Cambodia cracks down, but scam networks move on
The scam economy has never been only Cambodian. It is a regional business built on borders, casinos, real estate, fake recruitment, crypto laundering, and corrupt protection. Victims are global; workers come from across Asia, Africa and beyond.
‘This is real disruption, but it is only impacting the visible front end—the compounds—of a deeper problem’, said Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center and an expert on transnational crime and human rights in Southeast Asia. ‘The elites running the compounds remain unaccountable, and the primary money laundering and underground banking channels remain intact.’
Tower said one of the most serious consequences is that people were allowed to leave Cambodia freely instead of being processed through a law enforcement and victim-screening system. ‘Many of these are criminal actors who’ve flooded across borders into other countries where they’ve resumed scamming’, Tower said. ‘This has really become something of Cambodia’s gift to the world. They’ve unleashed this flood of scammers onto other countries.’
Reports of scam suspects and workers have appeared beyond Cambodia, from Vietnam and Indonesia to Sri Lanka and African countries such as Uganda. Cambodia and Myanmar remain major scam hubs, Tower said. ‘I don’t see that going away anytime soon’, he said, pointing to large scam parks along Myanmar’s border with Thailand and continuing operations in Cambodia and Laos.