Scammers busted in Southeast Asia's biggest ghost town
From a distance, Malaysia's Forest City looks 3D-printed: a bristle of identical white blocks clustered on an otherwise unremarkable coastline.
When it was unveiled by Chinese developers in 2016, the $100bn mega-project was pitched as "a dream paradise for all mankind": a special financial zone that could house some 700,000 residents. But a decade later, this 14-sq-km (3,400-acre) artificial island on Singapore's doorstep is thought to be inhabited by less than 1% of that.
Rows of eerily vacant skyscrapers loom over quiet streets. Inside empty apartments, benchtops and windows are filmed with dust.
"In 2016 they described it here like the golden city; very, very beautiful," says Jason Deng, a 56-year-old investor who was among the first to buy in Forest City, paying "a lot of money" for five properties.
"If I had known it was not so good I would not have bought so many apartments," he says now. "I thought it would be much, much better."
As it turns out, this is only a golden city for some people – and they're not the ones developers had hoped to attract.
In mid-July, Malaysian police raided two alleged scam operations spread across 32 premises in Forest City, arresting 335 people and seizing assets worth about one million ringgit (£181,810; $245,000), including 313 computers, 1,557 mobile phones, 17 laptops and 10 modems.
From these two call centre hubs – one occupying 27 apartments across five storeys of a residential tower, the other spread between five bungalows – cryptocurrency syndicates ran investment and love scams targeting victims abroad, according to police.
Those arrested include 309 Chinese nationals, 19 Indonesians, three Malaysians and four Myanmar nationals. Johor police chief Ab Rahaman Arsad said authorities were working with Interpol to track down the mastermind behind the operations.
The BBC reached out to Forest City and Johor police for comment, but did not receive a response.
Experts and locals tell the BBC this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg – and a symptom of a global scam industry that is spreading, evolving, and professionalising.
Forest City was meant to house some 700,000 residents – but the current population is thought to be less than 1% of that
"The reality is that many of these organisations now resemble multinational corporations more than a traditional organised crime network or gang," says John Wojcik, an analyst at TRM Labs, which investigates crypto-facilitated crime. "They have dedicated recruitment teams, IT departments, money-laundering specialists and infrastructure."
Authorities and experts agree that the Forest City operations were probably staffed by criminals who had been driven out of Cambodia, a global nerve centre for transnational scams.