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

This briefing note – part of a project advancing a new conceptual framework designed to improve our understanding of Russian illicit financial flows (IFFs) as linked to foreign policy (FP) aims – provides an overview of Russia’s economic presence in South Eastern Europe. It first considers its interaction with the post-Yugoslav region as a whole, then zooming into the patterns at play in Serbia and Montenegro. These two countries have had a dramatic change in relations with Russia in 2014, when Montenegro implemented sanctions after the annexation of Crimea, and Serbia did not. This juncture offers a clear opportunity to think about the extent to which IFF from Russia are linked to foreign policy considerations.

Tena Prelec

May 2022