Cambodia’s government said it is pressing ahead with a crackdown on online scam centers, with the stated goal of closing the remaining operations by the end of next month. Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who leads the Commission for Combating Online Scams, told The Associated Press in an interview that authorities have targeted 250 locations since July and shut down about 80% of them. He said police would follow up with suppression activities after April, seeking to keep the scam centers from reappearing in the same form.
Sinarith said the government has already carried out the current enforcement drive against the sites it believes are behind the scams. He said police have shut down about 200 locations of the 250 targeted, and he framed the campaign as part of an effort to reduce the industry’s ability to restart elsewhere. Cambodia has conducted previous crackdowns against online scam centers, but Sinarith said the persistence of the activity has motivated the new round of enforcement.
In Phnom Penh, police on Tuesday raided a suspected scam center in a high-rise building, arresting about 60 Cambodians and Chinese nationals at their desks. Bun Sosekha, a deputy commissioner of the Phnom Penh Municipal Police, described the operation as one in which people “did chat to convince people in Europe to invest the money with them,” adding that “their investment is fake and fraudulent. It is not real.” Journalists later saw equipment confiscated in raids elsewhere, including uniforms and fake identification cards used by scammers to pose online as Japanese police officers to trick and intimidate victims.
Sinarith also described the legal scope of the campaign. He said the latest crackdown involved 79 legal cases involving 697 alleged scam ringleaders and their associates. At the same time, he said Cambodia has repatriated almost 10,000 scam center workers from 23 countries, with fewer than 1,000 awaiting official repatriation, and that some people who escaped or were released from raided centers had returned home on their own.
The enforcement push has also brought international cooperation into the picture, Sinarith said. He said Cambodia works with countries, particularly China and the United States, to combat the problem.
Sinarith’s effort faces skepticism about how far it is reaching beyond the sites being raided. Jacob Sims, an expert on transnational crime and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, questioned whether the crackdown targets the broader system that enables the scams rather than focusing only on the buildings. Sims said past crackdowns in Cambodia have often left financial and protection networks intact, allowing operations to “quickly reconstitute,” and he said there have been “few signs the current round of enforcement is reaching the key perpetrators among the Cambodian ruling elite.”
Sims also said that restrictions on independent reporting and civil society groups make it difficult to verify the government’s claims. Separate from Cambodia’s domestic action, the AP said cybercrime has flourished across Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar, and that scam victims around the world have been bilked out of tens of billions of dollars annually, according to United Nations experts and other analysts. The AP described the industry as intertwined with human trafficking, with foreign nationals allegedly recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions described as near-slavery while scammers run romance and cryptocurrency fraud schemes.
Cambodia’s cybercrime problem dates back to an earlier period, Sinarith said, when scammers used voice-over-internet-protocol phones and disguised their locations and identities. He said the scams expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic as casinos—many already involved in gray-area online gambling—shifted toward large-scale online scams. Sinarith said scam centers have since spread beyond Southeast Asia, reaching places including Africa and Latin America.