Oecusse, a rugged, remote district of Timor-Leste in south-east Asia, is usually a pretty sleepy place. It’s located on the western side of Timor island, part of Indonesia, and is isolated geographically from the rest of Timor-Leste, which has governed the eastern side of the island since 2002.
But in August, Oecusse was rocked by a large police raid on a suspected scam centre, later linked by a UN report to organised crime networks running scamming operations across south-east Asia. Dozens of foreign nationals were arrested.
All this came at a bad time for Timor-Leste, shortly before its admission into the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in October.
And then in early September, a Facebook post by one of Timor-Leste’s highest political officials made some explosive allegations about a murky criminal underworld trying to get a foothold in the country.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Michael Rose, an anthropologist and adjunct lecturer at the University of Adelaide who has lived and worked in Timor-Leste, about how Asia’s scamming gangs set their sights on Timor-Leste as their next frontier – and the movement to keep them out.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
