Description
This paper examines how trust is built and protected inside Southeast Asia’s scam industry, and why these markets persist despite illegality and churn. Drawing on multi-sited research (2018–2025) across the China–Myanmar borderlands and regional hubs, it traces a three-layer trust architecture: at the micro level, broker–worker ties, kinship/province networks, and informal reputational ledgers; at the meso level, compound “house rules,” internal arbitration, escrow, and calibrated violence; and at the macro level, cross-border payment rails, platform affordances, and selective state enforcement that together provide credible guarantees. The analysis shows how brokers convert social obligation into liquidity and how compounds stage legality to attract labour and investors. Rather than reading persistence as state failure alone, the paper argues it is co-produced by platforms, intermediaries, and fragmented authorities. It closes with practical implications for regulation that target trust-building mechanisms, not just outputs.
