Cambodia aims to shut down all online scam centers within weeks

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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Cambodia hopes to shut down all of the country’s notorious online scam centers by the end of next month, the head of the Southeast Asian nation’s effort to combat the cybercrime said Wednesday.

Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, in charge of the Commission for Combating Online Scams, told The Associated Press in an interview that the government since July had targeted 250 locations believed to be carrying out the lucrative criminal activity, and has shut down about 80%, or 200, of them.

He said police would carry out suppression activities after April in an attempt to keep the scam centers from reemerging.

Cambodia has launched previous crackdowns against online scam centers but without major effect.

“The real question is whether this effort targets the system that enables the industry, not just the buildings where scams happen,” commented Jacob Sims, an expert on transnational crime. “Past crackdowns in Cambodia have often left the financial and protection networks intact, allowing operations to quickly reconstitute.”

“So far there are few signs the current round of enforcement is reaching the key perpetrators among the Cambodian ruling elite,” said Sims, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center. “Moreover, continued restrictions on independent reporting and civil society actors make the government’s claims difficult to verify.”

Cybercrime has flourished in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar, with scam victims around the world being bilked out of tens of billions of dollars annually, according to United Nations experts and other analysts.

The industry is closely involved in human trafficking, as foreign nationals are employed to run romance and cryptocurrency scams, often after being recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions of near-slavery.

Chhay Sinarith said that in the latest crackdown the government launched 79 legal cases involving 697 alleged scam ringleaders and their associates.

At the same time, it has repatriated almost 10,000 scam center workers from 23 countries, he said, with fewer than 1,000 awaiting official repatriation. Others who have escaped or been released from raided centers have gone home on their own.

Cambodia works closely with countries, especially China and the United States, to combat the problem, he said.

Cambodian police on Tuesday raided a suspected scam center in a high-rise building in the capital, Phnom Penh, arresting about 60 Cambodians and Chinese nationals at their desks.

“They did chat to convince people in Europe to invest the money with them, but their investment is fake and fraudulent. It is not real,” said Bun Sosekha, a deputy commissioner of the Phnom Penh Municipal Police.

Earlier Wednesday, journalists were shown 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.

Cambodia has been plagued by the illicit activity since it began on a much smaller scale around 2012, when it was primarily carried out using voice-over-internet-protocol — VOIP — phones, with the callers disguising their location and identities, Chhay Sinarith said.

The scams proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when casinos, many already engaged in the gray-area activity of online gambling, no longer had in-person customers and turned to online scams on an industrial scale.

Scam centers have since spread around the world, as far as Africa and Latin America.

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Associated Press writer Grant Peck in Bangkok has contributed to this report.

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This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Associated Press and FRONTLINE (PBS) that includes an upcoming documentary.