The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global anti-money laundering standard setter, has published a new report that traces the money behind scam compounds.

These operations are thought to inflict tens of billions of dollars in losses each year, and the report warns that criminals are using AI to scale them faster than authorities can respond.

Titled Combating End-to-End Illicit Financial Flows linked to Scam Compounds, the study records scam compound activity across Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia, placing it among the fastest-growing types of organised crime in the world.

It maps the payment services, virtual assets, technology and telecoms infrastructure that criminal groups rely on. The aim is to help countries intervene both before victims send money and after funds have left their accounts.

The harm falls on two groups. Large physical compounds remain the best-documented model, and individuals from at least 80 jurisdictions have been found inside such sites in Southeast Asia.

Around 120,000 people are believed to be coerced into running online fraud in Myanmar alone. Many are lured by bogus job adverts, moved across borders and then held through debt bondage, confinement, violence, sexual exploitation, torture and intimidation.

Meanwhile, people in more than 100 jurisdictions have been targeted by these hubs. Their losses often become unrecoverable once the money is withdrawn as cash, sent abroad or swapped into virtual assets. In one example, blockchain analysis linked over $100m in victim payments to a group of wallets tied to a single compound and followed those funds through laundering chains to the points where they were cashed out.

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