Features | Security | Southeast Asia

Cambodia: From Scam Empire to Security State

War with Thailand pushed Cambodia to enact a sweeping scam crackdown. Now the ruling elite is leveraging the same crackdown to consolidate its political control.

The remains of Me Teuk Bridge, previously the primary route into Thmor Da, in Cambodia’s Pursat province, as seen on Aug. 6, 2026. The bridge was destroyed by a Thai F-16 airstrike on Dec. 13, 2025.

It was two days after Christmas, just before 7 a.m., when Paul heard the first explosion. The 50-year-old Nigerian national had struggled to make a living as an English teacher in Vietnam and applied for a well-paid admin job in Cambodia, only to find he’d been sold to a criminal group running online scams. Beaten and tortured into compliance, he had been transported from site to site as bosses raced to evade a wave of raids on the country’s brutal scam compounds – by this point estimated to hold hundreds of thousands of people who, like Paul (we have changed his name for his safety), had been trafficked into forced criminal labor in the scam and illegal gambling industry.

By December, he was in Choam, a tiny jungle outpost where Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot is buried, confined to a scam compound complex centered around a casino that once served Thai gamblers hopping across the land border. That border had been closed since June, just before fighting broke out between Cambodia and Thailand. Now, after months of fragile peace, the conflict had erupted again.

Bosses told workers not to panic; Choam was not a target. Plus, Paul had never seen any sign of Cambodian soldiers or military vehicles from the windows of his guarded office-dormitory, and by the morning of December 27, the two sides had already negotiated a ceasefire. But hours before it came into effect, Thailand attacked.

“The next thing we start hearing, seeing drones. Blasting. Bombing upon bombing,” said Paul, his voice shaking. He says he survived by sheltering in a concrete drain, while scam bosses frantically hung Chinese flags from windows to show Thai surveillance the buildings were not Cambodian-controlled, but the main hotel-casino was hit again and again.

“A lot of people died there. And on the road, strings of bullets tearing the body of people’s cars,” he said. “If a bullet can tear a car [like that], what about a human being?”

The border dispute that sparked the conflict goes back decades, but targeting and capturing scam industry infrastructure under the guise of combatting crime has been weaponized as a tactic by both sides since mid-2025, when the Thai military began bombing scam hubs on Cambodian soil. The Thai military framed this as an effort to contain a global security threat that generates huge illicit revenues while fueling corruption and instability, and declared the conflict to be, in part, a “war against scammers.” Cambodia initially accused Thailand of exaggerating the scale of the problem as a pretext for illegal incursions into its territory, but faced with a far stronger and better-equipped army, and under pressure from countries it relies on for military aid, the government swiftly changed direction, launching a comprehensive crackdown on domestic scam compounds.

At first, it looked like Cambodia’s political elites were cornered. To repair frayed relationships with the United States and China, they not only had to admit the scale of forced online criminality compounds operating with impunity across the country but potentially sacrifice an industry worth half the country’s GDP and pivotal in cementing complicit elites’ grip on power. But instead of losing their hold over the country, Cambodia’s ruling families have turned the scam crackdown to their advantage, leveraging this diplomatic rehabilitation project to boost Cambodia’s military might, commandeer billions of dollars’ worth of real estate built and funded by criminal investors, and consolidate authoritarian control.

FBI Director Kash Patel meets with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet to discuss the Cambodian government’s anti-scam crackdown in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, July 22, 2026. Photo credit: Facebook/Samdech Thipadei Hun Manet, Prime Minister of Cambodia

Having spent years denying the existence of a large-scale, entrenched online scam industry, and even punishing those who attempted to expose it, Cambodian officials now claim their crackdown drove 300,000 scammers out of the country and saw over 250 compounds closed. While some of these compounds may be a single building, others are huge, interconnected real estate projects with their own supporting infrastructure, collectively constituting entire towns that had been purpose-built by criminal investors to the tune of billions of dollars. In June, Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who chairs Cambodia’s Commission for Combating Online Scams, told Channel News Asia that all these locations “have been converted into state property.”

This represents a staggering transfer of private assets into the hands of an increasingly autocratic government dominated by a clique of political dynasties whose own family members and company co-directors are linked to the scam compounds that have now been seized. That includes #8 Park and Golden Fortune Science & Technology Park, two “vile” forced online criminality compounds that had been designated for sanctions by the United Kingdom, U.S., and European Union as part of the Prince Holding Group. Prince Group is a Cambodia-headquartered conglomerate described by the U.S. Treasury Department as a “global criminal enterprise built on scam compounds, fraud and money laundering.”

Its founder, Chen Zhi, was appointed a personal adviser (with rank equivalent to a government minister) to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet; his father, former Prime Minister Hun Sen; former Interior Minister Sar Kheng; and to his son, the current Interior Minister Sar Sokha, who at one stage is reported to have co-owned Jinbei Casino, another entity targeted in the scam crackdown, alongside Chen himself. Sokha denies the reports.

In late May, Sar Sokha used an American lobbying firm to file a petition to remove his name from a draft U.S. bill listing key international cyberscam targets. Ten days later, the General Department of Prisons – overseen by Sar Sokha’s Interior Ministry – posted photos of the recently emptied #8 Park site, describing this as a new construction site that could be used as a prison facility.

Another prison-like scam compound has also been transformed by the Interior Ministry into a literal prison: the former “Mango 2 Park” compound, now an immigration detention center. Some trafficking survivors who managed to escape amid the chaos of conflict and crackdowns now find themselves here, in a building previously owned by one of the same types of criminal group that initially enslaved them.

Videos shared with The Diplomat of open sewage running through chronically overcrowded dormitories-turned-cells in stifling tropical heat suggest living conditions under the new management may be even worse.

This appears to be part of a broader strategy by Cambodia to expand prison capacity. New facilities are being built all over the country to ease critical overcrowding. Cambodia’s prison population has tripled over the past decade, pushing the system to more than 400 percent of its capacity. Some three-quarters of the population in some prisons are languishing at the pre-trial stage or awaiting final verdict, which can take years.

The spike in the prison population has been driven largely by sweeping arrests for minor drug offenses, but the past few years have seen draconian censorship laws increasingly target political opponents, environmental activists, protesters, and even social media users for simply resharing posts critical of government policy or its handling of the war with Thailand. In February, two Cambodian journalists were sentenced to 14 years in prison for “supplying a foreign state with information prejudicial to national defense,” after taking a photo with soldiers at the border that inadvertently appeared to show unplanted landmines in the background.

The ruins of a casino now occupied by Thai troops in Thmor Da, Pursat province, Cambodia, Aug. 6, 2026. Photo by Nathan Paul Southern.

There are concerns that this growing prison population is providing a literally captive workforce for a renewed war effort. Since May, the government began transferring nearly 800 juvenile offenders to prisons along the Thai border as part of a “vocational” program to assist military operations. Backtracking on an earlier proposal to use juveniles to build trenches and defensive infrastructure, Prime Minister Hun Manet said that participants will not serve in combat roles, but are deployed in engineering and construction supporting the military in parts of Pursat province close to the occupied scam town of Thmor Da, and in Oddar Meanchey province, home to scam compound-heavy flashpoints like Choam and the border town of O’Smach.

When we visited O’Smach in April, the Thai military was still occupying bombed-out compounds, and even giving media tours to journalists who appeared to ask no questions........

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