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A few weeks after Ben Yeo travelled to Cambodia for what he thought was a job in a casino, he found himself locked up in a padded room. “It’s a combination between a prison and a madhouse,” he remembers. He was being punished for refusing to conduct online scams.
“They tried all kinds of coercive manoeuvres, using a fire extinguisher to try to hit me, to scare me, using a plastic bag over my head to suffocate me … Whatever you see in the movies that actually happened.”
Scam Factories is a podcast series from The Conversation Weekly taking you inside Southeast Asia’s brutal fraud compounds. It accompanies a series of multimedia articles on The Conversation.
In the second episode, Inside the Operation, we explore the history of how scam compounds emerged in Southeast Asia and who is behind them. We hear about the violent treatment people receive inside through the testimonies of two survivors, Ben, and another man we’re calling George to protect his real identity.
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 the compounds, analysed maps and financial documents related to the scam industry and tracked scammers online to find out how these compounds work.
Read an article by Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li which accompanies this episode about the rise of the scamming industry.
The Conversation contacted AsiaHR international for comment. We did not receive a response. We contacted all the other companies mentioned in this multimedia series for comment, except Jinshui who we could not contact. We did not receive a response from them either.
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.
