Smoke and Mirrors: Scam Crackdowns in Cambodia and Myanmar
Transnational organized crime expert Jason Tower explains why crackdowns aren’t stopping scams, just moving them from one region in Asia to another.
Episode 71: When Congress wants to understand the criminal empires behind scams, they call Jason Tower. He is a leading expert about what’s happening in Myanmar and new activity in South Asia.
Erin West and Jason Tower meet to talk about his new report, “Criminal Convergence? Chinese-origin scam syndicates and their reach into South Asia.” (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal). Jason traces how the industry follows a predictable pattern: When a country cracks down on organized criminal operations — as the Philippines did with offshore gaming operators or POGOs — the syndicates simply relocate to wherever regulation is weakest.
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In reaction to current enforcement in Cambodia and Myanmar, syndicates are moving operations into South Asia; places like India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.
Sri Lanka is his leading case study. Unregulated casinos, a debt-laden Colombo Port City project, and lax business-process-outsourcing rules have created ideal conditions for compound operators, evidenced by the spread of gambling operators like U8, previously seen at Myanmar’s KK Park scam hub.
We’re already seeing Sri Lanka fighting back. There’s been over 1,000 arrests already throughout 2026 alone. — Jason Tower, Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime
Jason reframes Cambodia’s widely publicized “clearance operation,” as “smoke and mirrors.” Triggered by the US and UK’s move to sanction the Prince Transnational Criminal Organization and to seize $15 billion, the crackdown started in late 2025. But instead of ending the operations, Jason characterizes it as a mass relocation of criminals rather than accountability. There were almost no prosecutions; the physical infrastructure remains in place.
Jason closes with a rare bright spot: a quiet, effective U.S.–Madagascar law enforcement operation that shut down 13 scam operations, which he considers a model for getting ahead of these networks before they take root elsewhere in the world.
3 Truths about the Scam “Crackdowns”
The syndicates move faster than the world tracks them. Jason describes a “whack-a-mole” pattern. Pressure in one area — Philippines, Cambodia, the Myanmar-China border — simply pushes scam networks to the next hospitable jurisdiction. Instead of reacting after headlines break, authorities need to proactively map future targets by identifying areas with weak casino regulation, lax immigration, and corruption.
Cambodia’s so-called clearance was about optics, not justice. Despite mass departures and a widely publicized conference, Jason stresses that Cambodian courts have prosecuted nearly no one. Meanwhile, the physical infrastructure of the compounds remains fully intact. The doors are literally open for the industry to rescale once international pressure eases.
Myanmar’s KK Park crackdown was theater. Yes, the military demolished part of the massive compound. But it was a small number of buildings and advance warning circulated on Telegram. The warnings let roughly 40,000 operators relocate to jungle compounds and new townships. Meanwhile, Myanmar’s own telecom towers, not Starlink systems, keep the scam centers connected and profitable.
Shwe Kokko, the original of the scam parks along the Thai–Myanmar line is now the headquarters of the Myanmar military’s border guard. It has a fake Starbucks, luxury entertainment venues, a water park, go-karts, firing ranges — all sorts of criminal tourism projects.
The Myanmar military targeted 3 hubs in a border area that has 43. So there’s a lot of choices. And so Myanmar military went about demolishing KK Park. It blew up building after building. — Jason Tower, GI-TOC
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Who Is Jason Tower?
Jason G Tower is a senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), where he works on organized crime, security and illicit economies in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Myanmar and China. Since 2019, Jason has been at the forefront of cutting-edge research on the rise of criminal enclaves hosting industrial-scale scam operations across the region and has published a series of reports highlighting the involvement of armed actors and China-origin transnational crime groups in these activities.
Jason’s work on online scams, casino crimes, illicit economies and conflict in Myanmar has been featured in over 100 media outlets, and he has testified on multiple occasions before the U.S. Congress on these issues. Jason served previously as Myanmar Country director for the United States Institute of Peace, and has held senior positions at PeaceNexus and the American Friends Service Committee. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Politics at Chulalongkorn University.
More from GI-TOC
Global Organized Crime Index provides metrics-based information to allow policymakers and authorities to prioritize their interventions on the basis of a holistic assessment of where vulnerabilities lie. It assesses the level of criminality and resilience to organized crime for 193 countries on three pillars: criminal markets, criminal actors, and resilience.
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Article: How cyber scams reshape communities, economies and ecosystems in Cambodia
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