Authorities in Sri Lanka have failed to successfully prosecute a single transnational cyber scam case, police have said, despite more than a thousand arrests so far this year of suspected members of Asian fraud syndicates who have surged into the South Asian country.
The admission comes as experts warn the island nation is becoming a destination of choice for thousands of scam workers fleeing Southeast Asian nations such as Cambodia, which had in recent years become home to massive scam compounds, many of them reliant on trafficked workers.
Recently crackdowns in scam centers in Southeast Asia have driven mostly Chinese-origin scam syndicates to set up shop in vulnerable states from Madagascar to Papua New Guinea.
Among the countries of South Asia, Sri Lanka stands out for being at “serious risk of becoming a hub for industrial-scale cyber scams,” the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) said last month.
From January until September, Sri Lankan police have conducted raids on 27 suspected scam compounds around the country and arrested 1093 people, Sri Lankan police spokesman Fredrick Wootler told OCCRP and Sri Lanka’s The Sunday Times.
The figure represents a dramatic rise from 2025, when just 26 people were arrested, Wootler said. An additional 573 suspected scammers were arrested the year prior.
Despite the well-publicized arrests, “we have not had a successful prosecution yet” of anyone suspected of using Sri Lanka as a base for scamming victims abroad, Wootler said.
The issue, Wootler explained, is that Sri Lanka’s current computer crime law, which dates from 2007, only allows cases to be opened on the basis of a complaint from a victim. Since the majority of those getting scammed live abroad, few complaints have been received.
Instead, he added, the vast majority of suspected scammers are being charged for visa violations and being removed from the country.
“The current government is …very much keen to see that this type of criminal networks [must] be taken away from Sri Lanka,” Wootler said.
The head of Sri Lanka’s police cyber crime unit, Chandima Arumapperuma, told reporters that the majority of suspects arrested so far carry passports from Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, India, and Indonesia. Many come with travel records showing they had previously been in Cambodia or Myanmar, both well-known scam hubs, she added.
Efforts to interview suspects are hampered by language barriers while devices are often encrypted and difficult to analyse, Arumapperuma added.
“The volume of devices we find in each raid is so high, usually about 200 phones and laptops, and we simply do not have the resources to process all of them,” she said.
Adding to the difficulty, experts say, is another factor: Sri Lanka is desperate for foreign exchange. The tourism-dependent country offers visa-free travel to passport holders from 40 countries, including China. It has also opened up investment for online gambling and brick-and-mortar casinos, and has opened up a “special economic zone,” known as Colombo Port City, to attract investors in the digital economy sector.
“Online gambling and offshore gambling operate in legal gray areas in Sri Lanka. The country has an economically distressed project, the Colombo Port City. And then it has a mechanism for bringing large numbers of foreigners,” said Jason Tower, a transnational crime expert at GI-TOC.
In contrast to Southeast Asian scam hubs, where compounds have operated out in public view with protection from politicians and armed groups, Sri Lanka’s scam industry remains clandestine. But failure to tackle these networks could allow the industry to grow to a scale at which criminals become a force powerful enough to defy the government, Tower warned.
"The imagination is the limit. Going from what's hidden and clandestine to what is open and obvious, “ he said.
“Right now Sri Lanka's sort of on the threshold."
