Reference

Crime and illicit finance

A terminology layer for East and Southeast Asia: which native term carries statutory weight in which jurisdiction, which is merely colloquial, which an agency has quietly retired — and what the issuing body itself calls it in English.

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What this is, and what it is not

An analyst at a bank, a police force or an agency already has better raw material than this publication could produce — mutual evaluation reports, regulator advisories, sanctions lists, the regional threat assessments. This section does not compete with any of that and does not restate it.

What does not exist in English, in one place, is the mapping between a native legal term and what it actually means. Someone reading a Japanese police release, a mainland Chinese indictment or a Korean prosecutorial statement has nothing to orient them: which word is statutory, which is street usage, which an agency stopped using a decade ago, and which English rendering the issuing body itself prefers. That is the gap this fills.

What is deliberately absent

• Current sanctions or watch-list status. Those change continuously and the bodies that maintain them publish them better; a mirror that has gone stale is a false statement about a named party. What this section does carry is a dated chronology of actions already taken — past acts, each anchored to its instrument — with links out to the live lists for anyone who needs current status.
• Loss and volume estimates. The published figures are not reconcilable with one another — they cover different geographies, count profits against losses, and mix reported with modelled. Quoting one as though it settled the question would be worse than quoting none.
• Anything operational. This documents the public record and the vocabulary. It does not explain how an offence is committed or how detection is avoided.

By jurisdiction

The same story from three positions. Each of these countries has a domestic fraud problem with its own statutory vocabulary, citizens trafficked into the same compounds, and nationals defrauded from those compounds by their own co-nationals — a pattern all three governments document in their own words.

• Japan — 特殊詐欺, and the only zone raised on scam grounds
• South Korea — 전기통신금융사기, and three zones under outright travel ban
• China — 电信网络诈骗, a dedicated statute, and the judicial definition of a 园区

Terms

• 23 entries
• 13 jurisdictions

1. Assisting information-network crime 帮信罪 / 幫信罪 China · Legal The offence used against the people who supply the infrastructure of fraud — sellers of SIM cards and bank cards, and money mules. It is the enforcement workhorse behind the 断卡行动 campaign.
2. Bōryokudan 暴力団 Japan · Legal The statutory category for an organised crime group in Japan. The governing act defines it as an organisation likely to facilitate its members in collectively or habitually committing illegal acts of violence. It is the term that appears in law, in police statistics and in court, and it is not interchangeable with the word most English readers know.
3. Butchering the foreign plate 杀洋盘 / 殺洋盤 Chinese-language operations · In-group Perpetrator jargon for running the relationship-investment fraud against non-Chinese victims, formed by analogy with 杀猪盘. It has since appeared in Chinese court reporting and legal commentary. A homophonic variant, 杀羊盘 or butchering the sheep, is a pun on the same sound.
4. Cut-the-cards operation 断卡行动 / 斷卡行動 China · Agency category A national campaign against the supply of the two things a fraud operation cannot run without: telephone numbers and bank accounts. Launched 10 October 2020 under the State Council inter-ministerial joint conference on telecom-network crime.
5. Cutting out the kidney 噶腰子 / 割腰子 Chinese-language internet discourse · Colloquial The organ-harvesting fear attached to the Southeast Asian compounds, and one of the most widely circulated ideas about them in Chinese. In Chinese it functions overwhelmingly as dark humour — a grim internet joke about the danger of going abroad. It is recorded here because the distance between what is feared and what is documented is unusually wide, and because translation into English inverts its register.
6. Dog-push 狗推 Chinese-language operations across Southeast Asia · In-group The operators own word for the frontline worker who runs the approach on dating apps and social media — the sales tier. Above them sit 狗庄, a branch manager, and 主管 or 组长, supervisor or team leader.
7. Furikome sagi 振り込め詐欺 Japan · Agency category Superseded The earlier National Police Agency umbrella term, adopted in December 2004, covering the ore-ore ("it's me") impersonation calls and related fee, refund and loan-guarantee frauds. Superseded as the umbrella by 特殊詐欺 from 2012 as the methods stopped depending on bank transfers, though it survived as a named sub-grouping for several years afterwards.
8. Hangure 半グレ Japan · Colloquial Superseded Media and colloquial term for groups that behave like organised crime without the structure, ritual or designation of a bōryokudan — and, crucially, without attracting the legal consequences that designation brings. The National Police Agency's own working term was 準暴力団 (quasi-bōryokudan), adopted 2013; both have since given way to the tokuryū framing.
9. Jopok 조직폭력배 / 조폭 South Korea · Agency category The standard police and press term for an organised crime group in South Korea, routinely contracted to 조폭. It is not itself a statutory term — no act defines it. Prosecutions proceed under the criminal-organisation article of the Criminal Act and the aggravated organised-violence provisions of the Punishment of Violences Act.
10. Mirror transaction 對敲 / 对敲 China, and Chinese-speaking networks internationally · In-group The settlement mechanism behind most Chinese underground banking. Money moves within each jurisdiction and never across the border between them: a payer hands over funds in one country, a counterpart releases the equivalent in another, and the two sides are reconciled against each other. The operators describe the objective as 兩地平衡 — balance in two places.
11. Northern Myanmar 缅北 / 緬北 Chinese-language discourse · Colloquial In Chinese this is not primarily a geographic term. It is a byword for lawlessness and disappearance, carrying a weight that northern Myanmar does not begin to transmit in English. It has also absorbed places that are not in northern Myanmar: Myawaddy, the site most associated with the compounds, is in Karen State in the southeast on the Thai border opposite Mae Sot — and is still filed under 缅北.
12. Organisation of a criminal-syndicate nature 黑社会性质组织 China (People's Republic) · Legal Draft The PRC statutory category for organised crime. It requires four characteristics together: a stable organisation with identifiable leadership; economic strength obtained illegally and used to sustain the group; organised and repeated violence or intimidation; and — the distinguishing element — illegal control or substantial influence over a locality or an industry, frequently sustained by official protection.
13. Park (scam compound) 园区 / 園區 China; operations in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos · In-group What the fraud operations in Southeast Asia are called in Chinese. The word is the standard bureaucratic term for a development zone, and it began as the operators own branding: a joint 2024 opinion of the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security describes syndicates operating abroad under the pretext of industrial parks and development zones while in fact running fraud.
14. Piglets 猪仔 / 豬仔 Chinese-language discourse; operations across Southeast Asia · In-group The trafficked workers inside the compounds. The same word, with the same verb construction 卖猪仔, was used in the nineteenth century for indentured Chinese labourers in the coolie trade, along with a full vocabulary — 猪仔馆 for the holding barracoons, 猪仔船 for the ships, 猪仔纸 for the indenture contract.
15. Romance baiting 殺豬盤 / 杀猪盘 Chinese-speaking criminal networks; operations across Southeast Asia · In-group Long-duration relationship fraud in which a victim is cultivated over weeks or months and then induced into a fraudulent investment. The Chinese name is the perpetrators' own, and it describes the victim as livestock being fattened. Variants exist for other animals.
16. Shitei bōryokudan 指定暴力団 Japan · Designation A formal designation applied to a named group by a Prefectural Public Safety Commission under the Bōtaihō. Designation does not ban the group or make membership an offence. It unlocks administrative powers against it — cease-and-desist orders, exclusion from contracts and premises, and liability provisions reaching the leadership. A designation is valid for three years; the Act provides no renewal mechanism, so on expiry the commission makes a fresh designation.
17. Telecom-network fraud 电信网络诈骗 / 电诈 China · Legal The PRC statutory category for fraud committed by telecommunications or network means. It is the Chinese counterpart to Japan’s 特殊詐欺 and Korea’s 전기통신금융사기 — one phenomenon, three statutory vocabularies.
18. Telecommunications financial fraud 전기통신금융사기 / 보이스피싱 South Korea · Legal The statutory term is 전기통신금융사기 — telecommunications financial fraud — defined in the special act governing prevention and victim reimbursement, with the Financial Services Commission as competent authority. 보이스피싱 is the public-facing and media term, used even in official awareness campaigns, and now covers messaging, SMS and remote-access vectors well beyond voice.
19. Tokuryū 匿名・流動型犯罪グループ / トクリュウ Japan · Agency category The National Police Agency's category for groups that assemble through social media for a specific offence and disperse afterwards. Two features define them: the organisers stay anonymous, and the people who carry out the offence are interchangeable and rotate. They are not a gang with a membership; they are a recruitment pattern. The category subsumes the earlier 準暴力団 and has displaced 半グレ in Japanese policy language.
20. Tokushu sagi 特殊詐欺 Japan · Agency category The National Police Agency's umbrella category for fraud conducted without meeting the victim: the victim is induced at a distance to transfer money or hand over cash or cards. It is the heading under which Japanese fraud statistics are actually compiled.
21. Triad society 三合會 Hong Kong · Legal A legal category in Hong Kong, and one defined more strangely than most readers expect. Under the Societies Ordinance a society is deemed a triad society if it uses triad ritual, or adopts or makes use of any triad title or nomenclature. The definition turns on ritual and naming, not on organised criminal activity — an inheritance from the colonial-era suppression of the Heaven and Earth Society. Claiming or professing membership is itself an offence, without proof of actual membership.
22. Underground banking 地下錢莊 / 地下钱庄 China, and Chinese-speaking networks internationally · Colloquial An informal value-transfer network operating outside the licensed banking system, settling obligations between jurisdictions without moving money across a border. Not a statutory category anywhere; it is an enforcement and analytical label. Fronts are ordinary businesses — currency exchange, pawnbroking, jewellery, trade.
23. Yakuza やくざ / ヤクザ Japan · Colloquial The everyday and international word for Japanese organised crime. It has no legal standing whatever: no statute defines it, no designation attaches to it, and no police statistic is compiled under it. It remains useful for cultural and historical writing and is the wrong word for anything operational.