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Inside the criminal world of Southeast Asia’s scam compounds | Aeon Essays

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In Southeast Asia’s scam compounds, workers are being enslaved but the boundary between victim and perpetrator is blurred

Late one night in February 2022, a Chinese man recovering in a Cambodian hospital explained how a group of online scammers had held him against his will, tortured him, and drained his blood. His name is Li Yayuanlun. From his bed, he said he had sought work as a security guard in China, but was tricked and apparently kidnapped, transported to Cambodia, and then sold into one of the country’s many fortified ‘scam compounds’ – facilities where workers labour around the clock to extract money from people online. When he resisted, Li was beaten and tortured, then passed from one scam operator to…

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