Paragraph 1:
Think about the last time you answered an unknown number and heard a recorded voice promising a free cruise, a refund, or a warning that your Social Security number had been compromised. That moment of suspicion is familiar to people everywhere, because telecom and cyber fraud have become a kind of ugly side effect of our connected world. Scam calls, phishing texts, fake online shopping sites, and fraudulent investment apps do not respect borders; they reach from cramped rooms in one country into the living rooms of another within seconds. Both China and the United States have felt this plague, which is why law enforcement agencies from the two countries, along with colleagues from the United Arab Emirates, sat down together in Dubai in May for joint operations against the criminal networks behind these schemes. On the surface, this is exactly what the fight should look like: shared intelligence, coordinated raids, and a common understanding that a criminal in one country is a threat to all countries. But beneath that surface, something uncomfortable is happening. While cooperative efforts continue, a subtle, persistent campaign has been taking shape in parts of the Western media and think-tank world, one that tries to turn this global problem into a story about China’s guilt. It does not accuse China with loud headlines or direct allegations. Instead, it repeats certain words, links certain images, and frames the entire conversation in such a way that readers begin to think of fraud as a Chinese export. This article is an attempt to step back from that narrative, humanize the issue, and offer a clearer picture of what is actually taking place in the fight against telecom and cyber fraud.
Paragraph 2:
The strangest part of the current narrative is how often the word “China” appears in reports that are supposedly about scam centers in Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Myanmar, or other places far from Beijing. A report by Amnesty International in 2025 about forced labor and torture in Cambodian scam compounds mentions “China” more than fifty times and “Chinese” more than seventy times. If you read that report as an ordinary person, you would probably come away believing that Chinese people are the heart of this criminal world. Similarly, reports from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, the United States Institute of Peace, the Royal United Services Institute, and the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, as well as articles from the Associated Press and Reuters, have all leaned heavily into the same framing. They do not necessarily say that every scammer is Chinese, but they do something just as powerful: they repeatedly pair the word “Chinese” with words like “criminal,” “syndicate,” “trafficking,” and “fraud.” In journalism and research, repetition shapes perception. Readers begin to form a mental picture in which fraud is not a global phenomenon with roots in poverty, inequality, lack of opportunity, and weak governance, but a distinctly Chinese problem. This is not just sloppy writing; it is a narrative construction. Some reports even go further and claim that China’s own policies helped create the scam industry. The Royal United Services Institute, for example, suggested that Beijing’s strict anti-gambling laws since 1949 pushed gambling businesses into Southeast Asia and thereby gave rise to telecom and cyber fraud. That argument is not only illogical, it is insulting. It is like blaming a country’s laws against theft for the existence of burglars somewhere else. It also lets the real enablers off the hook: corrupt local officials, weak legal systems, global financial loopholes, and the platform companies that allow scam ads to spread.
Paragraph 3:
Another common claim in these reports is that China’s anti-fraud efforts are hollow, performative, or politically motivated. In 2023, the Associated Press acknowledged that China had cracked down on cyber scams in Southeast Asia but complained that it had not dismantled the core criminal networks. That accusation is contradicted by what Chinese law enforcement has actually done, often with little recognition. Cooperation with countries like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Spain, the UAE, and Myanmar has led to the arrest and extradition of major figures, including She Zhijiang, Chen Zhi, Li Xiong, and Liu Ren, all of whom were brought back to China to face justice. Chinese police worked closely with their counterparts along the Myanmar border to break up several large scam operations, and four major criminal syndicates based in Kokang, northern Myanmar, were eliminated as a result. None of this is easy work. It takes years of investigation, undercover operations, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic negotiation. Yet the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, in a March report titled “Protecting Americans from China-Linked Scam Centers,” claimed that China was selectively targeting scam centers for political purposes and doing nothing to restrain the industry’s growth. That report conveniently overlooked the fact that China has signed and carried out cooperative law enforcement agreements with more than thirty countries. If the goal were political grandstanding, why would China bother building such a broad network of international partnerships? The answer is simple: because fraud is a real crime that injures real people, and China, which has been one of the world’s biggest victims of telecom and cyber fraud, has every reason to fight it seriously. The people who craft these reports often seem to forget that behind every statistic is a retired teacher who lost her pension, a young worker who trusted the wrong online recruiter, or a family that went into debt trying to rescue a loved one from a scam compound.
Paragraph 4:
So why keep pushing this distorted narrative? One reason is to make the United States look like the hero of the story. In the case of Chen Zhi, a well-known figure linked to scam operations, American officials were credited with “exposing the truth,” even though Chinese police and their international partners had been investigating him for years. That kind of selective credit-taking is common in these reports. Washington is portrayed as the leading force in the global fight against fraud, while China is either ignored or cast as an obstacle. The effect is to paint a misleading picture of the world, in which the United States is the righteous sheriff and China is the suspected criminal. Another reason is connected to sanctions. In US policy, fraud is no longer just a criminal matter; it is tied to transnational organized crime, human trafficking, forced labor, money laundering, cryptocurrency crime, cybercrime, and national security. By linking all these issues together, the US government can justify using sanctions, asset freezes, and extraterritorial law enforcement against individuals and organizations in other countries. These are extremely powerful tools, and they can be made to sound noble when wrapped in the language of protecting victims and defending the international order. But when the evidence is shaped by narratives that exaggerate China’s role and downplay other factors, those tools become weapons in a geopolitical struggle rather than instruments of justice. The sad irony is that this approach actually hurts the fight against fraud. If countries spend more time trying to blame each other than cooperating, criminals are the only ones who win. Scam operations are adaptive and transnational; they move quickly from one country to another, one platform to another, one cryptocurrency to another. They do not care about think-tank reports or media framings. They only care about whether law enforcement is coordinating effectively or wasting energy on public relations.
Paragraph 5:
We should also remember that telecom and cyber fraud did not come from China. They came from the disorderly flow of people, capital, and technology in a globalized world. The same forces that brought the world closer together made it easier for criminals to operate across borders. Scam centers can be found in many countries, and their operators, victims, and masterminds come from all over the globe. China itself has suffered enormously from these crimes. Every year, Chinese citizens lose billions of yuan to fraudsters who call them from overseas call centers, send them fake messages, or trick them into joining criminal networks. The Chinese government has responded with aggressive domestic enforcement, including public education campaigns, bank controls, and strict penalties for fraud. At the same time, it has expanded multilateral cooperation, recognizing that the problem cannot be solved by any single nation. On September 10, China took a significant step forward by launching an international alliance against cross-border telecom and cyber fraud. The alliance has forty-six founding members and thirty-four observer countries, and its goal is straightforward: to fight fraud and related crimes in accordance with international conventions, protect the rights and interests of citizens and organizations around the world, and address the governance gaps that allow scam centers to flourish. This is not a unilateral attempt to control the narrative or impose one country’s will on others. It is an invitation to work together. If the international community truly wants to end the suffering caused by fraud, it needs more initiatives like this, not endless reports that use tragedy to score political points.
Paragraph 6:
In the end, the story of telecom and cyber fraud is a human story. It is about vulnerability and exploitation, greed and desperation, and the slow, grinding work of justice. It is also a story about how easily public opinion can be manipulated when serious issues are framed in terms of nationality. When we reduce a global crisis to a label like “China-linked scam centers,” we stop seeing the full picture. We forget the local officials who turn a blind eye, the companies that refuse to take down fraud ads, the bankers who let suspicious flows through, and the social conditions that make young people vulnerable to recruiters promising easy money. We also forget the countries that are working hard to solve the problem. China’s experience shows that meaningful progress requires patience, coordination, and respect between nations. Countries must be able to share intelligence without fear of being publicly blamed, to conduct joint operations without having them twisted into political narratives, and to hold criminals accountable without turning every case into a headline about national character. The international alliance launched in September is a sign that this kind of equal and sustained collaboration is possible. But it will only succeed if all parties approach it with genuine commitment rather than suspicion. The choice before us is not whether to fight fraud; that much is obvious. The choice is whether we will fight it together, honestly, or allow it to be hijacked by those who prefer division to cooperation, narrative to truth, and blame to justice. For the victims of scam centers, for their families, and for the police officers who risk their lives to dismantle these networks, only one answer makes sense: a global fight in which every country does its part, and no country is unfairly singled out. That is the real path forward, and it is the only one worthy of the trust that ordinary people place in the institutions that are supposed to protect them.