Myanmar: Terms of Extraction
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Insight Myanmar
Lindsey Kennedy is an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker whose work sits at the intersection of organized crime, corruption, and conflict. Drawing on years of reporting across Southeast Asia and beyond, she argues that the scam-compound economy now operating across Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos is not a fringe criminal phenomenon but a central force reshaping states, borderlands, and entire national economies. What is often described in narrow terms as online fraud or human trafficking, in her account, is something much larger and harder to isolate from formal power. It is a system that recruits through deception and coercion, profits through torture and fraud, depends on state protection, and increasingly reaches into everything from real estate and infrastructure to weapons flows, border control, and war itself.
Early on, Kennedy makes clear just how badly the usual framing fails. “They are not a separate organized crime phenomenon. They are a core part of the economic activity of a country.” The point is not rhetorical exaggeration. It is the premise of everything that follows: these compounds are no longer a criminal sideshow but part of the structure through which power, money, and development are now being organized.
Kennedy did not enter this work through a conventional route. After studying literature and spending time in video production, she moved toward journalism through questions of technology, ethics, and social justice, then found herself pulled deeper into broader investigations of human rights abuses, organized crime, and corruption. In Southeast Asia, she suggests, those subjects are difficult to separate. What began as work on issues such as illegal land clearance, forest crime, and illegal logging eventually opened onto the expanding world of scam compounds, where criminal enterprise, state complicity, and conflict economies overlap so thoroughly that none can be understood on its own.
Kennedy prefers the term “forced online criminality” because the industry contains a wide range of abusive labor beyond the usual shorthand of “online scams.” Gambling operations, romance fraud, coerced online sex work, and other forms of exploitation can all exist within the same compounds. So can a wide spectrum of victimhood and complicity. Some people knowingly take jobs they suspect are dubious, others believe they are heading into ordinary customer service work, and many discover the reality only after crossing a border they did not know they had crossed. By then, escape may be impossible. As Kennedy puts it, “People are completely tricked into working somewhere they have no idea what’s happening.” This framing captures the basic architecture of the system: people are absorbed before they can even name where they are.
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