These seaside apartments were a ghost city - then police say scammers moved in

From a distance, Malaysia's Forest City looks 3D-printed: a bristle of identical white blocks clustered on an otherwise unremarkable coastline.

When it was unveiled by Chinese developers in 2016, the $100bn mega-project was pitched as "a dream paradise for all mankind": a special financial zone that could house some 700,000 residents. But a decade later, this 14-sq-km (3,400-acre) artificial island on Singapore's doorstep is thought to be inhabited by less than 1% of that.

Rows of eerily vacant skyscrapers loom over quiet streets. Inside empty apartments, benchtops and windows are filmed with dust.

"In 2016 they described it here like the golden city; very, very beautiful," says Jason Deng, a 56-year-old investor who was among the first to buy in Forest City, paying "a lot of money" for five properties.

"If I had known it was not so good I would not have bought so many apartments," he says now. "I thought it would be much, much better."

As it turns out, this is only a golden city for some people – and they're not the ones developers had hoped to attract.

In mid-July, Malaysian police raided two alleged scam operations spread across 32 premises in Forest City, arresting 335 people ‌and seizing assets worth about one million ringgit (£181,810; $245,000), including 313 computers, 1,557 mobile phones, 17 laptops and 10 modems.

From these two call centre hubs – one occupying 27 apartments across five storeys of a residential tower, the other spread between five bungalows – cryptocurrency syndicates ran investment and love scams targeting victims abroad, according to police.