Cambodia’s Online Scamming Crackdown Stops at the Top

This week’s international anti-scam conference is an attempt to distract global attention from Phnom Penh’s abetment of criminality on an industrial scale.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who will this week preside over the International Conference on Combating Online Scams in Phnom Penh on Sept. 23-24, 2026.

On September 23 and 24, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet will preside over an international conference on combating online scams in Phnom Penh that is co-sponsored by Interpol, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and China’s Lancang Mekong Cooperation mechanism. In the run-up to the conference, Cambodian leaders and state media have been unusually candid that its purpose is to help “restore the country’s international reputation.”

The ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) has spent years denying or minimizing a massive criminal economy operating in plain sight – and repressing those journalists and human rights groups that sought to expose the problem. Now that extraordinary outside pressure compelled it to empty the country’s massive online scamming compounds, the party-state is recasting itself as an anti-scam champion while the politically protected elites who abetted the industry remain largely untouched.

Now comes the harder question: whether the political system that protected this industry will be held accountable – or allowed to write itself a clean bill of health with a global seal of approval.

That question is at the center of a new letter from U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast and House China Select Committee Chair John Moolenaar. The chairs asked the Trump administration to investigate 26 individuals and two entities and determine within 180 days whether they meet the statutory criteria for sanctions under Global Magnitsky, cyber-related, transnational criminal organization, or other authorities. The letter pointed to what the lawmakers describe as the “financial networks, organizers, and political protection structures” that enabled the industry.

Research I published last week, supported by the National Democratic Institute and Inca Digital, placed Mast and Moolenaar’s letter in its broader context. Our central claim is that Cambodia’s scam compounds were only the visible front end of a deeply entrenched political economy. The scam economy was not a sudden criminal intrusion into an otherwise normal state. Cambodia’s ruling coalition has spent decades converting successive illicit and predatory economies – from land and natural resources to casinos and online gambling – into private wealth and political power. The government’s crackdown, enacted due to external pressure, has reached foreign operators and physical compounds without meaningfully disturbing the domestic political arrangements that enabled the scam economy’s rise and significant durability.

Notably, the chairs’ requested determinations include prominent spokespeople, Cabinet-level officials, personal advisers, and family members of the prime minister.

Consider just one example: Hun To, nephew of former Prime Minister Hun Sen and cousin of........

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