As Amnesty’s investigation demonstrates, many compounds operate alongside licensed casinos, hotels, and commercial developments, raising difficult and dangerous questions about who profits from these spaces and why enforcement has so often proven inconsistent. The report documents repeated cases in which compounds continued operating after police raids, victims were transferred to other facilities before authorities arrived, and survivors described apparent collusion between compound managers and local officials.
This should not be understood simply as corruption. It is better understood as the dark side of a development model built upon deregulation, speculative investment, and fragmented state oversight combined with access to a global pool of desperate, vulnerable, and unprotected labor.
The explosion of online scam compounds after 2020 came as the pandemic devastated tourism throughout Southeast Asia, and casino revenues collapsed almost overnight. Hotels emptied, and gambling centers that had previously catered to Chinese tourists suddenly faced financial ruin.
Many criminal organizations adapted with remarkable speed. They used the existing physical infrastructure: casinos, dormitories, security systems, surveillance cameras, private guards, and cross-border financial networks. What changed was the commodity being produced.
Instead of gamblers crossing borders, the customers were now online; instead of roulette tables, workers sat before rows of computers. Former casino towns hidden in corners of Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar became globally networked fraud factories, with a workforce increasingly composed of trafficked migrants.
