How Timor-Leste is fighting back against Asia’s scamming gangs

Hey, Justin Bergman here, international affairs editor at the Conversation Australia. We're taking a short pause, but we'll have a new episode of The Conversation Weekly for you next week. In the meantime, here's an episode we recorded with Michael Rose, an anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Adelaide. It's about how Asia's scamming gangs have set their sights on Teor Lee as their next frontier and the movement that's trying to keep them out. We hope you enjoy. It's late August 2025 and a sleepy coastal part of Timolstee in Southeast Asia is rocked by a large police raid on a hotel complex. Ousi is a rugged remote place. It's on the western side of Teeour Island, part of Indonesia and is isolated geographically from the rest of Temostee, which governs the eastern side of the island. Tim Moeststee, also known as East Teemo, became an independent country in 2002 after a brief civil war and struggle for [music] independence against Indonesia. In this police raid, dozens of foreign nationals are arrested at what emerges is a suspected scam [music] center linked to organized crime networks running scamming operations across Southeast Asia. All this comes at a bad time [music] for Teimmostee, which is being admitted into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, [music] in October. And then a few weeks later, a Facebook post by one of the country's highest officials lifts the lid on the [music] murky criminal underworld that's trying to get a foothold in the country, causing a commotion in Dilly, the [music] Timori's capital. I'm Gemma from the conversation, an independent news and [music] analysis platform partnering journalists with academics. Welcome to the conversation weekly, where [music] experts explain how we ended up here. In today's episode, how Asia scamming gangs set their [music] sights on Teimo Lestee as their next frontier and the movement to keep them out. Michael Rose, you're an anthropologist and an adjunct lecturer at the University of Adelaide in Australia and you've spent time living and working in Timolstee and you still have many connections there. Welcome to the podcast. >> Thank you very much for having me, Gemma. So in late September, one of the most powerful elected officials in Team Mostee published a post on Facebook entitled a manifesto for the defense of timstee which made some startling allegations about organized crime. Why did you come across this and what was your reaction when you saw it? >> So look, I've been connected with uh Tim Moe for a long time. first as sort of a junior activist type and later on uh working on the fringes at the UN and then I went back as an anthropologist and I've continued to write about the place and take an interest in it and maintain lots of friendships and things there ever since and so when I'm on Facebook you know my feed is full of all the sometimes kind of fevered dilly gossip and look one of the really interesting and really positive things about the nation that Tim Moles has grown into since 2002 is just how how strong the tradition of public debate and accountability is and a lot of these debates play out over Facebook. A lot of the local telecom providers provide you with free Facebook when you sign up. So there's people around who tell you they have Facebook but don't have the internet. >> So this Facebook post that you saw, it was written by a man called Aio Pereira who is the Timuriz Minister of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. What do we need to know about Pereira? >> Aio Pereira is uh one of the most important politicians in Timolestee. He lived in Australia for many decades during the Indonesian occupation and he sort of has a distinguished history as a supporter and member of the movement for independence and since then he's got a fairly distinguished career as a real leader within Tim Oste. He also has oversight over the National Intelligence Agency. >> And tell me about the post and the claims that he was making. What did it actually say? >> So the post was called a manifesto for the defense of team molestste. And it was a call to the team's people as well as specifically a call to honest people within the bureaucracy uh within the political system within the security forces and it was raising the alarm. He made very specific allegations that organized crime networks had flown in some cases about $45 million US into Teeour and had used it to essentially buy officials in order to be granted licenses to set up shop in Tim. And he was essentially arguing that unless an investigation was made, unless serious action was taken, then Tim or Lee sort of risked going the way of Cambodia or other sort of areas in Myanmar where aspects of the state have in some ways been captured by organized crime. And he laid it out as a very stark choice. He was saying look do we want to be a democracy like the state that we suffered and fought so long for or are we going to become a state which has essentially been captured in some senses by organized crime. So like it was a very sort of emotive call to the people and it's also interesting and no accident that it also really hearkened back to the rhetoric of the resistance years. There's a very long tradition in timole of appeals to the people the pav timian and so this was essentially resurrecting that sort of spirit of popular resistance repurposing it for a modern problem. >> And the the background to all this he talks about organized crime and triads from Cambodia, Malaysia, Macau, Hong Kong. The background to this is that there is a huge problem with organized crime operating scam centers in Southeast Asia. Um, this is something we've covered on the conversation weekly in the past and we did a whole series on scam factories in the region. And this is people who are being sometimes tricked into traveling to these remote areas and then forced into scamming people around the world in these compounds where they can't leave until they've made a certain amount of money. And so this is what he was alleging that the the organized crime is trying to bring that model to the country. >> He was making fairly specific allegations about the amount of money which had been brought in by these triads and saying specifically that had been used to use the word bribe officials in order to get permission to set up these very sorts of scam centers. And I think one of the things that pushed him to take action is that a scam center along sort of Cambodian lines and linked by a UN report to the very same networks that have been operating in Cambodia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia had been taken down the month before he put out this sort of appeal to the people by the police in Timles's remote western district of Oussusi which is about 90 km west of the main national border and which is completely surrounded by Indonesian territory. >> And tell me about Ousi. Why would this remote area that's sort of separate from the rest of Tim and semi-autonomous in some ways appeal to these organized criminal gangs? >> OSI was one of the first places where Portuguese missionaries landed in the 16th century. I should admit that I have a special affinity with it because I spent two years there with the UN and then doing my PhD on religious practices and agricultural practices of the Ouzi Hills. So I know the place really well. For the first 10 years of independence, Oussie was extremely poor and isolated. But in 2014, really major investments were made in improving infrastructure in the main town. So, for example, a huge international airport was constructed by an Indonesian state-owned company. This didn't seem to be particularly well planned. The international airport doesn't have any international routes and only one or two domestic routes. So, it just sits there as this big yawning empty building. But it's quite extraordinary because the town is this sort of flat, dusty, hot, quiet, friendly place where there'll be like a goat munching grass by the side of the road and then people pushing their fishing boat into the water and then there's this enormous international airport just sitting there next to the sea. Another one of these projects which sort of took place in autonomous oussi was the construction of what was intended to be a five-star hotel. Now, this was always a strange project. I was actually in the town when it was happening. At one point, a very confused looking crew of Greek construction workers turned up. Building started and stopped. Nobody knew quite what was going to happen. There was all sorts of rumors flying around. And by the time I sort of left in 2015, it still hadn't been finished. It was just this sort of enormous construction site on the edge of town next to a mosquito-ridden rice patty and behind the market. So it got all the sort of downstream market junk as well. So it wasn't like an obvious place for a holiday. >> Is that where the raid took place? >> Yeah. And that's where the raid took place. And the town, I might add, is a very small place. Not a place where strangers can just sort of wander around unnoticed. But what people did notice was that this compound was suddenly home to a mysterious group of foreigners. No one really knew who they were or what they were doing there. But after the police raid, it turned out it was at least 30 foreign nationals along with a crew of tear who were operating some sort of scam center. So local media later spoke to T-Rise nationals who'd been working there and they described how there were Chinese, Filipinos, Tares, Indonesians too, I think, all making scam phone calls to people in their sort of respective language areas. The police also talked about seizing all of the equipment you would need to run something like that. Sort of Starlink transmitters and all that sort of thing. >> And then the UN picked it up too, didn't it? Can you talk us through what the UN did? Yeah. So, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime did pick it up and they wrote a really sort of detailed report tracing how this operation in Oussie was an extension of the same organized crime networks that have been operating in Cambodia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. And what appears to have happened is that they have looked at Tim Mostee as this kind of fragile state mostly known for its sort of traumatic history and thought well here's a soft touch we can bribe some local officials and set up our operation here and the sort of Oussie was also sort of an interesting choice of a place to do that because it has this sort of international airport and this big compound where you can operate but on the other hand it really is out of the way. So these allegations about organized crime came just a few weeks ahead of Tim Moest joining ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Did that make them more embarrassing? >> This isn't a new thing. I mean, President Ramos Hortar talked about joining Azan in the mid70s. But 23 years after independence, it really does seem like closer integration with Azan has become the obvious choice with quite heavy support from its former occupier Indonesia. But it's sort of interesting that this UN report occurred just as Tim Mostee is drawing closer to Southeast Asia. And I I think what it signals is that uh as well as all the sort of advantages of being part of the Azan block, Timolestee is going to face similar challenges to other sort of Azan countries that come along with potentially increased mobility and foreign investment. Can you just explain why this matters at this moment? Why is it important that Tim Oste is seen as the new front for this scam operation? >> One of the really big issues for Tim Oste is that the economy over the past 23 years since 2002 hasn't grown in a way which really benefits the majority of the people. So there's substantial oil and gas reserves off the south coast. So they piled up a big petroleum fund, $18 billion the last time I checked. But the problem is this sort of bankrolls almost all government expenditure. And aside from subsistence farming and a bit of coffee and a little bit of tourism, there's really no maj sort of industries. And so people worry about what's going to happen when that petroleum fund finally runs down, which is happening quite quickly. But at any rate, the situation today is that for a lot of young people, there's really not much in the way of opportunities for salaried work or social mobility. And there's a growing sense of frustration at the sort of old guard of resistance veterans in many cases who are still in charge of the country. So Pereira went public with these allegations on Facebook at a very feal time in Tarie's political life and in the political life of the region as a whole. Thousands of students have clashed with police in Jakarta as anger simmers over lavish allowances paid to MPs. [music] >> Nepal is burning. Young protesters in Catmandu have set fire to the parliament building, the Supreme Court as well as the residents of the former prime minister. [music] >> The Asian Spring of a wave of youth protests across the region. Young people are just fed up with the lack of opportunities, with official corruption, with inequality. And so social media is part of this story and [music] Tamarie social media also has a close relationship with Indonesian social media and so these big student protests in Indonesia I won't say inspired but that sort [music] of spirit really has also sort of caught on in team and around the time Pereira released his manifesto there had been really major protests [music] in Dilly >> student protesters in team or lest have claimed a win after the government reversed a decision to buy 65 new cars for parliamentarians. The car plan sparked 3 days of protests in the capital with police dispersing the crowd with tear gas after protesters lobbed rocks at a parliament building. And there was the issue of a lifetime pension. And you know, this is a country where the minimum wage for each month is [music] $115, where young people have very few opportunities for salaried work. A lot are going abroad to look for [music] work in Australia and elsewhere. So it seems that one of the things Pereira was aiming [music] to do by releasing this manifesto for the defense of Tim Molesste at this time in this way was to sort of ride that wave of youthful rebellion. Coming up, what happened after [music] Pereira went public and what this means for the wider fight against organized crime and [music] scam centers in Southeast Asia. >> [music] >> Every week, Michelle Graten offers you a ringside seat to the latest in Australian politics with interviews and insights from political insiders. On the conversations Politics with Michelle Graten podcast, we cut through the spin and get to the substance with independent analysis of the issues that really matter. Stay informed. Search and follow Politics with Michelle Graten wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. So, Michael Rose, we've been talking about this Facebook post that Agio Pereira published in September and his call to action to do something about his allegations around organized crime in Tim Estee. What happened after he published it? >> So, both the president and the prime minister had a fairly measured response. dilly gossip but fairly credible gossip is that there was a lot of anger from factions within Pereira's own political party who thought that he should have kept it in house um publicly the prime minister said that he would be given a chance to address his ministerial colleagues it's very interesting though that what Pereira his main demand in his manifesto was that gambling licenses which had been in his view fraudulently granted as a result of bribery be rescended. And his other one is that an investigation take place into exactly who had taken this triad money. The week after the manifesto went public, he actually got his way, which is fantastic. There was a meeting of ministers and a draft resolution was agreed upon cancelling licenses and stopping any more from being granted, which from Pereira's point of view is a real victory. And you would also think that it would very much styy any sort of attempts by triad gangs to set up Cambodian style call centers in Timolstee. I mean, I'm sure they can still try bribing people and try all sorts of things, but the fact that the Tim's people have shown that they won't be bought is sort of a really interesting development. He also called for an investigation as to who has taken the money and look that would potentially be politically explosive and the fact that there's been no public announcement and there has been no public investigation is significant in my view. >> You actually sent a message to the president to get his response. What did he say to you when you asked him about these allegations of organized crime? >> I mean fun fact Tim Mostee has probably the most accessible president in the world. President Ramos Hortar, I'm sure he wouldn't mind me saying this, is I'm sure he uses his judgment about it, but generally quite happy to hand out his WhatsApp number to curious foreign academics and fellow citizens and time permitting and things will text people back. Um, so when I messaged him, he said, I did follow these developments. I've always said Tim Molesste does not have a homegrown organized crime, but we are too vulnerable to organized crime from outside. But Tim Molesste being a fragile country is still very attractive to organized crime from Asia. But I do not engage in allegations as just done by UN office on drugs and crime. So he's referring to the report which was saying that the scam center in Oussie was part of an international network. I know well the work of UN agencies. They should focus more on solid research and less on allegations against individuals because this is not their mandate. I have full confidence in our authorities with support from the Australian Federal Police and the Indonesian Police in tackling the challenges by organized crime. >> Okay. So, he's aware of of the challenges and the vulnerabilities of his country, but he he's perhaps not that keen on the UN taring team with the same brush that other countries have been because of these scam operations. I couldn't say what Ramos thinks but he has form as a pragmatic optimist. So I believe that he tries to look at sort of situations in timole without sort of catastrophizing because the country has suffered so much over the years that sort of people get into the habit of thinking about it as lurching from one crisis to another. So yeah obviously he is aware of the threat that organized crime does pose to his country. However, he seems to be very, you know, optimistic that the team's police in cooperation with their international partners will be able to handle that. >> So, when we ran this series we did earlier in the year about scam factories, one of the researchers that we worked with, a guy called Ivan Francheskini, he explained that these scam operations, they don't happen in a vacuum. They're often there because members of the local elite have turned a blind eye or are gaining in some way from the construction of these compounds or the employment opportunities that it actually offers local people. How do you think that dynamic is playing out in team moles? This scam operation inus didn't succeed. So do you think there's still a risk that this could continue or or is just a bad choice for these scam operators? There's certainly people in Dilly who were like, "Okay, they've rescended the license. The scam center has been shut down, but are people within the system still protecting corrupt officials?" Some people say that's might be what's happening. But looking at it from a more positive point of view, my personal hunch is that international scammers have severely misjudged uh Tim Oste, which is easy to do because it's a little known place. So they've probably just fallen back on cliches about it being a poor corrupt state. That's not really true and it's certainly not that simple. Um so I think what we're seeing here is a uniquely tear dynamic where even though the place is very poor in some ways even though it does have very weak institutions in in some cases even though there are some corrupt officials it also has a remarkable spirit of popular resistance. It also has a um very active civil society. It's a very talkative sort of society. And even though it's big enough to sort of be a thriving busy place, it's also small enough that you can't really hide a scam center without sort of people noticing something is going on and getting curious about it. So, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Ultimately, even though it's really alarming that these same networks which have been exploiting people so horribly in Cambodia have tried to set up there, they've failed. And yeah, my hunch is that they're not going to succeed, but whether they'll try again simply remains to be seen. >> Michael, thank you very much for talking us through all that and we'll keep an eye on what happens next. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. This interview with Michael Rose was recorded in late October. In the weeks since, Michael says his sources indicate a police [music] investigation into the allegations made by Pereira is ongoing, but there's been no public announcement of an official investigation. The conversation reached out for comment [music] to the government of Tim on the issue, but did not receive a reply. That's it for [music] this week's episode of the Conversation Weekly. It was written and produced by Katie Flood and me [music] Gemma Wear with production assistance from Mend Marowani. Sound mixing [music] is by Michelle Mlham and our theme music is by Nita. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email us directly [music] at podcast conversation.com. You can sign up for the conversation's free daily newsletter too by clicking on the link in our show [music] notes. The Conversation is a nonprofit news outlet dedicated to sharing the work of academic experts with a wider audience. If you like what we do, please support us at donate.the [music] conversation.com. And please do also rate and review the podcast wherever you follow us. [music] It really helps us reach new people. Thanks for listening.