At an MWC Shanghai roundtable on scams and fraud across China and APAC, Sri Lanka’s Digital Economy Deputy Minister Eng. Eranga Weeraratne put a specific, mechanical ask to GSMA – and a blunter admission than the room expected.
A year ago, Sri Lanka would have joined a conversation about scams and fraud as a consumer-protection story – a country worried about its own citizens being targeted. At MWC Shanghai’s roundtable on safeguarding digital trust, Deputy Minister Eranga Weeraratne arrived instead with what he called a harder, more uncomfortable vantage point. As enforcement has tightened across parts of Southeast Asia, organised scam operations have begun relocating to Sri Lanka. In the first months of this year, police removed well over a thousand foreign nationals from scam operations on Sri Lankan soil – more than the previous two years combined.
That statistic, he told the room, is the clearest evidence yet that scams are not a problem any single country can legislate its way out of. Pressure in one jurisdiction simply pushes the operation to the next one with good connectivity and, often, softer enforcement. ‘Scams are not a national problem with national solutions. They are a displacement problem,’ he added.
The Deputy Minister was specific about direction – a distinction he said is easy to miss in a regional conversation. Scam operations physically based on Sri Lankan soil are overwhelmingly targeting victims outside the country. At the same time, Sri Lankan citizens are being targeted by scam operations based abroad. Perpetrator, victim, and enforcement jurisdiction, in other words, rarely sit in the same country – which is exactly why he argued individual nations acting alone will keep losing ground, and why regional collaboration on intelligence sharing, technological support, joint capacity-building for investigators, and coordinated law-enforcement operations has to move from aspiration to infrastructure.
Over 1,000 foreign nationals removed from scam operations on Sri Lankan soil so far this year – more than the previous two years combined.
The displacement runs in two directions