Chasing Black Money: South–South Migration, Global Inequality, and Nested Exploitation in the Telecom Scam Industry

• In Event: Recalibrating Justice: Risk, Reform, and Reentry

Abstract

This paper draws on our ethnographic research in Myanmar’s telecom scam industry to examine how South–South migrants from countries like India and the Philippines become core labor in a global “black money” circuit. It reveals stratified inequalities among Global South nations under neoliberalism, challenging North–South exploitation models. Migrants flow “in reverse” into peripheral regions like northern Myanmar, forming a distorted chain of South–South dependency. Their migration is shaped by three layers of structural violence: (1) economic stagnation and gig precarity at home; (2) recruitment via platforms like TikTok that transform survival needs into exploitable voluntarism; (3) Global North financial systems laundering scam profits, legitimizing illicit capital. The study critiques anti-scam narratives on Telegram that frame migrants as greedy while obscuring the structural complicity of platform capitalism and state failure. Introducing the concept of nested exploitation, the paper argues that scam economies mirror globalization’s darkest logics, where South–South migrants are both victims and reproducers of global inequality.

Authors

• Jingjia Xiao, University of California, San Diego

• Hua Zhong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Qing Xiao, Carnegie Mellon University