The recent bust of a transnational “love scamming” syndicate operating in Indonesia run by Chinese nationals should serve as a wake-up call—not only for Indonesian law enforcement, but also for Beijing.
The case, revealed this month by Indonesia’s Directorate General of Immigration, illustrates how cross-border cybercrime exploits legal loopholes, jurisdictional blind spots and uneven international cooperation.
More importantly, it highlights why China and Indonesia must work together more closely, urgently and transparently to confront a crime that respects no borders.
The details of the case are troubling. Twenty-six Chinese and one Vietnamese national were arrested across multiple elite residential clusters in Tangerang, South Tangerang, North Jakarta, and Penjaringan. Operating quietly in gated communities far from public scrutiny, the syndicate targeted South Korean citizens living outside Indonesia.
The choice of victims was calculated. According to Indonesian officials, the perpetrators believed that by avoiding Indonesian victims, they could evade prosecution under Indonesian criminal law. By operating outside China, they sought to escape China’s far harsher penalties for online fraud.
This is not merely a story of individual wrongdoing. It is a textbook example of organized cybercrime exploiting regulatory gaps between states. The syndicate was structured, hierarchical and technologically sophisticated.
A leader, identified as ZK, oversaw operations, financiers and controllers managed logistics, and field operators executed scams using hundreds of mobile phones, laptops, PCs and custom-installed network infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence tools such as “Hello GPT” were used to automate romantic conversations, allowing male perpetrators to convincingly impersonate women. Victims were lured into video calls, secretly recorded and then blackmailed.
Indonesia deserves credit for its coordinated enforcement operation, conducted between January 8-16, 2026, which combined immigration surveillance, digital forensics and on-the-ground raids.
The discovery of long-term overstayers—some illegally residing in Indonesia for nearly eight years—and the possession of Indonesian identity documents obtained unlawfully further underscore how deeply the network embedded itself within local systems.
Yet law enforcement alone is not enough. This case exposes a shared problem that cannot be solved by Indonesia acting in isolation. When Chinese nationals commit crimes abroad to avoid prosecution at home, the issue becomes one of international responsibility.
China cannot credibly claim success in combating cybercrime domestically while its citizens relocate operations overseas, turning countries like Indonesia into unintended staging grounds.
For China, cooperation is not just a matter of diplomacy but also of credibility. Beijing has repeatedly emphasized its zero-tolerance stance on online fraud, telecom scams and organized cybercrime.
Those commitments, however, must extend beyond its borders. Active collaboration with Indonesian authorities—through intelligence sharing, joint investigations, suspect profiling and financial tracing—would demonstrate that China’s crackdown is substantive and not selective.
Indonesia, meanwhile, has its own interests at stake. As Southeast Asia’s largest economy and a hub for foreign investment and tourism, Indonesia cannot afford to be perceived as a safe haven for transnational cybercriminals.
Crimes like love scamming may not directly target Indonesian citizens, but they damage Indonesia’s international reputation, strain diplomatic relations and exploit weaknesses in immigration controls and document security.
Concrete cooperation is therefore essential. First, both governments should establish a permanent joint task force on cyber-enabled transnational crime, linking immigration, police, cybercrime units and prosecutors.
Second, China should commit to accepting deported suspects for prosecution when sufficient evidence exists, rather than allowing them to disappear into administrative gray zones. Third, both sides should work together to regulate and monitor the misuse of AI tools in criminal activity, including information sharing on emerging technologies used by scam syndicates.
Equally important is cooperation beyond China and Indonesia. The victims in this case were South Korean nationals, a reminder that cybercrime can be a trilateral—and often multilateral—problem.
China and Indonesia should actively involve impacted countries in evidence-sharing and victim-reporting mechanisms, ensuring that the absence of local complaints does not translate into impunity.
The arrest of 27 foreign nationals is a success, but it is only the beginning. Love scamming thrives on distance—between countries, between legal systems and between responsibility and accountability. By choosing cooperation over quiet deflection, China and Indonesia can turn this case into a model for regional action against cybercrime.
Failure to do so would only ensure that the next syndicate moves on, finds another loophole and repeats the same crimes—just in a different neighborhood and under a different scam gang flag.
Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is director of the China-Indonesia Desk at the Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) independent research institute. Yeta Purnama is a researcher at CELIOS.