As part of January being recognized as Human Trafficking Awareness Month, we look at how financial sextortion, once a fringe online threat, has evolved into a weapon of multi-billion-dollar global criminal enterprises
Key insights:
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Sextortion has evolved into a global industry — This crime is being fueled by organized crime networks and human trafficking.
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Victims exist on both sides— Often, vulnerable workers, who operate as forced labor in scam compounds abroad, are as much the victims as those people being scammed online and extorted for financial gain.
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Digital literacy and cross-border cooperation are strong tools — Governments and law enforcement need to better educate the public about these scams and seek better collaboration to prevent exploitation and to dismantle organized crime networks.
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A 17-year-old Michigan high school student died by suicide in 2022 after inadvertently sharing explicit photos with a Nigerian sextortion scammer after the scammer posed as a teenage girl on a fraudulent Instagram account. Also, a 16-year-old Kentucky high school student died by suicide in 2025 after he was blackmailed with an AI-generated nude image.
Sadly, these two families are victims of the more than 100,000 sextortion reports filed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) since 2020, many now involving AI-generated imagery. These reports are part of the larger increase in financially motivated sextortion, which typically targets males ages 14 to 17 and which has been on the rise since 2020. These tragic cases are part of a vast network of scams that stretches from the American suburbs to criminal compounds in Asia and Africa.
Sextortion in the modern age
The FBI defines sextortion as a criminal act in which an offender blackmails a victim for payment under the threat of releasing sexually explicit material, such as a photo or video. The material may have been solicited through a romance scam or may be the product of generative AI (GenAI). Sextortion is the latest trend in a series of scams that generate billions of dollars for international criminal syndicates on the backs of forced labor in parts of the world with unstable governance and oversight. An average 800 CyberTipline reports submitted to NCMEC on a weekly basis from 2022 to 2023 related to the sextortion of minors.
NCMEC notes that victims of sextortion scams can submit complaints to the CyberTipline and make use of the Take It Down platform. Take It Down allows for anonymous requests to remove explicit images from participating platforms and social media companies. The U.S. Department of Justice Office for Victims of Crime encourages changing passwords after scam activity and not responding to any requests for payment, even if threats are made.
Organized crime syndicates and cyber-scams
Asian crime syndicates are the “definitive market leaders” in cyber-enabled fraud and online scams, which have been rapidly expanding since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime. In areas of Asia with weak governance, scam centers and fraud gangs run sophisticated operations that often front as industrial parks or casinos and hotels. Individuals are trafficked into these scam compounds and coerced into defrauding other victims online. The trafficked individuals often are lured with false promises of high-paying jobs and the ability to maximize their language skills.
Broad enforcement efforts have been relatively ineffective as scamming operations simply move within the country or offshore.
Once there, victims are forced into labor to commit financial fraud usually by enticing smartphone users to invest in cryptocurrency scams or engaging in sextortion (which sometimes includes forced sex trafficking to produce sexual content). It is unclear if teenagers are being targeted explicitly or if they are inadvertently targeted through broader, population-wide cyber-scams.
The Myanmar town of Laukkaing (also spelled Laukkai), the capital city of the Kokang Self-Administered Zone is considered the engine-room of forced labor scamming. In Myanmar’s Kokang region, criminal networks like the “Four Families” have turned from narcotics to online scamming, operating casinos, and scam compounds possibly because these crimes are more lucrative and easier to operate at scale.
In October 2023, a deadly crackdown at Myanmar’s Crouching Tiger Villa (referred to as the 1020 Incident) was the beginning of the crumbling of mafia-led control in Laukkaing. The Chinese government launched coordinated attacks, which resulted in Chinese extradition of three of the leaders of the Four Families. The leader of the Ming family (which operated Crouching Tiger Villa) took his own life after being captured, but more than three dozen members of his extended family with ties to organized crime and illegal activities in Myanmar were sentenced in Chinese courts in September 2025, including 11 who were sentenced to death.
An estimated US $1.4 billion was generated by the Ming family over 10 years through telecommunications fraud, illegal casinos, drug trafficking, and prostitution.
Inside offshore scam compounds
Beyond Southeast Asia, forced-scam operations have grown rapidly across the Mekong region. The International Justice Mission (IJM) Nexus Report, funded in part by Thomson Reuters, notes their study of CyberTipline reports and IP addresses point to a strong presence of scam compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia.
The financial impact of scam compounds is no small factor — ruling elites in these countries have a financial motivation to look the other way because of its high profitability. The estimated cyber scamming returns in Cambodia are more than US $12.5 billion annually, or about half of the country’s formal GDP. Across Mekong countries (China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam), cyber-scam returns generate an estimated US $43.8 billion annually.
The financial impact of scam compounds is no small factor — ruling elites in these countries have a financial motivation to look the other way because of its high profitability.
Broad enforcement efforts have been relatively ineffective as scamming operations simply move within the country or offshore, and there are reports that these complex money laundering operations help move funds into the formal economy of countries with weak governance.
Despite the challenges in enforcement, some high-profile enforcement cases have helped to generate international coordination against cyber-scams and sextortion. A California teen’s death by suicide resulting from sextortion led to the arrest of four men in Cote d’Ivoire three years later. Interpol’s Operation Contender 3.0 (July and August 2025) resulted in 260 arrests and more than 1,200 electronic device seizures in 14 African countries. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) announced that cybercrime would be prioritized as the main regional security concern last month. Domestically, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has issued sanctions on nine targets involved in scam operations in Shwekokko, Myanmar, and against Cambodian businessman Ly Yong Phat (who is also associated with online scam centers).
Digital literacy as a solution
To truly begin to crack scam networks that operate in parts of the world with weak governance, nations need to work together to improve the digital literacy of their citizens and support stronger cross-border investigation strategies. Stronger anti-money laundering frameworks can disrupt scam compounds more effectively than sting operations that just force the scam operation to move elsewhere.
It is critical that digital literacy is emphasized for online users who fall prey to sextortion and among job seekers lured into forced labor in scam compounds by fraudulent job advertisements. Cross-border collaboration among authorities, along with stronger enforcement and shared digital literacy, are the best defenses against this evolving threat.
You can find out more about our coverage of human trafficking, child exploitation, and forced labor at our Human Rights Crimes Resource Center here
