Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds (book talk)
Based on his new book Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds (Verso, 2025, co-authored with Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li), Mark Bo explores the rise of the fast-growing industry of online fraud in countries including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines.
Operating from heavily guarded compounds, these scam centres rely on the labour of thousands of people - many trafficked or deceived - forced to defraud others under threats of violence and confinement. Scam traces the origins of the industry, from small, scattered operations dotted around urban areas to the now industrialised complexes that can be seen across the region today.
Initially staffed by Chinese nationals and targeting the Sinophone world, the industry has in a short space of time assumed a truly transnational scope. Victims across the globe are now targeted with various types of scams, leading to billions of dollars in lost funds. To enable the targeting of diverse ‘markets’, the scam workforce has evolved, and nationals from more than fifty different countries have been recorded as being trapped in these scam complexes. Controlled by transnational crime groups and protected by local elite business and state actors, the industry has managed to sustain operations in the face of global scrutiny and periodic law enforcement crackdowns. Drawing on over five years of research, site visits, survivor testimonies, and open-source intelligence work, this talk examines how the region’s scam industry has grown to become a global crisis.
Speaker & chair biographies
Mark Bo is a researcher who has been based in East and Southeast Asia for the past two decades. He works as a consultant researching organized crime trends in Southeast Asia and conducting open-source intelligence investigations into sites and stakeholders involved in cyber-enabled fraud. In 2024 he co-founded the non-profit organisation Eos Collective, which investigates and documents the spread of the online scam industry and provides support to survivors. He is the co-author of Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds (Verso, 2025) and has published articles on cyber scams and human trafficking in publications including Trends in Organized Crime and Critical Asian Studies.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).
*Banner photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of the London School of Economics and Political Science.