• The influence it licenses and the fraud it disowns

On 13 April 2023, a notice appeared in Mandarin on China’s Consular Service website, posted by the embassy in Colombo. 

It recorded that several Chinese citizens, lured by ‘high-salary’ recruitment advertisements, had travelled to Sri Lanka, been cut off from their families, and then forced into telecom fraud. 

Those who failed to meet targets or tried to leave were beaten. The embassy coordinated with Sri Lankan Police, who rescued 13 trapped citizens and arrested key members of the fraud group, including suspects held over illegal injury and unlawful detention.

Three years on, nobody writing about cyberscams in Sri Lanka appears to have read it.

Reporting in The Sunday Morning on 31 May offers the most detailed public account I’ve read so far of what has become a sprawling enforcement crisis. Around 800 foreign nationals were arrested between January and late May this year, nearly double the 430 recorded across the whole of 2024.

Raids in Cinnamon Gardens, Chilaw, Koswatta, Rajagiriya, Kollupitiya, Werahera, Galle, and Dodanduwa. Nine Chinese nationals intercepted in Katunayake with 383 mobile phones taped to their bodies. 

The article closes on an interesting point which few others have flagged: “Not all of the individuals currently cycling through the island’s deportation pipeline are willing participants in organised crime. A portion are themselves trapped within it – and the deportation procedure, as currently applied, makes no distinction between the two.”

The most compelling evidence for that article’s argument is in Mandarin on Chinese Government websites that no one writing on this issue seems to monitor. The April 2023 notice was predated by a WeChat post from the embassy three weeks earlier which advised citizens trapped in fraud dens to send their exact address, floor, and room number to Sri Lankan Police. 

By 5 July 2023, the embassy recorded that Sri Lanka-related telecom fraud incidents had “significantly increased”. A near identical warning followed on 12 June 2025, and the standing destination page for Sri Lanka on the Consular Service site states that since 2023, citizens who trusted high-salary advertisements have faced forced involvement in online gambling and e-fraud, restrictions on personal freedom, or extortion. 

The Chinese State has known, and has said publicly in Mandarin for over three years, that a portion of its nationals inside Sri Lanka’s fraud compounds are prisoners.

More than policing? 

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Armed Conflict Survey 2025 describes a cyber-scam industry inflicting annual losses of up to $ 37 billion in East and Southeast Asia, grown inside special economic zones and borderland business parks backed by Chinese investors, and run by syndicates with roots in China operating through Chinese-linked networks and quasi-legal businesses. The industry Beijing now wants dismantled was incubated, in considerable part, within enclaves its own capital built. 

The survey also records the suspicion among analysts that China’s crackdowns have allowed Beijing to extend leverage and expand a security footprint into new territories. Intelligence sharing, suspect identification, and repatriation channels are useful. Far less acknowledged is that they are also the entry points of a national security relationship conducted, so far, entirely beyond any public or parliamentary scrutiny, which very likely involves signals intelligence, surveillance, and domestic telecom network cooperation. 

These turnkey architectures can leave behind powerful and pervasive technologies, and mechanisms that are leveraged by the Sri Lankan State for purposes well beyond the original aims, as well as operations including the targeting of critical dissent, protests, and civil society (think Aragalaya-esque public uprisings thwarted in the future).

The relatively sudden enforcement energy around this issue is interesting, and could stem from several reasons. One could be China’s Anti-Telecom and Online Fraud Law, adopted in September 2022, which applies to fraud committed overseas by Chinese citizens and to anyone, anywhere, who targets victims inside China.

Telecom fraud now sits inside the party-State’s public security compact with its own citizens, and Sri Lanka, after the crackdowns in Myanmar, Cambodia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) displaced the syndicates, has become an offshore extension of a domestic political problem. 

The embassy in Colombo said as much on 18 March this year, attributing the influx to Sri Lanka’s telecommunications infrastructure, geography, and lenient visa policies. On 9 April, China’s Ministry of Public Security announced that Sri Lankan Police had handed over 125 fraud-linked personnel – a story amplified across Weibo and Douyin under anti-fraud hashtags. 

By 29 May, the embassy was framing the cooperation through a warning that unchecked criminality would damage Sri Lanka’s international reputation, public security, and social stability. Reading between the lines of this overt presentation of friendly bilateral concern, China appointing itself guardian of Sri Lanka’s reputation is doing something more than policing.

My own research since 2020 into Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) on Facebook places China at the lead in Sri Lanka. No other foreign nation state engages in FIMI to the degree that the Chinese have, and for over half a decade now. 

A constellation of increasingly sophisticated, strategic, State-controlled accounts and influencer personas, publishing almost exclusively in native-speaker Sinhala, collectively reaches around 6.5 million accounts on Facebook alone, with engagement that dwarfs every leading Western and the Indian diplomatic mission combined. 

What the Chinese influence operations exclude as narrative frames is as deliberate as what they produce: debt, surveillance, Taiwan, Xinjiang, and the conditions attached to Chinese capital never appear.

The scam crackdown completes and complements this vast FIMI endeavour. The Communist Party of China (CPC) distinguishes between Chinese soft power it licenses on social media, and narratives inconvenient to China that it cannot control. Influence operations are instruments of the State, advancing preferred narratives with its consent and at its direction. 

The syndicates draw on the same raw material – Chinese identity, language, platforms, payment rails, passports, and diaspora networks – without authorisation, and they prey on victims inside China itself, where every scam call into Guangdong or Sichuan erodes the public security promise on which the party’s domestic legitimacy increasingly rests. 

Worse, from Beijing’s vantage, the syndicates attach ‘Chinese’ in the Sri Lankan public mind to trafficking, money laundering, coercion, and crime – the precise inversion of the friendship and benevolence the influencer accounts spend thousands of posts constructing. The enforcement communiqués, with their talk of safeguarding Sri Lanka’s stability, protect the brand that the influencers build. Enforcement, here, is reputation management by other means.

The harm to Sri Lanka 

And while Beijing narrates itself as guarantor of order against cyber criminality, it acknowledges nothing of the other deception it runs. 

On 4 June, Viginum – France’s State agency countering foreign digital interference – revealed that a network of 13 fake news sites pushing Chinese propaganda at audiences in English, French, Spanish, and Vietnamese was managed from inside CGTN, exposed when a senior project manager at CGTN Digital left a login trace on one of the sites. The same CGTN whose Sinhala-language operation publishes into millions of Sri Lankan news feeds at clockwork intervals, every day. 

One form of digital manipulation China prosecutes across borders, with bilateral cooperation and ministerial communiqués. The other it manufactures, industrialises with generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), and, when caught, never admits. No Chinese statement on cybercrime in Sri Lanka acknowledges that the largest sustained foreign influence operation on the island’s dominant social media platform is its own.

We may also now be a net exporter of cybercrimes and cyberscams. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka’s latest National Risk Assessment, which investigative journalist Namini Wijedasa reported in May, flags ‘pig butchering’ for the first time as a developing threat – foreign scammers operating from Sri Lankan scam farms targeting largely overseas nationals. The Police says the networks reach victims across Asia: in India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and above all in Mainland China, which the embassy’s own statements name as the principal target. 

With over 1,000 foreigners arrested this year as syndicates relocate from Cambodia and Myanmar, Sri Lanka now hosts what amounts to an export-processing zone for fraud – disinformation, deception, and deceit manufactured here for consumption elsewhere, even as Sri Lanka bears the reputational cost. The fear is to what degree these operations already turn inward, targeting Sri Lankans – to a greater degree than they have in the past.

And therein lies the rub. The State pressing hardest for rapid, wholesale repatriation is the same State whose own consular record, social media posts, and news reports in Mandarin clearly indicate that some of those repatriated are victims of trafficking. A deportation pipeline without victim screening, resonating with the warnings in The Sunday Morning article, can launder the trafficked back into punishment, and remove, on the same flight, the testimony that might convict the organisers, financiers, and facilitators who remain. 

These are, however, not questions or concerns articulated by the Sri Lankan Government or Police. We are, tellingly, inside both of Beijing’s digital economies: the influence it licenses and the fraud it disowns. Both operate simultaneously, harming Sri Lanka in different ways. 

(The writer is an independent researcher whose writing has treated democracy as a fragile, lived practice – tested by war, censorship, and disinformation. His research and writing moves between bearing witness, discourse analysis, cultural criticism, and policy analysis, yet retains a central focus – that the quality of democracy, especially in the age of AI and accelerated truth decay, is only as good as institutional architectures that strengthen memory, evidence, dissent, pluralism, and public trust)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)