CAMBODIA—By July 28, O’Smach, on Cambodia’s northern border, had become a ghost town. Five days of intense fighting with Thailand, erupting after months of tensions over contested territory, saw more than 260,000 people driven from their homes on both sides of the border. Families streamed out of nearby villages toward makeshift camps. As an older man who stayed behind pointed out shelling damage to his neighbors’ home, a drone appeared overhead, sending him running to the trench he’d dug in his yard.

Not everyone had the chance to flee. Cambodia’s 2019 census put O’Smach’s population just over 9,850, but that doesn’t include the prison-like, office-dormitory compounds that have appeared here over the past five years, with the capacity to house 10,000 more.

CAMBODIA—By July 28, O’Smach, on Cambodia’s northern border, had become a ghost town. Five days of intense fighting with Thailand, erupting after months of tensions over contested territory, saw more than 260,000 people driven from their homes on both sides of the border. Families streamed out of nearby villages toward makeshift camps. As an older man who stayed behind pointed out shelling damage to his neighbors’ home, a drone appeared overhead, sending him running to the trench he’d dug in his yard.

Not everyone had the chance to flee. Cambodia’s 2019 census put O’Smach’s population just over 9,850, but that doesn’t include the prison-like, office-dormitory compounds that have appeared here over the past five years, with the capacity to house 10,000 more.

Around 50 sites like these now line the Cambodia-Thailand border, designed to house a slice of the trillion-dollar cybercrime industry—primarily teams running investment scams, dubbed “pig butchering” for the way they fatten their targets up; sextortion scams that blackmail victims, including children, by threatening to make sexual images public; scams that impersonate police to gain account access; and fraudulent online gambling sites. Once aimed largely at the Chinese public, these now target victims worldwide and rake in tens of billions of dollars a year in Cambodia alone.

The compounds evolved from a casino industry that caters mostly to Chinese tourists and Thai day-trippers and has been linked to human trafficking, drug smuggling, and the endangered wildlife trade. From 2016, physical casinos were dwarfed by the online gambling industry (outlawed by Cambodia in 2019), which progressed to illegal sites and outright scams. Operators rent space in casinos and purpose-built compounds controlled by Chinese criminals, Myanmar warlords, and the Cambodian political elite.

Scam companies rely heavily on forced and trafficked labor from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to chat with targets, pose as romantic interests and employees at fake investment platforms, and persuade them to make deposits. Survivors tell us that torture, rape, and beatings are common. As the fighting raged in July, some trafficking victims reached out for help, saying they were locked in their dorms by their bosses. Videos shot from inside these sites show missiles flying overhead, explosions thundering outside, some workers appearing to break out and run, and damage from shelling in the grounds.

The surface cause of the conflict—still simmering more than a month after the cease-fire—is a decades-long

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