At midnight on Tuesday, armed police burst into a soundproofed office in the southern Chinese city of Nanning, arresting about 100 people allegedly carrying out employment and shopping scams on social media. It was just the latest raid targeting scam syndicates in China, where online crime involving cross-border operations is on the rise, according to Ministry of Public Security data. Experts say those international networks are a problem for Chinese investigators, and they need to do more to collaborate with overseas counterparts to tackle crimes like scams, as well as trafficking of humans and illegal drugs. “The Ministry of Public Security can do a lot to suppress narcotics, human trafficking and cybercrime, but unless they work with the rest of the world, they are going to get displacement effects,” said Roderic Broadhurst, emeritus professor in criminology at the Australian National University. Scams have become a major headache for Chinese law enforcement – in 2020, about 40 per cent of criminal cases involved scams, according to the public security ministry. In the past five years, some 1.2 million telecoms fraud cases were busted, with 1.3 million suspects arrested. New legislation targeting phone and online fraud has been drafted to tackle the problem and was reviewed by lawmakers in October. Online scams and other crimes such as human trafficking and the illegal drugs trade often involve people operating outside China – particularly in less developed countries where there might be a lower risk of detection – and funds being sent across borders. This makes prosecution an international matter, as Chinese police have to work with their counterparts elsewhere to locate suspects and recover funds. While there is no international treaty governing judicial cooperation, the Budapest Convention provides guidelines on global cooperation against cybercrime – but China is not a signatory. Still, the public security ministry says it broke up around 4,100 cross-border criminal syndicates from 2017 to 2021, taking aim at channels for illegal funds transfers and professional criminal groups. It arrested around 4,600 suspects from 120 locations around the world between 2019 and 2021. Sara Zhong, an associate professor in sociology at Chinese University of Hong Kong, said many scam syndicates employ people from rural China to work in Southeast Asian nations where governance is weaker. She said low-level scammers were likely to be victims of fake job ads themselves. How Chinese forced to run online scams in Cambodia can pay with their lives But China’s tough pandemic controls may have reduced fraud activity in the country as low-level scammers returned home and then could not get back to the Southeast Asian nations where they had been working for syndicates. Zhong said the higher risk of identity detection in China could have deterred people from continuing these scams on a large scale from within the country. In 2021 alone, the public security ministry’s National Anti-Fraud Centre halted 329 billion yuan (US$49.2 billion) worth of fraud payments, involving some 2.89 million victims. The ministry said it handled more than 418,000 cases of economic crime that year, preventing 2.76 billion yuan in losses. But both Zhong and Broadhurst agreed that recovering embezzled funds across borders is extremely difficult for law enforcement agencies globally, and working with other countries is crucial for any chance of success. Human trafficking has also been a big issue in China in recent months, after a woman was found chained up in a hut in the Jiangsu city of Xuzhou in January – a case that caused a national outcry. Zhong said this was about doing more to help existing victims in China, noting that human trafficking cases had declined in the past two decades. According to the public security ministry, human trafficking cases have fallen by 86.2 per cent since 2013, with less than 20 cases of child kidnapping last year. Zhong said human trafficking in China now involved less kidnapping but more deception to bring women into the country as brides. “About half of the existing cases are actually related to women in Southeast Asian countries – like Myanmar and Vietnam. Those cases are not exactly human trafficking as they use a cover like a matchmaker or job agency,” Zhong said. “Of course the cheating is there, but there’s a certain level of agreement as the girls’ families signed an agreement and the agencies were paid,” she said. “When the women arrive … in China, they find that it’s totally different [from what they were expecting].” Broadhurst said China still had a long way to go on regional and international criminal justice collaboration. “We can only hope that these collaborative efforts – and the credibility of these efforts – continue to improve, but they’ve got headwinds like the civil war in Myanmar,” he said. Politics can also get in the way, as exchanging intelligence on criminal justice operations requires trust between countries. Some may be reluctant to pass on sensitive information out of sovereignty concerns, while unstable internal politics can also hamper effective cooperation, according to Broadhurst. “The challenge now for the Ministry of Public Security is whether it can really back up its capacity to work effectively with other policing agencies and vice versa,” he said. “If people don’t trust the other agency, it’s not going to be possible.”