Police say a victim-complaint requirement and difficulties examining seized devices hinder fraud cases involving victims abroad, while most suspects face visa charges and removal.
Sri Lankan police say they have not successfully prosecuted anyone suspected of using the country as a base to scam people abroad, despite arresting 1,093 people in raids on 27 suspected scam compounds from January to September 2026. Police spokesman Fredrick Wootler gave the figures to OCCRP and Sri Lanka’s The Sunday Times.
Their joint investigation described scam syndicates moving into other countries after crackdowns in Southeast Asia. Experts warned that Sri Lanka was becoming a destination for scam workers leaving countries such as Cambodia, where large scam compounds have often relied on trafficked workers.
Wootler said Sri Lanka’s computer crime law, which dates from 2007, allows cases to begin only after a victim makes a complaint. Most victims live abroad, and police have received few complaints. That leaves a legal barrier between raiding a suspected operation and opening a fraud case.
The vast majority of suspected scammers are instead charged with visa violations and removed from Sri Lanka. Those immigration actions take suspects out of the country; they do not establish guilt for fraud. The government wanted these criminal networks removed from Sri Lanka.
Police also face obstacles in gathering evidence. Chandima Arumapperuma, head of the police cyber crime unit, said language barriers hinder interviews with suspects. Seized devices are often encrypted—a form of digital protection that makes their contents difficult to read—and difficult to analyse. Raids usually yield about 200 phones and laptops each, more than police have the resources to examine in full.
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A separate investigation by OCCRP and The Sunday Times documented multiple identities used by Chen Guoqing, 31, who was abducted from the Colombo Port City special economic zone on July 23 and murdered, according to a police investigative report. Local authorities said they believed Chen had a high-level role in international criminal activity and was killed over a money dispute with other criminals.
Investigative files showed that police recovered a Cambodian passport naming him Chen Hao and a passport from Suriname naming him Tao Guoqing. The reporters established his original name by checking the Cambodian passport against public naturalisation and name-change records. The documents establish the different identities he used, not the scale of Sri Lanka’s scam industry.
Police said they had arrested five suspects over the killing and were seeking three others believed to have fled the country.
Analysis
In September, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime warned that Sri Lanka faced a serious risk of becoming a hub for industrial-scale online scams. The country’s scam industry remained hidden, unlike Southeast Asian operations that had worked openly with protection from politicians and armed groups.
Jason Tower, a transnational crime expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, warned that failure to tackle the networks could allow them to grow powerful enough to defy Sri Lanka’s government.
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