Towering over a palm-fringed artificial coastline just kilometers from Singapore’s bustling border, Malaysia’s Forest City cuts an uncanny, almost surreal figure: rows of identical, gleaming high-rise towers stretch across 14 square kilometers of reclaimed land, their empty windows catching the sun over silent, nearly deserted streets. When Chinese developer Country Garden first unveiled the $100 billion project in 2016, it was billed as a futuristic, eco-friendly dream paradise: a special financial zone designed to house 700,000 residents, complete with luxury hotels, a championship golf course, and a sprawling water park targeted at wealthy global investors. A decade on, however, less than 1% of that projected population calls the development home, turning Forest City into one of Southeast Asia’s most famous ghost towns – and, as a recent major police raid has revealed, an ideal hiding place for transnational scam syndicates.
In mid-July, Johor state police launched coordinated raids on two suspected scam operations spread across 32 separate properties in Forest City, arresting 335 suspects and seizing assets worth approximately 1 million Malaysian ringgit ($245,000), including 313 desktop computers, 1,557 mobile phones, 17 laptops, and 10 communications modems. According to official police statements, the two hubs – one spanning 27 apartments across five floors of a residential tower, the other occupying five standalone luxury bungalows – were run by cryptocurrency-focused criminal syndicates that ran global investment fraud and romance scams targeting victims in countries around the world. Of those arrested, 309 are Chinese nationals, 19 are Indonesian, three are Malaysian, and four are from Myanmar. Johor’s police chief Ab Rahaman Arsad confirmed that authorities are working alongside Interpol to track down the criminal network’s fugitive mastermind. The BBC has reached out to both Forest City management and Johor police for additional comment, but has not received a response as of publication.
For early investors like 56-year-old Jason Deng, who purchased five properties in Forest City after the 2016 launch, the raid only confirmed what residents have suspected for years. “In 2016, they sold this as a golden city, so beautiful and full of opportunity,” Deng explained. “I paid a huge amount of money for these units. If I’d known how it would turn out, I never would have bought so many.” What was marketed as a life-changing investment turned into a ghost town, where dust coats the countertops of empty apartments and streetlights burn for almost no one each night. But for criminal networks, this widespread vacancy is precisely the attraction.
Security experts and local residents warn that the July raid only uncovered the tip of the iceberg, and that Forest City’s infiltration by scam groups is a clear symptom of a rapidly growing, increasingly professionalized global transnational scam industry.
“Many of these modern organizations look more like multinational corporations than traditional street gangs or organized crime networks,” explained John Wojcik, a criminal analyst at TRM Labs, a firm that specializes in tracking crypto-facilitated financial crime. “They have dedicated recruitment teams, in-house IT departments, professional money-laundering specialists, and established, permanent infrastructure just like any legitimate business.”
Authorities and analysts agree the Forest City operations were largely established by criminals fleeing intensified crackdowns on scam hubs in neighboring Cambodia, which for years served as the global nerve center for this multi-billion-dollar criminal trade. For years, industrial scam compounds in Cambodia have relied on trafficked forced labor, with workers held under threat of torture and abuse to carry out fraud schemes. Since late 2023, however, the Cambodian government has drastically ramped up raids on these complexes, pushing an estimated 300,000 people connected to the scam industry out of the country in just a few months. Many of these criminal operators have relocated to more permissive, under-patrolled locations across Southeast Asia – and Forest City proved to be a perfect fit.
Unlike the notorious walled, heavily guarded scam compounds found in Cambodia’s Sihanoukville or along Myanmar’s border regions, the Forest City operations blended almost seamlessly into ordinary residential life, operating out of standard apartments and bungalows alongside unsuspecting local residents. The semi-abandoned nature of the development gave criminals the privacy they needed to operate without drawing unwanted attention.
“It’s an open secret here that scammers are operating out of condominiums and serviced apartments across Forest City,” said Kevin, a local property sales agent and tenant who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from criminal groups. “This is a common problem across Johor and Kuala Lumpur, but it’s especially bad here – Forest City is very special.”
What makes Forest City unique, according to Kevin, Wojcik, and other observers, is its status as a failed mega-development turned ghost city. While official marketing materials still claim the development is home to 23,000 residents, Kevin estimates the actual population is less than 5,000. “That’s exactly why scammers chose this place,” he said. “They have total privacy here. Almost no one comes around to disturb them.”
The collapse of Forest City’s original vision did not happen by accident. The joint venture between Country Garden, one of China’s largest property developers, and Malaysian-linked firm Danga 88 was originally designed to attract wealthy Chinese buyers seeking second homes and investment properties offshore. But a perfect storm of overlapping crises – the global Covid-19 pandemic that shut down cross-border travel, China’s deepening property market crash, and new restrictions on overseas borrowing for Chinese citizens – gutted demand for the development and ground construction almost to a halt. Today, only 15 to 20% of the original proposed project has been completed, and the vast majority of finished units remain vacant.
That combination of modern, finished infrastructure, widespread vacancy, and a veneer of legitimate upscale development is exactly what criminal syndicates look for, Wojcik explained. “Forest City checks every box that organized crime looks for: it was marketed as a prestigious, master-planned luxury smart city that never lived up to that promise. It has modern infrastructure, hundreds of empty properties, and good international connectivity, all under the cover of legitimate economic activity that keeps criminal operations from being noticed.”
This model mirrors Shwe Kokko, the notorious scam hub 1,800 kilometers north on Myanmar’s border with Thailand, which was also marketed as a luxury resort destination and investment hub for wealthy Chinese buyers, but has since become a global center for fraud, money laundering, and human trafficking. Even today, despite its status as a mostly empty ghost town, Forest City continues to market itself as an up-and-coming center for tech innovation, tax-free business, and property investment – a marketing narrative that scam networks have turned into a perfect Trojan horse to hide their illicit activities.
“When syndicates embed themselves behind seemingly legitimate businesses in ordinary commercial developments, they don’t just become harder to detect and break up – they amass enormous power and influence from the massive profits they generate,” Wojcik said. That growing profit and influence has allowed the scam industry to professionalize at a rapid pace. While coercion and human trafficking still fuel much of the sector’s low-level labor, syndicates are increasingly recruiting experienced professional scammers with higher wages and better working conditions. Scam operators even post open job ads on Telegram, where experienced scammers share detailed resumes highlighting their fraud expertise to compete for open roles.
“It’s a clear sign the industry is maturing into a fully professionalized criminal enterprise, even as coercion and exploitation remain widespread,” Wojcik noted.
While the Forest City raid has drawn new attention to the issue, transnational scam operations have been active in Malaysia for years. Throughout 2022, Malaysian authorities carried out multiple raids on scam centers operating out of residential properties in Johor, Penang, and Kuala Lumpur, years before the global scale of the industry gained widespread international attention. Though these crackdowns have sent a clear message of zero tolerance, analysts warn that Malaysia remains a hub for influential criminal networks, and any large-scale re-emergence of the industry requires close monitoring.
For many Forest City residents, the presence of scammers has become just another part of daily life in the semi-ghost town. “It’s been an open secret for years – the only shocking thing is that the police actually followed through on raids,” Kevin said. He is convinced dozens more scam operations remain active in the development, but says most local workers and long-term residents prefer to stay out of the issue: “It’s not my business. I just work here for a paycheck.”
Other residents take a similar view, and some even report that Forest City is slowly beginning to grow out of its ghost town status. Phillip, a tech worker who relocated from Singapore to Forest City last year attracted by lower housing prices, said he was not surprised by the raid revelations. “Scammers could be my neighbors, they could run a syndicate down the hall – but at the end of the day, this kind of crime happens everywhere, no matter where you go,” he said. What did surprise him, he added, is that more and more people are moving to the development. “A lot of people lost a lot of money on this project, but over the last three months, I’ve seen more and more lights on in the condos at night. We went from one in 20 units occupied to maybe one in five. It’s slowly changing from a ghost town into a real place people want to live.”