Southeast Asian World Fraud Center

There are many practitioners in this field, and a significant number are forced into it. Forced practitioners tend to be young, highly educated men—those with strong financial motivation and a basic level of education that fraud schemes require. They are often lured away by promises of high salaries and then coerced into working.

The most common scam methods include "pig-butchering" romance scams, online gambling, and cryptocurrency fraud. Together, these have created a $3 trillion scam market. Forced workers face performance quotas; if they fail to meet them, they are beaten or resold to other operations to extract remaining value.

Fraudsters often impersonate customer service representatives for e-commerce companies, officials from public security or judicial authorities, delivery personnel, and bank or financial institution employees. So if you receive a call like this, remember to verify it on the official website—don't get tricked step by step.

The typical practitioner is a young adult, and those lured into the trade are often young adults from Guangdong province. It's a case of the same traits leading to both profit and loss: people who fall for recruitment scams are also more vulnerable to being scammed themselves.

Is it safe to travel there? According to world safety indexes, at least it's safer than going to the United States—though still riskier than China. If you can be scammed in China, you'll need to be even more careful abroad.

Southeast Asia Telecom Fraud Stories: Far More Than Just in Myanmar | Tencent News Guyu Data