'Scam states'

Raid on notorious fraud hub fails to halt illicit industry

- Tess McClure

For days before the explosions began, the business park had been emptying out.

When the bombs went off, they destroyed empty office blocks and echoing food halls. Dynamite toppled a deserted hospital, silent karaoke complexes, gyms and dorm rooms.

So came the end of KK Park, one of southeast Asia's most infamous scam centres, according to press releases from Myanmar's junta. The facility had held thousands of people forced to defraud victims around the world. Now it was being levelled piece by piece.

But the park's operators were long gone: apparently tipped off that a crackdown was coming, they were busily setting up shop elsewhere. More than 1,000 labourers had fled across the border, and about 2,000 others had been detained. But up to 20,000 people, probably trafficked and brutalised, had disappeared.

Away from the junta's cameras, scam centres similar to KK Park have continued to thrive. So large has the multibillion-dollar global scam industry become that experts say we are entering the era of the scam state.

Like the narco state, the term refers to countries where an illicit industry has dug its tentacles deep into legitimate institutions, reshaping the economy, corrupting governments and establishing state reliance on an illegal network.

The demolition of KK Park was the latest highly publicised crackdown on scam centres in southeast Asia. But analysts say such raids are largely performative or target middling players, amounting to "political theatre" by officials who are under international pressure to shut them down but have little interest in eliminating a wildly profitable sector.