Examining the Evolution of and Responses to Scam Operations in Asia-Pacific 

Cyber scam operations have grown into a trillion-dollar criminal ecosystem, generating harm that runs from trafficked and coerced labor inside scam compounds to the millions defrauded worldwide. As crackdowns in Cambodia and the Philippines push operations to relocate, the phenomenon is spreading into new and less prepared settings, from Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste to Palau, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea.

This multi-country, comparative study examines how governments and civil society in these emerging risk locations can draw on the experiences of Cambodia, the Philippines, and India, where responses are more developed but still evolving, to understand what is driving the spread of scam centers, how institutions are responding, and where legal frameworks, mandates, and cross-border coordination are falling short. This study foregrounds the governance dimension: which agencies hold responsibility, what tools they have, and why some responses hold while others simply displace the problem elsewhere. Scam operations expose with particular clarity what happens when a state's capacity to sense a fast-moving threat exceeds its institutions' ability to coordinate and act on it, and what determines whether that gap closes or widens.