Sri Lankan police have arrested 37 people suspected of running a scam centre in a suburb of the capital city Colombo.
The 36 men and one woman, all Chinese citizens, were detained on 2 May after officers received a tip-off that led them to a property in Talangama, where authorities claim they found people who were working illegally and in some cases overstayed their tourist visas as well.
As part of the raid, police seized 35 tablet computers, 147 mobile phones, and 100 SIM cards. It's hard to imagine that that is a normal number of devices for 37 people are likely to need while they are "on holiday."
The Sri Lankan authorities have recently had some successes in their fight against scam operations running within their country's borders, having detained 152 foreign nationals (most of them Chinese) accused of running a similar operation from a hotel in the north west of the country a month ago.
Prior to that, in March, immigration officers arrested 135 Chinese men and women in connection with another scam centre. Those individuals have since been deported.
So the obvious question to ask is: what are these alleged scam centres suspected of being doing?
Well, the answer appears to be so-called "romance-baiting" scams, where victims are groomed online through texts sent to "wrong" numbers, dating apps, or unsolicited social media messages, before being ultimately steered towards fake cryptocurrency investment platforms.
Such scams often represent a deeply human tragedy on both sides of the screen. The United Nations and Interpol have repeatedly warned that many of the people engaged in the actual scamming are themselves victims who have been lured abroad with fake job offers, only to have their passports taken away from them and threatened with beatings if they do not scam strangers.
In fact, the United Nations estimates that approximately 220,000 people are being held as forced labour in scam compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar alone.
As countries like Thailand and Cambodia have increased pressure on scam compounds, criminal gangs have begun to move to countries with the magic combination of more flexible tourist visa policies and strong digital infrastructure. Sri Lanka has recently boosted its appeal to foreign tourists by relaxing visa requirements, and has been "rewarded" by more scam centers popping up in its cities residential suburbs.
You don't have to live anywhere near a scam compound for any of this to land in your life. The whole point of these operations is to reach affluent victims — and many of the targets are based in the United States, UK, Europe, and Australia.
The FBI's Internet Crime Report revealed that US $5.8 billion was lost by Americans to cryptocurrency investment scams in 2024, with more than 41,000 complaints. And those are just the victims who reported being scammed. In all likelihood, many more never do.
Graham Cluley is an award-winning security blogger, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s.
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