Tokuryu vs Yakuza: The Changing Rules of Japan’s Underworld

Japanese organised crime is seen as shifting from the classic yakuza model to scammers recruited online. This is true, but that truth is much more nuanced. World of Crime explains the whole story.

In May 2025, Cambodian and Japanese authorities breached a guarded compound on the outskirts of Poipet, a dusty border town near Cambodia’s border with Thailand. Inside, investigators found twenty-nine Japanese nationals working telephone fraud operations targeting victims back home. Some had been there for years.

The raid was one of dozens in the last couple of years that have revealed the extent of one of the most significant criminal economies of the 21st century: scam compounds.

Discoveries of compounds, or parts therein, focused on the Japanese market have kept coming. Between the end of 2024 and October 2025, authorities identified 104 Japanese nationals abroad as suspects or participants in scam operations across Cambodia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The Poipet site was the largest, accounting for nearly a third of all known Japanese nationals extracted from such facilities during that period.

What emerged from Poipet was the final piece of evidence that, for several years now, Japanese citizens were being identified at home, transported abroad, and absorbed into compounds run by organised crime groups.

Those in Japan responsible for this have been named tokuryu.

They are upending Japan’s underworld, especially at a time when the yakuza and their hold over major criminal economies is fading fast.