multiple international markets, and dormitories that centralize control. They also discuss how overlapping industries, such as online gambling, intersect with scam enterprises, and how ethnic and linguistic divisions are manipulated to maintain authority and suppress collective action among workers. The authors articulate the central concept of compound capitalism to describe this regime of labor, security, and revenue extraction. They argue that these operations reflect a new yet continuities-laden form of predatory capitalism, driven by external crime networks and local political-economic contexts, and intensified by the precarities wrought by the Covid-19 era. The paper highlights implications for how scholars name and analyze labor misuses in the digital economy, while noting limitations tied to survivor-based sources and the broader regional context.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
The article identifies limited academic attention to conditions inside scam compounds and notes that mainstream modern-slavery research has lagged in addressing this emerging form of forced criminality. It also identifies money laundering as a poorly understood area requiring further research. External networks involving influencers, brokers, and traffickers are outside the article's scope.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
The study draws on extensive Cambodia fieldwork over three years and in-depth interviews conducted in 2022–2023 with 32 survivors of scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos. The survivor accounts were complemented and cross-checked with testimonies collected by NGOs and journalists, and contextualized using media reports, scholarly literature, and civil-society materials.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The evidence is primarily qualitative and based on 32 survivor interviews, supplemented by secondary accounts and documentary sources. The authors explicitly exclude detailed examination of external recruitment networks involving brokers, influencers, and traffickers. Due to space constraints, they also do not examine in detail the worker desperation that drives entry into compounds.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Further research is warranted on the accounting and money-laundering dimension of the scam economy, which the authors describe as extremely difficult to penetrate. The authors also indicate that external recruitment connections and the worker desperation component of compound capitalism require fuller treatment beyond this article.

          

              

    
    

        
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