It is notoriously difficult to measure the size of the global scam economy, but credible estimates put victims’ losses in 2025 at around $442 billion — approximately on par with the economic output of Denmark. The democratization of artificial intelligence and, by extension, deepfakes and instant translation services, is expected to accelerate this trend. But for an industry that relies on technology, the tools of the trade don’t need to be particularly advanced. Human ingenuity is what drives success.
With so much money at stake, and “fraud-as-a-service” software readily available on the dark web, scams are evolving. There are investment scams , e-commerce scams, predatory loan scams, business email compromise scams, sextortion scams , package-delivery scams, kidnapping scams, imposter scams, adoption scams and romance scams — also known as “pig-butchering” for the way in which the fraudster “fattens up” the target by building a trusting relationship before going in for the kill. The latter exploded after the pandemic, as online fraud soared. At the same time, stories of job-seekers who had been tricked and trafficked into working at scam compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia began to surface in international media. Suddenly, victims of the trade weren’t just lonely Westerners.
In Southeast Asia, where the compound model was pioneered, operations mimic white-collar workplaces, with recruiters and human traffickers handling personnel, middle managers and team leaders overseeing logistics and data brokers supplying a steady flow of new marks. As researchers Mark Bo, Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li detail in 2025’s Scam , their authoritative account of the industry, these fortified compounds, typically run by criminal groups in partnership with local entrepreneurs, are miniature societies unto themselves. Often located in volatile border regions, the larger ones contain “numerous scam companies, shared canteens, brothels, clubhouses, clinics, pharmacies, and services of all sorts, ranging from restaurants to hair salons.”
It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of people are currently working in scam operations across the region. Many were lured by deceptive job posts or, more often, at the behest of friends or relatives already inside. Some people are paid, though contracts can be deceptive and debt accrues quickly. Travel and visa expenses are passed onto workers, and food and housing charged at extortionate rates. Those who don’t meet performance targets are subject to beatings and torture, and sometimes sold to rival scam centers. At the compound where he worked in Cambodia, one interviewee recalled, “workers had to deal simultaneously with more than ten phones from seven a.m. to midnight or, if the targets were in the United States, from one a.m. to four p.m. There were no breaks during office hours and no weekends off.” The price of freedom is typically upwards of $50,000.
As law enforcement has taken a greater interest in the industry, some scam entrepreneurs have relocated to friendlier jurisdictions and copycats have flourished. In recent years, scam compounds linked to organized crime have been discovered in the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, India and West Africa, sometimes disguised as call centers or casinos, in other instances simply hidden in office parks. After years of seeing their citizens targeted, fighting cyberfraud is now a rare shared objective between the US and China. At the end of April, a joint operation between Washington, D.C., Beijing and Dubai resulted in raids on nine fraud centers in the emirate and the arrest of 276 people.
Industrial-scale operations make up a significant part of the fraud economy, but as Carlos Barragan illustrates in The Yahoo Boys: Love Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers (June 9, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his deeply reported and richly empathetic account of four scammers in a poor suburb of Lagos, gains aren’t only being made at the top. After all, the occupation has no barriers to entry, and for many young people without any prospects, there’s nothing to lose in giving it a try. Faced with Nigeria’s unfettered inflation and staggering youth unemployment , Barragan’s subjects spend druggy nights impersonating White women from Western countries they’ve never been to, satisfied that at least they’re not falling further behind. “Are you going to apply for a job that will pay you 25,000 naira ($18.38) when a [50-kilogram] bag of rice in Nigeria is 30,000 naira?” one scammer told Barragan. Just two years later, the price of that same bag had more than doubled.
Compared to their peers in school or employment, successful Yahoo Boys, named after the email accounts often used by early digital scammers, inhabit a parallel world. Uniformed in designer clothes with free-flowing cash, they live in hotels, hire private drivers, and become conspicuous mainstays of local economies. “In Ikotun,” Barragan writes, “hotels catered to them, boutiques were springing up because of them, drug dealers profited from them, and young women preferred ‘hustlers’ to civil servants or bankers.” There is no definitive headcount, but among the dozens of scammers Barragan informally polled, “most guessed that between 60 and 80 percent of young men in Lagos are involved.” In 2023, the director of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission arrived at a similar number .
As the broader get-rich-quick economy of crypto and prediction markets captures the public imagination, making salaried work seem like a fool’s game, scamming takes on a mirror-world appeal: less a rejection of the economic order than an extreme expression of its values. Some Yahoo Boys start scamming in university, having lost faith in upward mobility; others begin earlier, hoping to become the big men in the neighborhood. Here’s Barragan, surveying the scene at an Ikotun club:
“They were like giant planets, pulling friends and women into their orbit. People hovered nearby, waiting in case a Yahoo Boy started spraying cash or bought another bottle. These boys — baby-faced teenagers with whispers of mustaches above their lips — radiated an aura of reckless success, with their golden chains and steely stares and fur-clad girlfriends and arrogant orders to the waiters, who, in return, treated them like demigods.”
Unlike the scam operations of Southeast Asia, which grew out of organized crime networks in Taiwan and China, Nigeria’s industry evolved more haphazardly. It first took root in the 1980s, when the collapse of the oil boom shocked a society that had grown accustomed to wealth. With inflation rampant and jobs suddenly scarce, fraud flourished, unleashing in subsequent decades thousands of Nigerian princes who just needed some help moving money. By the 2010s, the Yahoo Boys of these email schemes had gotten smartphones and updated their tactics. Now, the best way to strike it rich was to seduce foreigners over text message.
Barragan became interested in 2015, after his mother began an online relationship with a 54-year-old American soldier. When “Brian” eventually asked her to start sending money, her sons convinced her it was a scam. Further digging revealed that the messages had been sent from Lagos. In a reported essay that became the basis for this book, the journalist went to the city in search of his mother’s scammer, hoping to understand his motivations.
Barragan never found him, but he did come away with a grasp of the dynamics that allowed cyberfraud to thrive in West Africa; how social isolation and loneliness in the West could be exploited by teenagers in the slums of Lagos, and why poverty and the legacy of colonialism might prompt them to do so. “Americans have no shoulder to cry on, but have everything,” one local tells him. “On this side of the world, we have everybody to take care of us, but we have nothing.”
While much has been written about the victims of scams — the families destroyed, livelihoods vanished — there has been less committed to the scammers themselves, and how the billions of dollars illicitly flowing into the Global South have corroded societies. In Southeast Asia, the enrichment of mafias and gangsters perpetuates cycles of violence, while communities that rely on scam compounds for revenue and jobs learn to survive on exploitation, sometimes going so far as to sell escapees back to the companies. In cities like Sihanoukville, a hub for scam compounds in southern Cambodia, selling people into forced labor has become an alarmingly common way to settle scores or just pay off one’s debts. As an interviewee told the authors of Scam , “the person you are eating dinner with now can be the one who sells you tomorrow.”
In Lagos, cyberfraud has bred its own kind of inequality, in which playing by the rules means accepting a handicap. “They called it an ‘epidemic,’” Barragan writes, “not because of what the boys were doing to victims thousands of miles away, but because of what they were doing right at home. Prices rose. Social trust frayed. Apprenticeships were abandoned as boys traded hard labor for quick scams.”
A fake DHL message, an online flirtation that eases into investment advice: It is shockingly easy to separate people from their money. And regardless of where one is in the world, that temptation can be too much to refuse. As the champions of casino economies prod us to forget that anything that’s too good to be true most likely is, scammers stand ready to benefit.