You’ll find yourself in a world of hurt working remotely in a country you lack a work visa in. Getting caught is another matter entirely, but I assume they’ll come down on them eventually, probably by offering an incentive to citizens to report them.
Why do you expect them to crack down? The intent of disallowing working on tourist visas is to protect the local labor market. Digital nomads work for foreign companies and don't get location based market benefits that would be restricted to locals (consensus among the various communities seems to be that having local clients was a big no-no), so they add no pressure to local labor markets. In regards to the local economy, digital nomads are nothing but tourists.
Rather than cracking down, the current direction is legalization. Countries where digital nomads are common know what's happening and they ignore it as it's beneficial to them and are now legalizing to get an even larger slice of the pie (by attracting those who were previously fearful).
Others have mentioned the issue of housing stock, but regular tourists are actually more inefficient in that regards (very seasonal and short stays. Think about how many empty room-days most hotels have).
Housing stock is a huge thing. As an expat, working remote, and (legally) living here, the locals can't believe how much I spend on rent, which is still cheaper than I was paying in the states, but far more than any native could/would pay.
The country is likely missing out on (pretty substantial) income taxes, so through legalization they are trying to get some of that. I'm sure the countries enjoy the injection of cash into their economy, but they would rather get that from tourists vs. people working, who tend to use more public resources than tourists.
I'm not seeing how digital nomads have an additional negative impact compared to tourists though. If we're comparing not having wealthy foreigners vs having them, then yes, nobody will deny that has an effect on housing stock, but having digital nomads vs tourists is either a wash or a benefit to the digital nomads.
As for public resources, people who commute for work most likely use more than tourists, but digital nomads doing so would be an outlier.
The differentiation between digital nomads (people on a tourist visa/waiver) vs expats is an important one, as expats do get more entitlements to public services due to their legal residence.
This is a huge part of it; if your group of locals likes you and is on your side, you'll probably be fine.
But if you piss off the wrong person, you could have a hell of a time (depending on the country, even spending time in jail).
And the US embassy may not be inclined to help depending how blatant you were about it.
Luckily, the more likely jail time is the more likely you can just bribe the right person, but again, you need the locals on your side to tell you who that is.
To agree; if you're quiet, don't use up too much bandwidth, parking, or have visitors you might stay under the radar; But maybe you have a rent dispute, maybe you party too hard one night, maybe someone at your pub doesn't like that you cheer for the other team.
You're a blackmail target like anybody else doing something baseline illegal.
