Scam Logistics: Building and Governing the Digital Illicit Economy in the China–Myanmar Borderlands

Online scam compounds are often described as a cybercrime problem, but this is only partly true. Victims encounter scams online, yet the industry is built offline. It depends on territorial control, armed protection, labour recruitment, telecom access, supply chains, transport routes, financial channels and legal ambiguity. This research shows that scam compounds in the China–Myanmar borderlands are not isolated criminal hideouts but nodes in a wider corridor through which people, goods, money, data and coercion circulate. Armed groups, militias, brokers, traders and state-linked actors regulate movement, provide protection, extract rents and shape enforcement outcomes. Far from being marginal, scam centres reveal how illicit borderland economies are embedded in broader processes of accumulation, governance and uneven development.

Xu Peng (Manchester / SOAS CIVAD )

July 2026