Thai tourism risks being undermined by Southeast Asia cyber-scam industry
Maha Songkran World Water Festival 2025, Bangkok. Tourism Authority of Thailand, via X.
Thailand’s tourism industry is being undermined by concerns over safety of travel to the country amid the burgeoning epidemic of organized cyber-crime in Southeast Asia.
A decline in foreign tourist arrivals is a main factor behind the Thai central bank’s projections that the economy will expand more slowly than expected this year, according to the edited minutes of the Thai Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting held on 25 and 30 April. The minutes were published on 14 May.
Safety concerns among Chinese tourists about travelling to Thailand were the main reason for lower arrivals, the minutes said. The number of international tourist arrivals in Thailand might not return to the pre-pandemic peak of 40 million in 2019 in the next one to two years, the MPC added.
The MPC did not spell out why Chinese people have become more reluctant to visit Thailand, but the reason is clear enough.
Chinese people, since the start of Covid-19, have been the most likely to find themselves trafficked and then trapped in cyber-scam compounds run by Chinese organized crime gangs in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
The compounds in many cases grew out of Chinese-run casinos in the region which needed to be repurposed when Covid-19 meant that business dried up. In the early years, the compounds ran using mainly trafficked Chinese labour, and the bulk of the financial victims tricked into making payments online were Chinese.
That has become less true in recent years. The compound organizers know that the Chinese government wants to curtail scams which harm Chinese citizens. The biggest global pool of affluent online potential victims is English-speaking. So there has been a switch to trying to recruit more English speakers to work in the compounds.
The strategy has been successful. The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) has said that the region’s scamming industry could soon rival fentanyl as one of the top dangers that Chinese criminal networks pose to the United States. USIP estimated that Americans lost $3.5 billion to scams originating in the region in 2023 alone.
Those who are being forced to carry out the scams are often young and well educated, and are being lured with a job offer into travelling to Southeast Asia. Their real destination, be it Cambodia, Myanmar or Laos, will often not be disclosed.
The candidates will instead be told that they will be working in Thailand, which sounds above-board and legitimate. Once they have arrived, they will then be transported to a compound in one of the neighbouring countries.
The nightmare scenario for Thailand is that its perception as a safe tourist destination will be compromised by the global ambitions of regional cyber-crime. The government has been working to try to tackle the wider problem.
In February, Thailand cut electricity and fuel exports to Myanmar border areas where the cyber scam compounds are known to operate. It has also suspended cellphone towers along the Cambodian border believed to be servicing scams, and carried out arrests inside Cambodia.
It’s clear, though, that Thailand can hardly deal with the problem on its own.
Foreign governments need to do more to alert their citizens to the dangers both in terms of being trafficked and of being tricked online. Financial regulators need to address the ease with which the criminal proceeds are being laundered into the formal economy. And co-ordinated international sanctions need to be imposed on the major players behind the rackets.