The KK Park complex, a gigantic online scam center located on the border between Myanmar and Thailand, September 17, 2025. LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP
Falling in love to the point of emptying one’s bank account: This is the well-honed mechanism of romance scams, which claim thousands of victims in France every year. Gift cards, bank transfers and cryptocurrencies are favored by brouteurs – a French term for these scammers who win over their targets from afar before robbing them.
While West Africa remains a major hotspot for these fraudsters, due to its large French-speaking population, authorities are now turning their attention to Southeast Asia. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, huge complexes have sprung up there, employing hundreds of thousands of workers of around 50 different nationalities to industrialize romance scams. Their specialty: “pig butchering” scams, a method that favors long-term exploitation of victims – typically using fake investment opportunities – over multiple small-scale deceptions.
Between January 2020 and February 2024, these Asian criminal networks extorted $75 billion (€65 billion) from victims worldwide, according to a University of Texas study. But how do these scam factories operate and why are they so difficult to dismantle, even though their locations are well known?
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