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Late one night in February 2022, a Chinese man recovering in a Cambodian hospital explained how a group of online scammers had held him against his will, tortured him, and drained his blood. His name is Li Yayuanlun. From his bed, he said he had sought work as a security guard in China, but was tricked and apparently kidnapped, transported to Cambodia, and then sold into one of the country’s many fortified ‘scam compounds’ – facilities where workers labour around the clock to extract money from people online. When he resisted, Li was beaten and tortured, then passed from one scam operator to another. He claimed his captors finally began to drain large quantities of his blood: seven times in half a year. In the hospital, he pointed weakly at an infusion bag above his head. That was the size of each extraction, he said. In online articles, journalists began to describe his case as that of the ‘blood slave’.

Li’s tale had all the elements of a nightmare: human trafficking, captivity, physical abuse, and an unexpected macabre twist. In response, Chinese social media lit up with outrage and sympathy. Even government officials in China and Cambodia took notice. For a moment, Li seemed to embody the darkest truths about the criminal scam compounds spreading across parts of Southeast Asia.

Drone view of the scam compound

In the past decade, these walled enclaves have popped up in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines and other nations. What began as a collection of small-time fraud operations run from apartments, villas, hotel rooms and back offices, often by ethnic-Chinese criminal groups, has expanded into a massive industry. There are now hundreds of fortified scam compounds in all shapes and sizes, bristling with guards, surveillance cameras and barbed wire. Behind the gates, thousands of workers run constantly evolving online schemes that target victims across the globe. They groom individuals through romance or investment schemes to strip them of their savings. They trick older people into giving up access to their bank accounts by offering fake ‘tech support’. They coerce migrants into laundering money. They pretend to be government or law-enforcement officials and exploit international students. These are just some of the many criminal operations currently being run from scam facilities in Southeast Asia.

Alongside the problem of regulating scam compounds and policing their operators, there is another issue: how should we understand the people working inside them? On the surface, they may appear as victims of modern slavery, like Li, or as hardened criminals targeting people online. But inside the murky underworld of scam compounds, familiar ideas about crime, scamming and slavery begin to unravel. In such a context, stories become tangled and uncertain as the boundary between truth and fabrication blurs. In the process, victimhood becomes a very slippery category.

Cracks soon appeared in Li’s account. Medical experts doubted him. The Chinese platform where he claimed to have seen the job ad that had led to his abduction found no evidence of the post. On social media, people started wondering why criminals would want to sell cheap human blood. The very details that made his testimony unforgettable – the stolen blood, the image of a man being milked like livestock – also made it seem doubtful. It was clear that he had been trapped in scam compounds and had emerged broken and ill. Less certain was how much else of his story was true. Was he really a victim of what the media described as ‘cyber slavery’?

Cambodian authorities jumped at the opportunity to claim that tales of forced labour in their country’s scam compounds were largely fabrications by hostile foreign forces or by workers dissatisfied with their bosses. Li’s case, however, reminds us of something more unsettling. Because survivors of scam compounds – of modern slavery – are often doubted or dismissed, they may sometimes feel the need to embellish or dramatise their stories simply to be heard. The urge to exaggerate is not necessarily evidence that they are inventing fictions to exculpate themselves. Instead, it can reflect the constant demands to prove their status as a victim – demands that become heightened in the context of the scam industry.

Each worker in the scam compounds of Southeast Asia sits along a spectrum of victimhood. At one end are the ‘pure’ perpetrators who knowingly profit from the misery of others. At the other end are the ‘pure’ victims who are trafficked, beaten, and held against their will. Between these poles lie the most troubling categories: perpetrators who later become victims, and victims who are compelled to become perpetrators. Even those who enter the industry willingly may do so due to limited opportunities and financial desperation. It is in this grey zone that the boundaries of suffering and responsibility blur, and it is here that modern slavery is being redefined.

Cambodian officials inspecting the compound

How, then, should one respond to stories like Li’s that are so entangled in suffering, coercion and doubt? One place to start is simply by listening and taking testimonies seriously, even when they are messy or incomplete. That is the work we began doing in 2022, after Ling Li, one of the two authors of this essay, first encountered people trying to escape the compounds.

Ling is now a graduate student studying modern slavery, but around 2022, she was living in Cambodia for a research project on bride trafficking. While in Phnom Penh, she began hearing alarming accounts of people trapped inside scam compounds, and soon found herself assisting Chinese charity groups and other civil society actors working to rescue them. As she became increasingly involved in this world, Ling engaged with hundreds of people who had escaped these facilities. She interviewed dozens about their experiences. The other author of this essay is Ivan Franceschini, who, before studying the world of scamming, had spent nearly a decade researching labour issues linked to Chinese investment in Cambodia, including in Sihanoukville, a coastal town that morphed into one of the world’s major scamming hubs during the COVID-19 pandemic. As........

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