'Scam states' How lucrative crime hubs took root in parts of Asia

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

- Tess McClure

When the bombs went off, they took down empty office blocks and demolished echoing, multi-cuisine food halls. Dynamite toppled a four-storey hospital, silent karaoke complexes, deserted gyms and dorm rooms.

So came the end of KK Park, one of south-east Asia's most infamous "scam centres", press releases from Myanmar's junta declared. The facility had held tens of thousands of people, forced to relentlessly defraud people around the world.

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 2,000 others had been detained. But up to 20,000 labourers, most likely trafficked and brutalised, had disappeared. Away from the junta's cameras, scam centres like KK Park have continued to thrive.

So monolithic has the multibilliondollar 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.