In July, Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and State Security Service shut down two fraudulent call centers in Tashkent staffed by 131 people, eight of them foreign nationals. The employees spent their days calling residents of Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, and Denmark, posing as investment traders and steering them into cryptocurrency schemes that promised returns of up to 70 percent a month. 

The operations were organized like a company. Managers, organizers, team leaders, and operators filled a defined hierarchy. Recruiters had hired young, university-educated Uzbeks for their foreign-language skills. Staff used aliases, trained in operational secrecy, and worked behind guarded doors. During the raids, police seized more than 300 phones and over a hundred computers, detained 20 people — including two alleged ringleaders, a foreign national, and an Uzbek partner — and continued investigating another 111. 

Evolution of scam schemes 

Scam operations run from Central Asian soil, however, are not new, and their reach has been widening outward for years. In cases Uzbekistan security services uncovered in February 2025 and again in February early 2026, scam groups based in Fergana and Tashkent bought databases of Russian consumers who had purchased medicines and dietary supplements and then called them, posing as officials offering “compensation” for defective products and collecting “processing fees” that then disappeared. In January 2025, Kazakhstan uncovered a comparable operation in Almaty, where a Russian organizer employed two dozen local staff to pitch cryptocurrency investments to targets in neighboring countries before cutting contact once the transfers cleared. 

What makes the region attractive to the people who run these operations is an interesting combination of factors: a large pool of educated, multilingual young people willing to take call-center work, inexpensive connectivity, and enforcement systems still catching up to transnational cybercrime. The technical barrier is also low. Operators route their calls through SIM-boxes — devices loaded with dozens of SIM cards that make a call placed from abroad appear on the victim’s screen as a local number. 

The July operations show greater sophistication than these earlier schemes: pitches delivered in fluent English, aimed at prospective investors in richer Western markets, and supported by phishing sites built to mimic real trading platforms. On that evidence, the region’s scam economy is moving from domestic and regional reach toward a node in the global fraud market. 

Central Asians as targets 

The same conditions that let scammers operate from the region also leave its own citizens exposed to them. Kazakhstan logged more than 16,000 internet-fraud cases in the first eight months of 2025 alone. Most began with persuasion rather than hacking, with a caller impersonating a bank-security officer or a police investigator, talking the target into transferring money or installing an app. 

Much of the scam activity aimed at Kazakhstan’s citizens originates outside the country. Over the past year, Kazakh prosecutors have worked with counterparts in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, and Belarus to break up scam centers abroad that existed specifically to defraud Kazakhstan citizens, including a call center in Odessa dismantled in June 2026 that had reportedly taken more than 85 million tenge ($181,000) from over 100 victims. To counter these calls, Kazakhstan built an “anti-call-center” in Astana that intercepts suspicious foreign numbers before they reach their targets; authorities separately report blocking nearly 70 million fraudulent calls between 2022 and 2025 and seizing tens of thousands of unregistered SIM cards. 

Uzbekistan carries its own domestic burden. Some schemes turn on malicious phone apps: a victim is persuaded to install what looks like a legitimate program, which then harvests the banking details stored on the device and lets the operators drain the account. One such case in the Navoi region cost 21 people 336 million soms (about $28,200). Others are simpler, like the fake government-benefits website that took more than a billion som (about $84,000) from over 450 people this summer by promising state payments that never came. In their methods, these operations track global scam trends: they rely on purchased databases of stolen personal data to choose targets, spoofed numbers to disguise the source of a call, and ready-made scripts that guide operators through each manipulation. 

Trafficked into the trade 

There is a third position Central Asians occupy in this economy: as trafficked labor inside the scam compounds of Southeast Asia. Across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, established complexes, often run by ethnic militias in partnership with Chinese criminal networks, operate online fraud at industrial scale, staffed heavily by people who answered social media advertisements for well-paid jobs in IT, modeling, or tourism. The recruits fly to Thailand expecting a job; on arrival their passports are taken and they are moved across the border into guarded compounds, where they are made to run romance and investment scams. Refusal or weak “performance” brings threats, beatings, or ransom demands relayed to families back home. 

Central Asians are among them. In December 2025, citizens of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan were freed from Myanmar after a group managed to reach Uzbekistan’s consulate in Bangkok and report that they were being held and forced to make fraudulent calls. Kazakhstan has brought home about 50 citizens from Myanmar’s scam centers over recent years, with a handful more in 2026. Because Kyrgyzstan maintains no diplomatic mission in Thailand, Kyrgyzstan’s citizens had to be extracted by diplomats from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan acting on Bishkek’s behalf.  

Those cases are a fraction of the whole. Myanmar’s authorities estimate that up to 100,000 people work in the country’s scam centers, which by U.S. estimates defrauded American victims of some $7.2 billion in 2025. The compounds have proven able to relocate and re-staff faster than they can be raided, many of them moving deeper inland beyond easy reach; a rights group reported in mid-2026 that more than 5,000 people remained trapped near the Thai border, even after a large multinational crackdown the year before. In that context, the number of repatriated Central Asians is less a measure of the problem’s scale than of how few cases ever surface. 

A common thread 

The three positions that Central Asia holds – host of scam centers aimed at the West, target of operations run from throughout the CIS, and source of trafficked labor for compounds in Southeast Asia – share a single root. In each, the region's young, educated, multilingual, and tech-savvy workers are the raw material. Where skilled work is scarce and qualifications go unused, a call-center job that turns out to be criminal or a well-paid posting overseas that turns out to be a trafficking trap finds willing takers. 

On the other side of the phone, the schemes exploit a hunger for quick returns and thin financial and scam literacy. Raising awareness and educating the public would help people recognize the warning signs before they fall for the scams. And yet, the schemes keep advancing, moving from phone calls to crypto pitches to malicious apps, which makes them harder and harder to spot and address on the policy level.  

That sophistication raises the bar for law enforcement. Catching crypto- and app-based fraud takes technical capacity that agencies across the region are still building. And because these networks are transnational by design, with operators and victims located in different jurisdictions, no government can detect and dismantle them alone. The value of cross-border security cooperation is clearly visible in these recent cases, demonstrating what that joint response looks like, and how much more of it the scale of the problem will require.