Standard Research Grant: Socio-Technical Mechanisms Supporting the Continuous Adaptation of Cyber-Scam Compounds: Trafficking, Technology, and Transformation

Cyber scam compounds across Southeast Asia are sites of extreme human rights abuse, where trafficked and coerced workers are forced to perpetrate large-scale digital fraud against victims worldwide. These transnational scam syndicates exploit social media, job platforms, messaging apps, cryptocurrency networks, and emerging AI tools to recruit labor, execute scams, and evade enforcement, posing escalating threats to human security, U.S. financial integrity, and cybersecurity. Despite growing policy attention, including recent U.S. legislative action, efforts to dismantle these operations remain fragmented and short-lived. Grounded in science and technology studies (STS), this interdisciplinary project develops a new theoretical framework for understanding foreign scam syndicates as illicit digital assemblages in which technological infrastructures, coercive labor regimes, relational hierarchies, and governance gaps co-produce resilient criminal systems. Using a theory-driven mixed-methods design, the project integrates ethnographic interviews, survivor surveys, policy and governance analysis, and systematic examination of online fraud artifacts to advance three aims: (1) develop a socio-technical analytic framework of scam operations, (2) analyze how governance gaps are produced and reproduced across geopolitical and platform contexts, and (3) trace human trajectories of coercion and exit through survivor pathways. By theorizing the socio-technical mechanisms that sustain and adapt cyber scam compounds, this project advances STS scholarship while generating actionable insights for survivor support, platform governance, policy reform, and transnational security. Its findings will inform education, prevention, intervention design, and public awareness efforts, contributing to more effective responses to technology-facilitated exploitation and global cybercrime.