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Deception is a pervasive feature of the online marketplace: from phone calls by fake tech support workers at Microsoft, to fraudulent emails asking for advance fee payment, and fake postings for jobs on employment platforms. Building off interdisciplinary discussions within science and technology studies (STS), this special issue expands research on the underside, illicit, and irregular forms of digital behavior. Our focus is on how scams, fakes, and frauds are embedded in the digital economy. In particular, we look at the institutions shaping online scams, the labor involved in performing and/or navigating them, and the role of platforms in hosting them.

Sex workers are often portrayed as groups with little authority over their jobs. But lately they are making much use of online spaces, both large scale public-facing platforms and their own smaller websites. Taking a deeper ethnographic look into their online activities, I recount a story of highly adept, technologically proficient, and expert digital navigation by sex workers online. The analysis follows the trajectory of platforms in the online sex industry over the last two decades. First it charts the rise of platforms for matching, reviewing, and identity verification, many of which developed roughly around the 2000s, and their impact in reconfiguring the online labor of sex workers. Then it outlines events unfolding in the mid-2010s, when the state responded to this trend with legislation like SESTA-FOSTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. Representing a departure from previous strategies regarding the sex industry, these state policies embark on a battle for control over data. They identify platforms as the main source of the problem and turn to solutions of simply taking them down. I will argue that this strategy fails to address the broader structural conditions which draw people into online sex work. It also fails to recognize the ways that workers and other groups use platforms, and the kinds of surveillance they practice through them.

Global call centers, such as those in India receiving back office work from the U.S., are testing grounds for new ICTs (information and communication technologies). While the "electronic sweatshop" has been the prevailing model for understanding the implications of these ICTs, this analysis proposes that a multi-surveillances framework offers a more compelling account. It widens the lens from managers alone, and uncovers a web of actors directly involved in the daily operations of Indian call centers—technology vendors, American outsourcing clients, American consumers, Indian shopfloor supervisors, and Indian employees. Using a case study of the Indian call center industry, this analysis shows each of these actors participates in their own independent surveillance of the others. It charts the proliferation of the technologies themselves and shows how devices like emotion detectors, answering machines, and online unions are symbolic of changing relations in global interactive service.

The spread of corporate diversity programs in the past decade has meant renewed attention to the rhetoric of fairness in employment relations. A number of organizational dynamics can derail this project, however, especially at the transnational level. In the author's case studies of a U.S. high-tech firm (AmCo) and its subsidiary in India (TransCo), this happens through a filtering process, in which managers disassemble broad themes of diversity and repackage them in more narrow and exclusive terms. In the United States, the discourse of gender is more legitimate, whereas in India, it is ethnicity/race. These discourses of diversity have both positive and negative implications. They are used by managers to divert attention from overt forms of stratification and avoid disruptions in employee relations, yet they also generate a mutual critique between the two firms that can help to overcome the filtering process and achieve a more integrated understanding of discrimination.

Borders in Service traces the intersection of service labour and national identity across global call centres in seven countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Mauritius, Morocco, the Philippines, and the US-Mexico border. While most studies on offshore call centres have focused on India, this collection explores the experiences of call centre workers in many of the newly emerging hubs of transnational service work.