Scam Cities: inside the urban infrastructures of digital crime

Spanning almost five thousand kilometers, the Mekong River journeys from the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea, passing through the whole Indochinese peninsula, specifically in the Golden Triangle area situated between Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos. This region, historically recognized as one of the world's most significant centers for opiate production and illicit trade, has additionally taken on a crucial role in other forms of organized crime in recent decades, largely due to a lack of oversight from national authorities.

As documented in a 2025 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, China's regulatory clampdown on gambling platforms has diverted massive amounts of capital to these countries, promoting the development of entire urban areas dedicated to digital fraud: the Scam Cities, physical dimensions of digital crime, consisting of real infrastructure from which one of the darkest parts of cyberspace originates.

While this definition could be the title of a Steven Soderbergh film, the reality is that the term "scam" is not enough to describe the brutality of the quagmire that lurks in these places, explain Emanuele Giordana and Massimo Morello in Asia criminale I Nuovi Triangoli d'Oro tra Scam City, armi, droga, pietre preziose ed esseri umani (Baldini + Castoldi, 2025). The pattern is as follows: victims of online scams, lured around the world through fake romantic relationships, fictitious investments and computer phishing, are duped into being emptied of all their savings; but those beyond the computer screen or smartphone, the scammers, are also victims and prisoners. These are people recruited by deception, with excellent job-fake offers, whose passports are taken away and they are detained in often inhumane conditions in these armored urban complexes, the Scam Cities, which sometimes also include casinos, brothels and hotels.

For the most part, Scam Cities appear as settlements built from scratch, mostly on the outskirts of cities, often along interstate borders, in the "Special Criminal Zones" that in this geographic area overlap with China's Special Economic Zones. In Mae Sot, Thailand, as in the Myawaddy area of Myanmar, building complexes consisting of multi-story towers, integrated office and dormitory blocks, medical and logistics facilities are springing up, following a spatial organization that traces that of technology parks or free economic zones. They really resemble the suburban zones of any Asian megacity, a sprawl of buildings and industrial sites, except for certain notable distinctions: the windows of the buildings are blacked out, and the areas are bordered by perimeter fences, barbed wire and armed surveillance. According to a November 2024 article published in The Diplomat, it is the most powerful criminal network of the modern era.

In addition to new construction, Scam Cities also nestle within the urban fabric, exploiting unused or unfinished building stock. The most emblematic case is that of Sihanoukville, in Cambodia. Once known for its beaches and its role as the country's main port, the city experienced a construction explosion between 2015 and 2019 fueled by Chinese investment in the gambling industry, which came to a halt in 2020 due to Covid and Beijing's ban on gambling, which is why many casinos and hotels were abandoned or unfinished, making it a ghost town. In this functional vacuum, as of 2024, Sihanoukville has seen a period of renaissance in which, however, digital scams have also found a place, thanks to the creation of so-called "compounds," facilities reassigned to digital crime and transformed into camouflaged Scam City. Drinking a coffee in the middle of downtown and noticing a building whose perimeter is bordered by barbed wire, as we read in Asia criminale (Baldini+Castoldi, 2025), is not unusual, and it is easy to imagine how, having spotted the first building so masterfully armored, at a second glance the vibes of the city change drastically, from Asian Las Vegas to the capital of the dystopian world of predatory capitalism, defined by the authors precisely as "compound capitalism."

The report published by Amnesty International in June this year documented the presence of hundreds of foreign workers detained in these buildings, deprived of their passports and subjected to systematic violence in other Cambodian cities as well, such as Poipet and Phnom Penh.

Although born in specific Southeast Asian contexts, Scam Cities are not an isolated phenomenon. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's Inflection Point report, dated April 2025, notes that attempts to replicate the compound model are underway in other regions of the world: in Latin America, particularly in Colombia and Brazil, a number of police operations have uncovered clandestine call centers in areas far from state control, used as logistical bases for online scams. Similar facilities, often carved out of incomplete or abandoned buildings, have also emerged in West Africa, especially in Nigeria, but also in Zambia and Angola.

Opening image: Cambodia - Sihanoukville, view of the city. Via Wikimedia Commons, © Dmitry Makeev