Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart: A woman is holding a pair of smart glasses from Ray-Ban Meta in her hand at an eyewear store. (Christoph Schmidt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)

For Meta’s Smart Glasses, Access Is An Afterthought

A recording of Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's deposition is played for the jurors on March 4, 2026, in Santa Fe, N.M. (Jim Weber/Santa Fe New Mexican via AP, Pool, File)

Courts Find Platforms Addictive and Dangerous by Design

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House, Sunday, June 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

No Zuckerberg, The Future is Not Just For Individuals

A protestor carries a poster with a message in Hindi which translates as 'Save Our Constitution' as he participates in a protest movement led by Cockroach Janta Party, in New Delhi, India, Wednesday, July 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Vipin)

BitChat-Github Takedown Shows India Redrawing Its Perimeter of Online Control

A collage made of 13 different images arranged in a rectangular formation in the style of pop art. The images include vintage photographs of old signs, part of a vintage poster, a vintage space image, historic black and white photos of a male laborer carrying a sack and of a human eye, comic book-style words 'Wow!', 'Bam!' and 'Boom!' as well as a comic  book-style woman's face and images of digital tech, including a computer, a smart phone and computer chips.

Why Tech Hype Seduces Us Again and Again

Workers protest against anti-strike legislation on International Workers' Day in Warsaw, Poland, on May 1, 2026. (Photo by Jaap Arriens / Sipa via AP Images)

Separating AI’s Technological Problems From its Capitalism Problems

A sign near military checkpoint warns in Thai, English and Chinese of the danger of being trafficked and forced to work in locked scam compounds across the Myanmar border, in Mae Sot, Thailand, Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Amid Crackdown, Few Signs of a Slowdown in Scam Compounds

Abstract poster in the using geometric shapes, including circles and lines, arranged in a balanced composition.

A UX Design Perspective on Improving AI Safety

The Grok homescreen seen on a smartphone. Shutterstock

The Grok homescreen seen on a smartphone. 

Making AI Safe Requires More Than Constraining Its Instructions

The Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia skyline. Shutterstock

Which 'AI Sovereignty' Are You Buying?

A silhouette of a young girl working on a laptop.

Court Deems Meta a 'Public Nuisance,' a First for Social Media

Protesters march through midtown Manhattan to call attention to the effects of wealth inequality on: climate change, the Trump administration's foreign and domestic policies, and other social and political issues in New York on September 20, 2025. (Photo by Matthew Rodier/Sipa USA via AP Images)

Casey Michel on Breaking the Tech Oligarchy's Grip

Chief District Judge Bryan Biedscheid delivers closing remarks after the jury reached a verdict against Meta at New Mexico's First Judicial District Court, Tuesday, March 24, 2026, in Santa Fe, N.M. (Nathan Burton/Santa Fe New Mexican via AP, Pool)

Why New Mexico v. Meta Matters

hand putting ballot paper in box, ballot paper, ballot box, binary code, election, voting, voting ballot, democracy, politics, politics and government, technology

AI Didn't Create the Election Infrastructure Problem. It Just Made It Urgent.

Image of map and computer language over binary codes on server racks in server room.

Global Digital Policy Roundup: July 2026

Attorney General Raul Torrez, is joined by a group of mothers advocating for a change to social media, at a news conference outside First District Court, in Santa Fe, N.M., Monday, May 4, 2026. (Eddie Moore/The Albuquerque Journal via AP, Pool)

New Mexico Court Orders Meta to Pay to Establish $567 Million Fund to Abate Harms to Youth

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) confer during a markup hearing on August 5. Yuqing Liu/Tech Policy Press.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) confer during a 

 on August 5. Yuqing Liu/Tech Policy Press.

Senate Committee Advances Four Bills Aimed at Protecting Children Online

Minister of the Supreme Electoral Court Kassio Nunes Marques attends the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro at the Supreme Court in Brasilia, Brazil, Friday, June 30, 2023. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Brazil's Electoral Court Wants Platform Compliance Plans. Can It Enforce Them?

The OpenAI logo appears on a smartphone screen with the Microsoft logo in the background. (Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via AP)

Why Merger Law Misses Frontier AI's Ownership Structure

Participants, including Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang (front, 2nd from R), Japanese Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa (front, C) and Noetra Corp. President Hironobu Tamba (front, 2nd from L), pose for a photo during an event hosted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo on July 16, 2026. (Kyodo via AP Images)

What Sovereign AI Budgets Actually Buy

Amber Sinha is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press.

The Indian government’s takedown notice to GitHub regarding the BitChat application is a new use of the state’s machinery for online control. The 

, issued by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Ministry of Home Affairs, demanded the removal of three open-source repositories hosting the BitChat application within a rigid three-hour window. While it is tempting to view this incident as a structural shift in how the state regulates technology, a closer examination of India’s administrative history would suggest that it represents a natural, pragmatic progression of the state's systematic use of coercive power online. As communication technologies evolve to circumvent traditional chokepoints, the Indian state is adjusting its regulatory perimeter, applying long-standing administrative strategies to new technological architectures.

To understand the implications of this order, let us look at the technology and the administrative context in which the state operates.

BitChat is a decentralized, open-source messaging 

 that utilizes Bluetooth mesh networking. It allows users to communicate off-grid, relaying encrypted messages from device to device without relying on cellular infrastructure, Wi-Fi, or centralized servers. Because it bypasses traditional network layers, it requires no user registration or phone number verification.

The application recently gained significant traction among demonstrators in New Delhi. When local law enforcement authorities deployed a familiar tactic—imposing localized mobile internet blackouts under the 

Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules

—protesters adapted by utilizing BitChat to maintain coordination and communication. During 

the recent protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)

 at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, demonstrators turned to BitChat to maintain local coordination and real-time communication. Operating on a decentralized, peer-to-peer Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh network, BitChat allowed nearby smartphones to automatically relay encrypted messages directly from device to device without relying on cellular towers, central routing servers, SIM cards, or internet access. By removing the need for phone numbers or registered accounts, the app enabled protesters to organize logistics on the ground and bypass traditional network shutdowns and state surveillance chokepoints.

In its takedown notice, the I4C explicitly cited BitChat's decentralized architecture as the primary justification for the order. The agency argued that the app’s design “significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation by law enforcement agencies.” Because there are no centralized servers to subpoena and no subscriber logs to request, the state found its traditional surveillance and interception mechanisms neutralized.

The Indian state’s foundational objective during periods of civil unrest has always been to maintain a monopoly on information flow and communication. For some years, the most efficient mechanism to achieve this was the suspension of mobile internet. By coercing telecom service providers the government could effectively render a geographic zone offline. But as peer-to-peer applications like BitChat abstract communication away from cellular towers and into localized, device-to-device meshes, the telecom operator ceases to be a comprehensive chokepoint.

Faced with a decentralized protocol, the state moved one step up the technology stack to identify a new intermediary vulnerable to executive control, in this instance, GitHub. By targeting the platform that hosts the source code and installation binaries, the state’s attempt is to restrict the distribution of the tool at its source.

Statutory bypasses and intermediary liability

The legal mechanism employed by the I4C provides the most instructive insight into the state's operational pragmatism. As analysis by civil society groups like the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) have 

, the government did not rely on the standard statutory framework for website blocking.

Under normal circumstances, content blocking is governed by Section 69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, read alongside the 2009 Blocking Rules. Section 69A contains procedural safeguards explicitly upheld by the Supreme Court in 

. These safeguards include a designated review committee, an opportunity for a hearing for the content creator, and the requirement of a written, reasoned order.

Instead, the I4C utilized Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act. Section 79 is primarily designed as a safe harbor provision, granting intermediaries immunity from liability for third-party content. However, sub-clause (3)(b) revokes this immunity if an intermediary fails to expeditiously remove or disable access to unlawful material upon receiving “actual knowledge” via a government or court order. By weaponizing an intermediary liability exemption to effectuate a content takedown, the government circumvented the procedural friction of Section 69A. Section 79(3)(b) does not mandate hearings for developers, nor does it require detailed proportionality assessments by a review committee. It operates on the threat of secondary liability: comply within three hours, or risk losing safe harbor protections in India.

The Indian state frequently seeks the path of least administrative resistance, utilizing broad statutory interpretations to compel platform compliance without inviting judicial scrutiny or procedural delays. As MediaNama 

s, the true danger of this order lies in its potential for replication. The logic used against BitChat applies equally to any permission-less protocol, such as decentralized social networks. If the government can routinely use intermediary liability threats to remove communication tools simply because their architecture limits surveillance, a troubling precedent is set for all decentralized technologies. Addressing these systemic loopholes remains essential to securing any privacy-preserving, decentralized software.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new vision of artificial intelligence, set out in his essay “

,” promises that “superintelligence” will be available to everyone rather than concentrated in the hands of a few powerful institutions. His dream is that each of us will have a personal AI agent that understands our goals, protects our interests, and helps us become healthier, wealthier, more creative, and more capable.

The problem with his “philosophy” is not the promise that everyone should benefit from AI. It is Zuckerberg’s individualistic account of what “everyone” means.

Society appears in his vision as billions of empowered individuals, each equipped with a superintelligent assistant and pursuing personal goals. Give every person enough intelligence, the argument seems to go, and a better society will emerge from the accumulation of individually optimized lives. But the future is also collective. At a time of widespread loneliness and declining trust, we need one another more than ever. The question is not only how AI can make individuals more capable. It is also how AI might help us live together, a question Zuckerberg seems to largely ignore.

Human beings are not merely individuals living alongside one another in pursuit of separate goals. We depend on shared institutions, common resources and relationships built around mutual obligations. We need schools, hospitals, trustworthy information and democratic procedures. And many of the greatest challenges facing us, such as climate change, inequality, pandemics, war and democratic instability. This cannot be solved by giving every individual a more powerful AI assistant. They require collective judgment and collective action. Zuckerberg, however, repeatedly describes AI as a tool of personal empowerment. Your agent will improve your health, career, finances, relationships and hobbies. It will align itself with your values and work continuously on your behalf.

Yet a society in which every person has a system optimized to advance their interests is not necessarily fairer, wiser or more cohesive. It could become a society of technologically fortified individuals, each better equipped to compete, persuade and protect themselves while becoming less dependent on other people.

We can already see the beginnings of this development in social AI, such as ChatGPT, Replika or Claude. People increasingly turn to chatbots for information, advice, emotional support and companionship. These systems are available at any hour, adapt to individual preferences and rarely make demands of their own. They offer relationships on the user’s terms.

My colleagues and I call this development “

” which describes a social shift away from networks of people and toward highly tailored interactions with AI agents. It echoes what the sociologist Barry Wellman called “networked individualism.” The internet loosened people’s dependence on the strong ties of family and neighborhood, replacing them with more dispersed and self-curated networks. AI individualism may take this process a step further by reducing our need even for weak ties, the acquaintances, casual contacts and loose networks that provide information, advice and everyday support. Where a neighbor, colleague or friend of a friend might once have filled that role, a chatbot can now do so on demand, at any hour and without requiring reciprocity.

This shift may bring real benefits. For people who lack access to human support, the isolated, such as overworked or geographically stranded people, an always-available agent can be a lifeline. But what helps an individual is not necessarily what sustains a society. A population increasingly supported by private AI agents rather than by other people may gradually stop creating the connective tissue from which societies are made. For example, 

indicates that more intensive chatbot use has been associated with greater loneliness, emotional dependence, and less human socialization. Also, 

 from Stanford suggests that AI chatbots may worsen loneliness among vulnerable users; those with limited social networks who sought emotional support from AI chatbots reported lower well-being.

Zuckerberg presents personalization as a route to diversity. Because there is no single good life, everyone should be free to direct superintelligence toward the life they choose. But diversity requires more than individually aligned machines. It also requires encounters with people who resist us, disagree with us and make claims on our attention. Human relationships are valuable partly because they cannot be fully customized. They require negotiation, compromise and care. A personal agent designed to serve my goals makes no comparable claim on me. It may simulate care without requiring me to care in return.

Equal access to a personal AI agent is also not the same as equal power. These systems require enormous data centers, energy supplies, computational resources and stores of human-produced data. The companies controlling that infrastructure will still decide which models exist, how they behave, what they cost and which kinds of personalization are possible.

Personalization can therefore create an illusion of decentralization. Power appears to be transferred to individuals while remaining concentrated in the infrastructure on which their agents depend. Zuckerberg proposes allocating computing power through auctions at the lowest available price. But auctions allocate resources according to purchasing power, not human need.

This is where Meta’s recent child-safety case matters. Only days before Zuckerberg published his vision, a New Mexico judge 

 to pay $567 million to set up an abatement fund to address harms from its products. This on top of an earlier $375 million penalty, after a jury found that the company had misled users about the safety of its platforms and enabled the sexual exploitation of young people. The case shows why access to privately provided technologies cannot substitute for public oversight. When companies build systems that mediate relationships, information and care, the question is not simply whether individuals can use them. It is who protects the public when corporate incentives conflict with human needs.

Zuckerberg’s vision risks replacing some forms of social capital, the resources people draw from relationships, with what my colleagues and I call “AI capital”: resources supplied on demand by privately owned systems rather than developed through human reciprocity. AI capital may be faster and more convenient. But it is not necessarily an adequate substitute for what it replaces.

Zuckerberg is right to reject a single, centralized superintelligence. Such a system would create extraordinary possibilities for authoritarian control. And he does nod to “democratic values” and “democratic governing institutions.” But his alternative—billions of personalized agents pursuing private goals while depending on infrastructure controlled by a handful of companies—carries another danger. It mistakes the absence of a single center of control for the presence of genuine democracy.

A genuinely democratic AI future must ask a different set of questions. Which forms of artificial intelligence should be treated as public goods? Which decisions should remain subject to democratic deliberation rather than personal optimization? How can AI strengthen schools, public health systems and local communities instead of encouraging people to retreat into private systems of assistance?

Between centralized control and technological individualism lies democracy: the difficult practice of deciding together what we owe one another and what kind of future we want to share. The future should indeed be for everyone. But it cannot be built around billions of private assistants serving private ends. It will require AI that serves public purposes, institutions capable of holding its creators accountable, and a public willing to build the future together.

appearing on Tech Policy Press in 2026. More from the series

Why do we fall for hype, again and again?

 explanations. We are suckers for the charisma of the huckster. We fear, contextually and primordially, being left behind or left out. We each yearn to believe our future will be better. A lot can also be attributed to cynical opportunism. We hope that by riding the wave of hype we can surf to success. Maybe if we mimic the hyperbolic slop we hear gushing from our silicon overlords, it might make us sound adroit and better equip us to land deals, jobs and opportunities. We invest early, literally and metaphorically, hoping to sell our own speculation to a greater fool.

But in this short essay I want to propose another more theoretical sociological explanation. While hype may consist of lies, exaggeration and bombast, it also appeals to some aspect of each of us that yearns and deserves to 

 of figures Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos profit by building elaborate fantasy worlds, seducing us to believe that they are visionary saviors of humanity working to take us to the stars or to ever greater horizons of human achievement. I am speaking of something deeper and more profound, and frankly quite tragic.

What animates hype, what gives it its attractive spark, is the way it touches (and manipulates) our estranged power as part of a cooperative, storytelling species.

To explain, let me speak for a moment about what makes scams work.

There are, of course, “brute force” scams, the kind that are the equivalent of a mugging, exploiting our shock. Someone calls you claiming to be the tax authority and demands money. Or they tell you your child is in hospital and needs a immediate cash for a transfusion.

: someone entraps you in a fantasy. This kind of scam includes “

,” where a scammer uses a dating website to ensnare someone looking for love and companionship, only to rob them.

What makes catfishers so effective is neither the beautiful images or words of love they send their prey nor the plausibility of the sob story that prevents them meeting in person (a visa problem, a medical emergency, a debt. “Can I send you money?” the target volunteers). What really makes these scams work is the way the story they tell embraces and validates the scammed person.

On such reality TV programs, victims of scams often shamefully confess that the clues were there all along and that the scam was, in hindsight, blindingly obvious. But the victim was enraptured and, like anyone in the grips of infatuation, they ignored the inconvenient evidence. What so captivated them was not the persona of the scammer so much as the character they invited the scammed to play. The scammer and their target, like any two lovers, build a world together with words. The sophisticated scammer is adept at shaping that world so it validates and affirms the scammed 

: kind, romantic, generous, gallant, selfless, trusting and desirable. The scammed individual does not fall in love with the scammer’s fabricated persona, but their own. They help build the fantasy world that now entraps them.

Hence the curious but not uncommon phenomenon of a scammed person seeking out their scammer even 

 the robbery and betrayal has been revealed. They want to regain access to the person even though they know they were caught in a predatory relationship. They want to return to the storyworld which they and the scammer created together, albeit with very different motivations and consequences.

We are a worldbuilding species, and not only in the material sense that we make tools that transform the world that transforms us. We also change the world with words. The Caribbean radical thinker Sylvia Wynter speaks of us as 

, a storytelling animal, and meditates on the profound power we wield through the stories we tell. Her primary concern is how stories about race fundamentally reshape a material world built on anti-Blackness. The transatlantic slave trade and the world it made was justified and normalized by a series of interconnected stories about race, value and fitness. Edward Said’s famous study of 

 explores how a set of inaccurate stories about an imagined category called, by Westerners, “The Orient” came to be a key aspect of how imperialism was executed in those regions. In both cases, what is key is that such stories emerge asymmetrically and abusively from dominant power relations, and in turn helped to reshape and reproduce those power relations.

As a cooperative species, we create the world anew, in part, through the stories we tell, though we often take them for natural, normal and inevitable. True: in some societies some elites declare the monopoly on authoritative stories, for example the priestly caste in a theocracy. But every story, like every scam, is actually a collaboration. We make stories, stories make us, and we make the world, but not necessarily in circumstances of our choosing.

This has something to do with Marx’s famous theory of commodity 

, which is not, as it is commonly presented, merely an account of how individuals come to fall in love with things. It is, more profoundly, a 

” as collaborative worldmakers. When we behold a commodity like a smartphone, we fail to see it for what it is: the product of millions of hands, working together, but not always under the circumstances of their choosing or in any way democratically. All are subject to the “mute compulsion” of money. Our hands, too, are part of that protean totality of cooperative potential from which the smartphone is a small crystallization. What we hold in our hands is a fragment of our own sublime and alienated 

 to imaginatively (re)make the world. The story that it is the gift of Steve Job’s creative genius is a co-option of the imagination that, combined with many other such stories, traps us in among the most monstrous scams in the history of our species: capitalist wage relations as such.

If we bring Marx and Wynter’s approaches together, we might recognize that the world we are always in the process of remaking is 

. How we imagine the world, through stories and words, enables certain forms of collaborative activity (labour); that labor creates a material world that shapes the imagination. This process, on both material and imaginative sides of the coin, is not equal or egalitarian, but dominated by the powerful, whose power stems from their ability to shape the imagination and command our labor. It will not be enough to “seize the means of production” without also changing the way we imagine; but the way we imagine emerges from our material realities, and it is only in moments of material rebellion, resistance and refusal that the truly 

Hype, like a catfishing scam, is a form of asymmetrical predatory storytelling. It requires both the hyper and the public to buy in, but they are far from equally powerful and suffer vastly different consequences. One of the reasons hype is so successful is it offers the chance for a great many opportunistic individuals to become a hyper, each hoping to benefit from a greater fool, increasing the magnetism of the story.

But all hype carries encrypted within it a tantalizing fragment of our estranged collective world-making power. Under the din of fanfare, hype whispers to us: 

the world can be different, the future can be otherwise, belief can change reality

. And it’s true, but for all the wrong reasons. Beyond its particular rhetoric or claims, beyond the product or dream it is selling, what energizes hype—like a tiny piece of uranium in a huge nuclear reactor—is the way it refracts, in a perverted form, our collective capacity to change the world with words and stories, the potential of the imagination as a collaborative but alienated power. Another world is possible, we’re creating it all the time.

The problem is that, like the world promised by the catfisher which may indeed be based on the promise of genuine human connection, the story spun by hype is usually predatory. It does not actually make new worlds possible, it closes down possible futures by channeling our profound power of collective world-making into stupid projects that will be controlled by and enrich the ruling class who will exploit, abandon and abuse us. Believing the hype, we will invest our money, time, political will or simply our complacency in building a world that works against our collective interests, perhaps in the hopes that we ourselves may benefit or be spared the worst impacts. But for all it may claim to boldly open the door to the future, hype, like a catfishing scam that targets the lonely, preys on the tragic narcissism that is born of our estrangement from our species-being.

What does this mean for policymakers and others concerned with the role of hype in driving forward reckless speculative tech capitalism? I will confine myself to the following caution.

It can be tempting to imagine that, in the face of hype’s ability to hijack our optimism and beguile our judgment, we must encourage more sober, evidence-based, prudent realism. But this is the wrong impulse. Hype preys on us because we know something is profoundly, existentially wrong with this world and we all want change and know it to be urgent.

The problem is not our occasional irrational exuberance but a system that allows economic predators to prey on it. We are ecstatic, imaginative animals. We yearn to fall into our own narrative traps. We will always fall in love foolishly, even in utopia.

Rather than calling for everyone to calm down and be reasonable, we are better served by asking: to what other, better, more humane and generative purposes might our yearnings for change be put? How might we direct these towards the promise of a fundamental and radical transformation of the material economy? What other stories can we tell about what we, collectively, are capable of such that our radical capacities call themselves into being?

To believe the hype is, in a way, to believe in ourselves. How could we come to believe in our collective power to change the world in a way that proliferates our potential?

The law enforcement crackdown on scam compounds across Southeast Asia continues, but there are few signs that illicit activities are slowing down. Scam compounds are typically run by organized criminal gangs engaged in fraudulent operations at industrial scale. Trafficked compound workers 

 to work “up to 19 hours” per day defrauding victims around the world through romance and cryptocurrency investment scams. They are imprisoned in overcrowded living conditions with inadequate food and medical care.

Mechelle Moore, CEO of the countertrafficking organization 

, can see new scam compounds being constructed over the Thai border in Myanmar, even as newer compounds move further inland. Moore runs one of the few frontline non-profits aiding human trafficking survivors in the Northwest region of Thailand. Many of Moore’s clients are survivors of scam compounds. Global Alms supports the Thai government and 

 an emergency response team, a 24/7 hotline for reporting cases of human trafficking and gender-based violence, an emergency shelter, and aftercare services. Nevertheless, Moore and 

other organizations combating scam compounds

 frozen last year, making it more difficult to fund their counter-trafficking operations.

“At first we were unsure of the magnitude of the problem,” Moore recalled during an interview. In 2022, Global Alms experienced a significant increase in male trafficking victims coming out of scam compounds. The organization’s services were once predominately geared toward women, but it has expanded its services to support men, women, and children. Victims have been recorded coming from “78 nations across the globe.” “The only region we really haven't had victims coming out of Myanmar is the Pacific Islands,” Moore relayed.

A 2026 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 

 stated that despite growing attention to scam compounds, they are “still in place,” and arguably more “intertwined within the political economies” of Southeast Asia. There 

 estimates that “hundreds of thousands of people are believed to be trapped in forced labor” in the region. A recent OHCHR 

 attested to “300,000 people originating from 66 countries” in the scam workforce.

Last October, the Myanmar junta reportedly shut down a major Myanmar scam compound called KK Park. However, The 

 that experts concluded “the crackdown was performative.” Sandy Lin, a KK Park worker, told the 

that the “company” running the compound had already rented a new building in nearby Myawaddy and it planned to relocate workers who didn’t want to flee. Meanwhile, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states have announced 

 “regional action” through anti-online scam working groups, and a 2025 

 promised coordination with banking authorities, “timely sharing of information” on cyber incident responses, and digital literacy initiatives to combat scams.

The US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets (OFAC) 

 on transnational criminal organizations, such as the Prince Holding Group, that invest in scam compounds and “front companies,” coordinating with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Japan’s National Police Agency. In June 2026, OFAC 

 to target Hu Xiaowei, Prince Group’s “second-in-command.” The European Council also placed restrictive measures against the Prince Group, the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) in Myanmar, and Jin Bei Group in Cambodia, along with other individuals who 

 scam centers in Southeast Asia. In early 2026, the US Scam Center Strike Force 

 FBI agents to work with Thai authorities to review “thousands of mobile devices” seized from the shuttered Shunda scam compound in Myanmar. The Strike Force also 

 a “first-of-its-kind” seizure of a Telegram channel used to post fake recruiter jobs to traffic workers into Cambodian compounds.

Despite crackdowns and sanctions, transnational crime syndicates appear to either relocate or build new scam compounds elsewhere in the region. Typically, compounds 

 in remote border regions and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), which make them difficult to permanently shut down, even as regional and global interventions are carried out. Australia’s

 “exponentially” and newer ones are being moved away from “population centers” and being built to 

 regular apartments, which are harder to detect. Jason Tower, the senior expert with Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), 

 ABC News “Scamming 2.0” is moving further from the Thai border.

 about “corruption” being “deeply entrenched in the context of these lucrative operations.” Criminal syndicates are allegedly benefiting from collusion with politicians and government officials that further enables regional scam operations. Scam compound victims 

 OHCHR they have seen compound operators paying money to officials, and that operators have also been notified about law enforcement raids “in advance.” Other observers speaking to the Thai news site 

 any scam “kingpins” detained in ongoing operations and believe that Myanmar’s raids on scam hubs are “aimed at misleading the international community” to think they are fighting the scam industry. GI-TOC has 

 less attention should be paid to the individual scams being carried out by a scam center, and more research is needed on the “ecosystem” that enables compounds to operate.

Another force multiplier is the recent adoption of AI tools within scam compounds. In interviews conducted with the Associated Press and C4ADS, it was revealed 

 scammers were able to incorporate the use of chatbots, smart translation services, and “AI powered monitoring tools” to “control a workforce of trafficking victims” by tracking their behaviors. Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, a trafficking victim and former scam compound worker, relayed to the AP that he used AI models to increase the “speed and scale” to target victims. Rather than attack several victims at a time, Koorimannil “

Moore, who has served as CEO of Global Alms for over a decade, says it is a myth that only low-income people are trafficked. She described working with trafficking victims who have “university degrees, masters [...] and a few that have had doctorates.” One of Global Alms’ youngest trafficking victims was around fourteen years old, and one of the oldest was 54 years old. On the receiving end of a scam, Moore also pointed out that “everybody has the ability to be scammed, it’s just a matter of the perfect script.”

With no immediate signs that the scam industry will slow down in Southeast Asia or beyond, OHCHR 

 for a “human rights-based response to trafficking” that includes much more robust prevention measures than what currently exists. The OHCHR also sees a greater need for regional cooperation between digital platforms, financial institutions, law enforcement agencies, and civil society actors. Without a more coordinated effort, trafficked workers who carry out fraud and the victims being defrauded will continue to suffer in a destructive cycle of abuse.

Police artificial intelligence technology wearing blue vest outfit isolated digital collage. Cop with vintage tv for head with AI text.

Will AI Sycophancy Contaminate Law Enforcement?

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham is shown the driver's area on a FirstGroup bus at the bus station during a visit to Bath, England, Wednesday July 22, 2026. (Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP)

Burnham's First Week Redraws the Map of UK Tech Governance

Can the Pall Mall Process Curb Spyware Abuse?

A group of shareholders of Samsung Electronics Co. hold a rally criticizing a tentative wage agreement struck between the company and its labor union near the home of Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, May 21, 2026. The letters read "Unjustified transfer strike." (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Workers in Asia Are Fighting for Protections as AI Threatens Jobs

Tech Policy Press - Technology and Democracy

Tech Policy Press is tracking laws and regulations, along with government investigations and litigation, that will shape the rules and accountability for tech companies.

Latest

Podcast

Recent

Our content delivered to your inbox

Thank you!

Around the globe