Scam Factories Ep 1: No skills required

Scam factories is a special three-part series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam factories. Many were trafficked there and forced into criminality by defrauding people around the world.

The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and Mark Bo, an independent researcher.

In episode 1, our researchers travel to a village in Cambodia called Chrey Thom to see what these compounds look like. And we hear from two survivors about how they were recruited into compounds in Laos and Myanmar.

This podcast series was first aired in February 2025 on The Conversation Weekly podcast. In June 2025 it won Best Investigative Podcast series at the Publisher Podcast Awards.

The series was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design by Michelle Macklem. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Editing help from Justin Bergman and Ashlynee McGhee.

• Locked in: the inside story of Southeast Asia's fraud compounds
• ‘It seemed like a good job at first’: how people are trafficked, trapped and forced to scam in Southeast Asia – Scam Factories podcast, Ep 1