Galvanized by the torture and murder of a Korean student in Cambodia, South Korea is starting to crack down on gangsters luring Koreans into toiling  as virtual slaves in closely guarded apartment blocks, scamming foreigners out of millions of dollars a year. 

Promised easy money in Cambodia, young Koreans discover only after they begin calling telephone numbers around the world that they’re required to put in long hours under brutal bosses demanding they trick victims into coughing up the money.

A study by the Pew Research Center shows “73% of U.S. adults have experienced some kind of online scam or attack, and these are common across age groups.” Most of them, it says, “get scam calls, texts and emails at least weekly.”

Americans are primary targets, but the Asian scam centers focus on victims worldwide with calls in multiple languages. As in Cambodia, scam centers also operate with impunity in Myanmar despite a military raid on one of about 30 compounds near the Thai border. BBC reports that Space X, owned by Elon Musk, cut off Starlink satellite communications to 2,500 devices, but they’re only a small portion of the many thousands that scammers rely on for millions of calls daily.

South Korean gangsters are complicit, recruiting gullible young men — as well as a few women — into going to Cambodia unaware of the depth and extent of a scamming empire with tentacles extending throughout Southeast Asia, notably to Myanmar and the Philippines.

South Korea’s National Intelligence service believes a South Korean, previously involved in selling drugs in Seoul, was responsible along with others for the killing of the university student, according to testimony before a committee of the National Assembly. He’s under arrest while others are being sought.

The scandal has mesmerized Korean TV viewers, with the arrival in Seoul of 64 mostly young men on a chartered flight from Cambodia. Most of them, complicit in the scamming, were arrested and photographed in handcuffs as they arrived. They face questions about the fates of many others among about a thousand Koreans working at Cambodian scam centers, about 100 of whom are reported as missing by South Korea’s embassy in Phnom Penh.

The Koreans involved in Cambodian scamming are among an astounding 200,000 people from around Asia working in slave-like conditions throughout Cambodia, notably around Phnom Penh and the southern port of Sihanoukville. They represent only one segment of similar scamming operations elsewhere in the region.

“Transnational organized crime groups based in Southeast Asia are turning into ‘criminal service providers’ selling a range of illegal activities,” says a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. “There has been a proliferation of illicit operations, known as scam farms, following the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Southeast Asia “is the ground zero for the global scamming industry,” says the report. “Transnational organized criminal groups that are based in this region are masterminding these operations and profiting most from them.”  Typically, according to the report, they work “with people who control territory” — notably in the border areas of Myanmar.

“Many of them started out as casinos tied into the regional money laundering of the proceeds from drug trafficking and other criminal activity,” it says, until they “changed their business model and moved into the online space, especially scamming and cyberfraud.”

As the scamming spreads, so does the response. South Korea now is banning Koreans from going to parts of Cambodia while cutting off aid programs to the country and demanding Cambodian authorities crack down on a racket that Korean intelligence believe has links to the government. 

Authorities under Prime Minister Hun Manet, a West Point graduate and son of the long-ruling Hun Sen, say they arrested more than 3,000 suspects in June and July, but that’s only a small portion of the scammers Among them, according to Seoul’s Yonhap News, was a Chinese providing drugs to spike the drinks of  young Koreans, talking them into accepting job offers in Cambodia, then making them work furiously to meet quotas by promising phoney schemes and investments to unsuspecting victims.

The story is much the same elsewhere in the region. The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong tells the tale of a woman named Nancy. She talked of  “living a life worse than death, surviving purely by willpower,” on a scam farm in Myanmar, across the border from Thailand.

“Having lived in safe Hong Kong all her life, Nancy never imagined that an overseas job would lead to forced labor,” she told the paper. “Like thousands of others lured to Southeast Asian scam farms, Nancy was hoping to make some quick money.”

Scamming is growing ever more sophisticated with the rise of AI and cybercrime.

“They are essentially turning into criminal service providers by selling cybercrime, scamming and money laundering services, but also data harvesting and disinformation,” says the UN report. “Technology, like generative artificial intelligence (AI), is evolving so quickly, and that will really change the way these places operate by creating new opportunities for the scammers to make money.”

Eventually “You’re not going to need a thousand people to run scams on a text-based cell phone; “ says the report. “You just need a well programmed application to do it for you.”