Asia’s scam centre problem is moving on, not shutting down

By Johann Rebert, Nicola Nixon

When Sri Lankan police raided a seaside hotel in Chilaw earlier this month, they detained more than 150 foreign nationals running an online scam operation from inside the building. The raid was a law enforcement success—but it also confirmed what many had feared: the scam economy that has taken root across mainland Southeast Asia is now expanding.

Southeast Asia’s online scam centres—the sprawling operations that traffic workers from dozens of countries and force them to defraud victims worldwide of an estimated $40 billion a year—have since the Covid pandemic become one of the region’s most consequential and least governable crime problems. Sri Lanka’s exposure to the problem is growing fast.

In the first three months of 2026, arrests—including the one in Chilaw—had already exceeded 50% of those reported during all of 2025. If that trend holds, the annual figure could be greater than 600 cases, roughly double that in either 2024 or 2025. And that reflects only what is surfacing through the media: it does not capture what immigration authorities or law enforcement may be seeing, and it almost certainly understates the scale of what is occurring.

Read the full piece, published in The Interpreter, April 16, 2026, here.