A fact that many people overlook: the surge in Southeast Asian scam operations has nearly kept pace with the rise of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency has solved several of the biggest challenges that scam groups have faced over the past few decades:
Difficulty in receiving payments: Previously, bank transfers were easy to freeze; now USDT can be delivered globally within minutes.
Difficulty with cross-border transfers: Scam groups in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos can still move funds in real time, even when the victims are in China, Europe, the Americas, and Japan.
Difficulty with money laundering: In the past, it required multiple layers of transfers through underground money changers; now a large amount of fund movement can be completed through on-chain activity and over-the-counter trading.
Difficulty with expansion: With a stable payments and transfers system in place, the scam industry has begun to expand in an industrialized, organized manner.
Many people think that Southeast Asian scam compounds rely on guns and violence.
In reality, what matters more is: the internet + social media + cryptocurrency.
If the internet solved the problem of acquiring customers, then USDT solved the problem of collecting payments.
In a sense, cryptocurrency has greatly reduced the operating costs of the scam industry.
And in recent years—along with stronger global regulation, the widespread adoption of KYC at exchanges, the maturity of on-chain tracking technology, and joint efforts by countries to crack down on Southeast Asian scam compounds—the expansion rate of the scam industry has clearly slowed.
A question worth thinking about: if there had been no stablecoins like USDT back then, could the Southeast Asian scam industry have grown to the scale it has today?