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Scam Factories is a podcast series from The Conversation Weekly taking you inside Southeast Asia’s brutal fraud compounds. It accompanies a series of articles on The Conversation.
Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam compounds. Many were trafficked there and then forced into criminality by defrauding people around the world via email, phone and social media.
The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Mark Bo, an independent researcher. They’ve spent the past few years researching the expansion of scam compounds in the region for a forthcoming book. They’ve interviewed nearly 100 survivors of these compounds, analysed maps and financial documents related to the scam industry, and tracked scammers online to find out how these operations work.
In this first episode of the podcast series, No Skills Required, we find out how people are recruited and trafficked into the compounds – with many believing they’re going there to do a legitimate job.
Our researchers travel to a village in Cambodia, Chrey Thom, to see what these compounds look like. And we hear from two survivors, a Ugandan man we’re calling George and a Malaysian woman we’re calling Lee to protect their real identities, about how they were tricked into travelling to compounds in Laos and Myanmar.
Read an article by Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li which accompanies this episode.
The Conversation contacted all the companies mentioned in this series for a comment, except Jinshui, which we could not contact. We did not receive a response from any of them.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware, with assistance from Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Sound design by Michelle Macklem and editing help from Ashlynee McGhee and Justin Bergman.
Listen to The Conversation Weekly podcast via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.
Mark Bo, an independent researcher who works with Ivan Franeschini and Ling Li, is also interviewed in this podcast series. Ivan, Ling, Mark, and others have co-founded EOS Collective, a non-profit organisation dedicated to investigating the criminal networks behind the online scam industry and supporting survivors.
