Awareness as Intervention: Scam-Linked Forced Labour examines why scam-linked forced labour continues to persist and expand despite sustained international investment in prevention, capacity-building, victim assistance, and cross-border cooperation. Rather than framing this persistence as a failure of attention or intent, the publication argues that prevailing anti-trafficking responses are constrained by how they operate in practice, prioritising downstream harm management while leaving upstream recruitment dynamics and operational continuity largely intact.

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Drawing on longitudinal operational observation across repeated cases, the analysis assesses how awareness campaigns, training programmes, investigations, and protection mechanisms function over time. It finds that many interventions emphasise administratively manageable activity—such as workshops, advisories, reporting, and procedural compliance—without materially increasing enforcement risk or disrupting the systems that sustain scam operations. As a result, response activity accumulates while underlying conditions remain stable.

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The publication concludes that response effectiveness is closely tied to alignment between intervention design, institutional incentives, and operational reality. Where funding logic and evaluation metrics reward visibility, presence, and process over measurable disruption, interventions may stabilise harm rather than reduce it. Without addressing these structural constraints, awareness and capacity-building risk functioning as symbolic assurance rather than as mechanisms of meaningful change.