South Korea is emerging as the front line in the global war on organized networked crime with the most sensitive data of its leading telco being compromised by hackers, at least one rogue base station being connected to the second-largest telco so it can process unauthorized transactions, citizens lured into working for foreign scam compounds being offered an amnesty last year if they turned informant and box office success for a film based on the true story of a victim who tracked down the voice phishing boss who cheated her. A lot of this can be explained as because South Korea is an unusual combination that is more susceptible to networked crime than other countries, although other countries will catch up before long. South Korea is a prosperous nation with a dense urban population suited to the rapid deployment of the latest network technologies. It borders a kleptocratic state where cybercrime is a key source of foreign income and is also close to China, the origin of the crime syndicates that plague global communications networks, as well as being relatively near to the poor East Asian countries that became home to scam compounds after the authorities drove them out of China.
The result is that South Korea experiences the bleeding edge of scam innovation like no other country, with bad actors experimenting with new methods before they are replicated elsewhere. This includes new technological developments like phone malware that redirects calls to real banks and connects them to fake call centers instead, and new psychological ploys like convincing victims to isolate themselves from genuine assistance by telling them they are being hunted by criminals and they must lock themselves inside a hotel room to remain safe. So it comes as no surprise that the South Korean government has been rushing out new anti-scam initiatives at a rate that puts most other governments to shame. However, their success at persuading Koreans not to willingly work for foreign scam compounds may have had an unintended consequence. In 2023, there were just 17 cases of South Koreans being kidnapped or unlawfully detained in Cambodia. This shot up to 220 cases in 2024, and there have been over 330 cases during the first eight months of 2025.
The authorities allege the change is due to the gangs that run scam compounds luring Koreans to Cambodia with fake job offers, or simply grabbing Korean tourists off the street. The South Korean government upgraded warnings about travel to Cambodia and President Lee Jae Myung demanded ‘all-out’ measures to tackle the surge in kidnappings following the especially heinous killing of Park Min-ho, whose corpse was found in Kampot province, a regional hotspot for scam compounds. Park was a 22 year old university student whose body showed the signs of brutal torture over a period of days. Cambodian prosecutors have charged three Chinese nationals with his murder but there is plenty of reason to believe Cambodian law enforcement are turning a blind eye to operations run by the most powerful scamlords because of pervasive corruption and the wealth created by the scam industry. Estimates by the United States Institute of Peace suggest networked scams may generate 40% of Cambodia’s gross domestic product.
I will keep this post short because readers who want to learn more will not struggle to find relevant articles from the Korean press, including plenty of accounts written or translated into English. For example this excellent explainer from The Korea Times articulates the reasons why Koreans are at much greater risk from scam gangs than before. The purpose of my post is not to repeat what can easily be learned from other sources, but to highlight the fact that many industry insiders are choosing not to learn about the harm done by international criminal syndicates. Too many Western governments, associations and businesses talk as if all the damage done by transnational networked crime can be counted using dollars and cents. They act slowly, without any sense of urgency. Setting priorities according to crude calculations involving profits and losses has encouraged an unseemly complacency. It is a hangover from the bad old days of telcos, where the stock position of executives was to treat fraud as a ‘cost of doing business’. Even though investments in fraud prevention would often have generated a positive return of investment, crime was allowed to continue without any mitigation. This was because tackling crime failed to grab the attention of decision-makers who believed they could generate larger returns elsewhere.
That short-sighted miscalculation has fed the beast of organized crime. The more we feed crime, the stronger it becomes. Many of the same techniques that were previously used to cheat telcos are now used to cheat society more generally. And even when we raise our game, we do too little and too late, allowing criminals to reinvest the enormous returns they have generated from their crimes into new techniques. Some of that involves genuine technological innovation by the crooks. Or they just become more violent than before, because the profits they can make are so enormous. No amount of money can compensate for the loss of a human life, but we talk as if we need to identify more millions, or more billions, or more trillions of dollars of losses before we will be motivated to reduce crime. Those figures are all a bad joke anyway, compiled using highly questionable assumptions or based upon trivial sample sizes.
It would not take another trillion dollars to be stolen before people begin to care about the consequences of these crimes for human beings. Those who care about human beings already care about human beings. The root cause of our failure is that decisions are made by people who do not care about human beings, and who are encouraged not to care because everything is framed as an abstract financial calculation. Perhaps they lack the imagination to think of their son or daughter being kidnapped and beaten if they do not willingly submit to working in a windowless cell, forced to befriend victims on the far side of a screen by reciting the scam scripts supplied by their torturers. Some countries are a long way from South Korea. But if a scamlord will do that to a South Korean, why would they refrain from doing the same to a German, or a Bolivian, or an American, or an Egyptian? They would do the same to you or to any member of your family if they can make money by doing so. They have also reduced human lives to cold calculations about dollars and cents.
South Korea has been on the bleeding edge for scam innovation for at least a few years. Those of us who live elsewhere need to start paying more attention to the damage being done to their people in so many different ways. Language barriers are no longer an excuse for ignorance; automated translation is everywhere. The petty way industry associations work is no longer an excuse; we do not need to travel to the same room just to be in a conference with people from around the world. Our obsessions with money are no longer an excuse; our priorities should be determined by the scale of the problems we encounter, not by the amount of profit that can be generated by selling a solution. I expect South Korean authorities and businesses to be doing a lot of innovative work to tackle scams because they have no choice any more. The beast is beating at their door and it threatens to consume them. Other countries may choose to follow their lead, or they can continue on the path to hell. Those professionals who still think fraud prevention strategies should be based solely on calculations about profit and loss should ask themselves how much ransom they would pay to rescue somebody they love.
