Features | Society | Southeast Asia

‘I Was Forced to Shock Them’: Life Inside Cambodia’s Online Scam Compounds

There’s been widespread focus on foreigners trafficked into Cambodia’s cyber-scam compounds. But a growing number of Cambodian nationals are being forced to work in the illegal industry as well.

Motorbikes drive toward buildings under construction in Poipet City, Banteay Meanchey province, close to the Cambodia-Thailand border, Feb. 28, 2026.

“I tortured nearly 100 Chinese people,” a 27-year-old Cambodian former security guard recalled with regret. In January, the guard was lured to work at a big online scam center station on Bokor Mountain in southwest Cambodia, not imagining that he would be forced to punish Chinese workers who failed to find scam target clients.

One of many Cambodian scam center workers who spoke to The Diplomat, the guard asked to speak anonymously out of concerns for his safety.

He told reporters that he worked at the compound even amid the mass exodus of foreign nationals from alleged scam operations across Cambodia, which occurred in mid-January 2026.

The former guard applied for the job through a Facebook announcement recruiting security guards. The online recruiter told him that he would work as a regular guard, as he had done before at restaurants. However, on the night of his second day, his work took an unexpected turn when he was ordered to deliver electric shocks to workers for unknown reasons.

“I was a regular guard in the daytime; when it was nighttime, around 10 p.m., Chinese employees went in line to exercise,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what happened, but I was forced to give them shocks and beat them with a baton.” He said sometimes the torture was done by Chinese bosses.

“Sometimes I used electric shocks on their genitals,” he said.

The guard said there were at least 600 Chinese workers in the screened compound, which resembled an empty warehouse perched on the mountain. The center of the compound was protected by several layers of gates and security guards.

He said during this period, in January, he didn’t see any authorities inspecting the site, despite the crackdowns supposedly taking place elsewhere.

With little understanding of the Chinese language, many Cambodian security guards were reluctant to carry out torture, and some chose to quit. After realizing that his actions could potentially be illegal, he also decided to leave.

“I felt afraid, and I didn’t want to do it. Because torturing people is illegal,” he said.

He also recalled transporting newly arriving Chinese workers from the nearby town of Kampot to the Bokor mountain at night. Once they arrived, they were trained and then put to work in call centers in front of computers for what he believed were online scams.

The guard earned $360 a month, with food and accommodation provided. But conditions were harsh.

“It’s like a prison,” he said of the center. At night, the remaining food was mixed together with Chinese noodles, like pork rice. “I couldn’t endure eating it,” he said.

The warehouse had 10 big rooms with countless rows of bunk beds per room, everyone living together and showering together naked. They are not allowed to go out of the compound unsupervised. Only Chinese bosses and Cambodian staff could go outside to buy food.

The online scam industry has expanded rapidly across parts of Southeast Asia in recent years, including Cambodia, which has been alleged to be the second-largest destination for online scam operations after Myanmar. The industry is linked to serious human rights abuses and trafficking, with approximately 100,000 believed to be working inside Cambodia-based compounds, according to a U.N. report released in August 2023.

While Cambodian officials have rejected these claims, they have come under increasing pressure over the alleged collusion of state authorities in online scamming operations. In June 2025, Amnesty International released an investigation identifying 53 scam compounds that have been operating across 16 of Cambodia’s towns. The report documented abuses such as human trafficking, torture, forced and child labor, unlawful detention, and modern slavery that were taking place inside the compounds. Most notably, the group said the government had “failed” to address the crisis, despite announcements of periodic crackdowns, suggesting a “level of acquiescence” in the human rights violations.

Then, in October, Washington and London jointly sanctioned Chen Zhi, the chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Group, along with 146 related targets, accusing the Cambodia-based network of running transnational cyberfraud operations, including forced-labor scam compounds and cryptocurrency “pig butchering” schemes that stole billions from victims worldwide.

Three months after the allegation, Chen, a former personal advisor to the Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen and his son, Prime Minister Hun Manet, was arrested and extradited to China on January 6. Under intensifying pressure from both China and the U.S., the government launched the most serious government crackdown on the online scamming sector thus far, raiding scam operations across the country as workers flooded out of shuttered compounds.

Chhay Sinarith, head of the Secretariat of the Commission for Combating Online Scams (CCOS), says that 110,095 foreigners from six nationalities were deported from the country during January and early February. The campaign has also led 210,000 foreigners to voluntarily leave Cambodia, according to the Cambodian government, which also claims that it has shut down nearly 200 scam compounds and arrested and convicted a total of 172 ringleaders and accomplices since June. The government has pledged to completely stamp out online scam operations by April.

Billion-Dollar Scam Operations

Da Long, 30, spent nearly four years inside Cambodia’s online scam industry before quitting in mid‑2024. He shared his experience of how he witnessed the industry’s growth across the country and how he was almost trafficked himself.

Long, who asked to use a pseudonym, was a specialist in hotels and hospitality in Siem Reap. In 2020, when COVID-19 broke out, Long’s work and the whole country’s tourism sector collapsed. With $30,000 in debt, he had little choice but to accept a high-paying customer service position offering $700 a month in a building in Sihanoukville  — a workplace he later discovered was an online scam operation.

His role was to provide fake loan services to Filipinos abroad that did not require formal documentation.

“It’s a scam; the client will never receive the loan,” he said.

The process appeared simple. After filling out an application, clients were asked to transfer an initial $500 to “verify” their bank accounts. Once the payment was made, the company would claim the client had submitted incorrect information, forcing them to send additional funds. The cycle continued with endless mistakes until the victims had lost thousands of dollars.

“Some clients intended to borrow only $2,500 but potentially lost thousands of dollars,” he said, “In just one month, I could defraud 6,500 clients who invested money.” It took Long a month to realize it was a scam platform, but due to COVID-19, jobs were scarce, and he decided to stay.

Motorbikes drive toward buildings under construction in Poipet City, Banteay Meanchey province, close to the Cambodia-Thailand border, Feb. 28, 2026. (Photo by Thang Sinorn)

Long became involved in many types of online scams. He moved between sites, including the O‑Smach Resort in northern Cambodia, the Venus Casino in Bavet city on the border with Vietnam, and finally the Nanhai Hotel in Sihanoukville.

Those locations have been listed both by online research group Cyberscam Monitor and in U.S. reports as trafficking and forced labor sites with links to online scams.

When Long arrived at a casino in Chrey Thom, a district in Kandal province near the Vietnamese border, he said that the compound owners “intended to sell me” if he took a job there. A Chinese middleman who brought me would receive $700 in “incentives,” he said. He refused to work there but stayed in the industry out of curiosity and financial pressure.

At O’Smach Resort, he recalled there being around 20 buildings that housed some 5,000 people — mostly Chinese, but also including  Vietnamese and Thais. Work was extremely stressful. “I worked 12 hours per day. If I couldn’t find a client as a target, they threatened to deduct my salary,” he said. “Some days they punished me [by making me work] 18 hours.”

Long worked with many foreign nationals and witnessed them getting beaten and having their passports seized. However, he noted that the managers “don’t dare to touch or mistreat Cambodians.”

Later, he was assigned to carry out romance scams known as “pig‑butchering” scams. “One day, I defrauded a Chinese‑Malaysian client to invest $110,000. Some months, I earned $520,000 for the company. In one month, the company could earn approximately $18 million,” he said.

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) estimated the industry’s annual revenue at more than $1 trillion globally in 2024. The same year, Americans alone lost over $10 billion to scams originating from Southeast Asia, according to the U.S. government.

Similarly, cyberscams in Cambodia have generated more than $12.5 billion annually, or around half of the country’s formal GDP, according to the United States Institute of Peace. In a recent interview with AFP, Hun Manet rejected claims that the country was reliant on the industry.

Long explained the scam technique. The first step was to create a friendship online and build trust by sharing interests and backgrounds. The next step is to disclose each other’s wealth, and invite clients to an investment group filled with hundreds of fake accounts claiming false success.

After they are successfully induced to invest, Chinese mentors guide them onto scam platforms.

“They created a crypto platform that looked the same as famous trading companies. They copied companies like Amazon and Lazada,” he said.

At first, the “clients” received financial incentives to build their trust, then they were invited to VIP investments, and after that, the victims gathered tens of thousands of dollars to invest. At this point,  the scammers would go silent.

He said the target clients were mainly in Southeast Asian countries, except for Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.

During his time in the industry, Long also witnessed human trafficking. Foreign workers were lured from the Philippines, Laos, and Thailand to work in the scam centers. His Malaysian team leader told him the networks extended to Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, the UAE, and Brazil.

He claimed that authorities protected the operators at the time, and would warn them of crackdowns. “Every crackdown is only done in small locations,” he said. “For the large companies I work for, we received the information three days before the authorities took action.”

He said only trafficked victims were arrested, while the criminals remained at large.

Scam Recruitment Persists Despite Raids

Despite the extensive crackdown on cybercrime that has taken place since January across the country, recruitment for online scam jobs continues. This reporter joined a few Telegram groups that post Cambodian job announcements to thousands of members. They recruited almost daily for positions such as “call center staff,” “translators,” “type chatting” operators, and “AI models” – young women fluent in several languages and known for their ability to carry out pig butchering scams.  They targeted diverse nationalities, including Cambodians, and most were based in known scam hubs such as  Poipet, Bavet, and Sihanoukville, as well as Kok Kong and Mondulkiri provinces. Meanwhile, recruitment on TikTok by Chinese recruiters remains widespread.

Poipet​ was a particular area of focus. The border city has been transformed in the past decade by a construction boom tied to the online crime industry. Cyber Scam Monitor has identified and profiled 38 sites involved in scam activities in Poipet.

Like the rest of the country, in January, Poipet saw widespread crackdowns on online scam locations. But as of late February, some scam operations and even recruitment appeared to be ongoing.

Linda, a recruiter for a call center and AI models based in Poipet, told The Diplomat on February 27 that recruitment continued as normal for Cambodians and Indians, despite the mass crackdown in the city.

“My company operates normally,” she added, “because we gave enough money to the police.”

One of these was Pin, 18, who took a “type chatting” job in Poipet in mid-January, amid the ongoing large-scale raids by the Cambodian authorities. This has been a source of anxiety, but she has stayed on, despite the risks.

“I was told to type on the computer on my first day,” said Pin, who spoke under a nickname. “On the fourth day, they assigned me to handle a Facebook page.”

The company, owned by Chinese operators, offered “loan services” targeting Filipinos abroad. Pin’s role was to seek clients online. She earned $500 a month — far more than the $100 she could have made in her hometown of Siem Reap.

“Our target client is Filipinos overseas,” she explained. “They [are told they] can borrow 50,000 pesos, around $840, with only the condition [of showing] their national card.”

A multi-story building believed to house a large number of foreign nationals in Poipet City, Banteay Meanchey province, Cambodia, Feb. 28, 2026. (Photo by Thang Sinorn)

Pin had recently finished high school in Siem Reap and, due to limited job opportunities, decided to move to Poipet to work with her sister in the same company with a package offer that included accommodation inside the compound.

She admitted that the company was involved in illegal activities. “It’s a scam company providing fake loan services,” she said. Once clients agreed, their information was passed to what she called a “kill team,” made up of mostly Filipino workers, who tricked victims into creating fake bank accounts and making false transactions.

Pin described the atmosphere in the scam center as tense, especially as news of government raids spread. “I heard authorities came to raid across the province. There are a lot of scam activities, just different types of scams,” she said.

A reporter visiting Poipet City in late February observed that construction on several large buildings was still ongoing. Prominent casinos remained in operation, guarded by security personnel, while a number of buildings appeared to house large groups of foreign nationals.​

During the visit, this reporter also witnessed a group of Chinese nationals hurriedly leaving one building with their luggage, raising suspicions that the premises may have been used for illegal activities.​

Outside another building, a group of Pakistani nationals stood with their luggage and personal belongings. When approached, they claimed they had been working for an online scam company. One of them told the reporter that they were preparing to relocate to Sihanoukville.

A tuk-tuk driver in Poipet city noted that raids last year had triggered a mass exodus of foreign nationals, especially Chinese, leaving the city unusually quiet. However, he noted that many foreign workers had returned by February, and he suspected that they were online scam workers.

The Centre for Alliance of Labour and Human Rights (CENTRAL), a Cambodian NGO, has created the Job Scams Detector (JSD), a Telegram bot that helps to detect job scam posts on social media platforms, specifically designed to identify Cambodian job scams across Facebook, Telegram, and TikTok.

Khun Tharo, program manager at CENTRAL, said that the jobs detector was created after observing the increasingly sophisticated recruitment tactics used by scam syndicates. These include both visible and hidden job advertisements targeting social media users — particularly on TikTok — as well as a growing focus on female victims, returning migrants, and young job seekers in Cambodian communities.

According to a JSD report provided by Central, since the tool launched on January 29, a total of 382 reports of suspected scam jobs were received from 59 unique users. The report found that 43.7 percent of all reported cases were classified as having “high-risk” characteristics, indicating active scam campaigns targeting users that “require immediate attention.”

Ministry of Interior spokesperson Touch Sokhak told The Diplomat that reports of ongoing online scam recruitment amounted to “fake news.”

“It’s true that recruitment has been announced openly, but I believe it’s impossible during the intensified crackdown and investigation of the criminal networks,” he said, adding that such job announcements spread “fake news​ confusing public opinion.”

Asked whether the government planned to reveal the people involved in cybercrime networks, Sokhak said authorities could not disclose details while investigations were ongoing, as doing so could tip off suspects and allow them to escape.

Chou Bun Eng, permanent vice chairperson of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking in Persons,  believes that the government’s efforts will not end in April 2026, stressing that the “cleaning” process will take time to remove the remaining “dust” left by criminal operations.

“We will not tolerate it if it is found that there are crimes and individuals who commit crimes destroy our society,” she said.

Political Motivations

Jacob Sims, a fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, said he did not consider the government’s figures of the ongoing raids to be reliable.

Nonetheless, he said the crackdown was “real” in the sense that raids were occurring in certain compounds across the wider industry. “It does not appear to be purely performative,” he said of the campaign.

At the same time, Sims said that it was clearly “politically motivated” and could best be characterized as a whole-of-government effort to mitigate elite risks — reputational, legal, and financial — arising from its sustained involvement as a key co-perpetrator in the industry.

Sims also pointed to signs of selectivity. Certain compounds had been raided with great fanfare, while others remained untouched, and some appeared to have been emptied beforehand, suggesting possible tip-offs ahead of law enforcement raids

Cambodia ranks 17th out of 193 countries in organized crime, second only to Myanmar in Southeast Asia, according to the 2025 Global Organized Crime Index. The index highlights alleged human trafficking, cyberscams, financial crimes, wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, and synthetic drug production, often involving transnational networks and foreign actors deeply intertwined with Cambodia’s political and economic structures.

Despite the government having intensified its crackdown, the persistence of recruitment ads and the continued movement of workers into a known scam hub raise questions about whether the raids are dismantling the industry or simply forcing it to shift locations.

“Increasingly sophisticated propaganda by scam-sheltering states, along with the straightforward displacement of operations to other countries, also played a key role,” Sims said.

Sri Lanka was reportedly emerging as the next relocation destination for scam workers displaced from Cambodia, with syndicates beginning to set up operations there.

While it was still “too early” to determine how the crackdown would end, Sims said that the most serious deficiency was the Cambodian government’s inability or unwillingness to hold the true perpetrators accountable.

“The folks who cultivated, protected, and sustained this industry are among the most powerful in the country and any meaningful crackdown would start there — with the cabinet, with senators, top officials, the family, advisers, and closest business partners to former PM Hun Sen,” Sims said.

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“I tortured nearly 100 Chinese people,” a 27-year-old Cambodian former security guard recalled with regret. In January, the guard was lured to work at a big online scam center station on Bokor Mountain in southwest Cambodia, not imagining that he would be forced to punish Chinese workers who failed to find scam target clients.

One of many Cambodian scam center workers who spoke to The Diplomat, the guard asked to speak anonymously out of concerns for his safety.

He told reporters that he worked at the compound even amid the mass exodus of foreign nationals from alleged scam operations across Cambodia, which occurred in mid-January 2026.

The former guard applied for the job through a Facebook announcement recruiting security guards. The online recruiter told him that he would work as a regular guard, as he had done before at restaurants. However, on the night of his second day, his work took an unexpected turn when he was ordered to deliver electric shocks to workers for unknown reasons.

“I was a regular guard in the daytime; when it was nighttime, around 10 p.m., Chinese employees went in line to exercise,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what happened, but I was forced to give them shocks and beat them with a baton.” He said sometimes the torture was done by Chinese bosses.

“Sometimes I used electric shocks on their genitals,” he said.

The guard said there were at least 600 Chinese workers in the screened compound, which resembled an empty warehouse perched on the mountain. The center of the compound was protected by several layers of gates and security guards.

He said during this period, in January, he didn’t see any authorities inspecting the site, despite the crackdowns supposedly taking place elsewhere.

With little understanding of the Chinese language, many Cambodian security guards were reluctant to carry out torture, and some chose to quit. After realizing that his actions could potentially be illegal, he also decided to leave.

“I felt afraid, and I didn’t want to do it. Because torturing people is illegal,” he said.

He also recalled transporting newly arriving Chinese workers from the nearby town of Kampot to the Bokor mountain at night. Once they arrived, they were trained and then put to work in call centers in front of computers for what he believed were online scams.

The guard earned $360 a month, with food and accommodation provided. But conditions were harsh.

“It’s like a prison,” he said of the center. At night, the remaining food was mixed together with Chinese noodles, like pork rice. “I couldn’t endure eating it,” he said.

The warehouse had 10 big rooms with countless rows of bunk beds per room, everyone living together and showering together naked. They are not allowed to go out of the compound unsupervised. Only Chinese bosses and Cambodian staff could go outside to buy food.

The online scam industry has expanded rapidly across parts of Southeast Asia in recent years, including Cambodia, which has been alleged to be the second-largest destination for online scam operations after Myanmar. The industry is linked to serious human rights abuses and trafficking, with approximately 100,000 believed to be working inside Cambodia-based compounds, according to a U.N. report released in August 2023.

While Cambodian officials have rejected these claims, they have come under increasing pressure over the alleged collusion of state authorities in online scamming operations. In June 2025, Amnesty International released an investigation identifying 53 scam compounds that have been operating across 16 of Cambodia’s towns. The report documented abuses such as human trafficking, torture, forced and child labor, unlawful detention, and modern slavery that were taking place inside the compounds. Most notably, the group said the government had “failed” to address the crisis, despite announcements of periodic crackdowns, suggesting a “level of acquiescence” in the human rights violations.

Then, in October, Washington and London jointly sanctioned Chen Zhi, the chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Group, along with 146 related targets, accusing the Cambodia-based network of running transnational cyberfraud operations, including forced-labor scam compounds and cryptocurrency “pig butchering” schemes that stole billions from victims worldwide.

Three months after the allegation, Chen, a former personal advisor to the Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen and his son, Prime Minister Hun Manet, was arrested and extradited to China on January 6. Under intensifying pressure from both China and the U.S., the government launched the most serious government crackdown on the online scamming sector thus far, raiding scam operations across the country as workers flooded out of shuttered compounds.

Chhay Sinarith, head of the Secretariat of the Commission for Combating Online Scams (CCOS), says that 110,095 foreigners from six nationalities were deported from the country during January and early February. The campaign has also led 210,000 foreigners to voluntarily leave Cambodia, according to the Cambodian government, which also claims that it has shut down nearly 200 scam compounds and arrested and convicted a total of 172 ringleaders and accomplices since June. The government has pledged to completely stamp out online scam operations by April.

Billion-Dollar Scam Operations

Da Long, 30, spent nearly four years inside Cambodia’s online scam industry before quitting in mid‑2024. He shared his experience of how he witnessed the industry’s growth across the country and how he was almost trafficked himself.

Long, who asked to use a pseudonym, was a specialist in hotels and hospitality in Siem Reap. In 2020, when COVID-19 broke out, Long’s work and the whole country’s tourism sector collapsed. With $30,000 in debt, he had little choice but to accept a high-paying customer service position offering $700 a month in a building in Sihanoukville  — a workplace he later discovered was an online scam operation.

His role was to provide fake loan services to Filipinos abroad that did not require formal documentation.

“It’s a scam; the client will never receive the loan,” he said.

The process appeared simple. After filling out an application, clients were asked to transfer an initial $500 to “verify” their bank accounts. Once the payment was made, the company would claim the client had submitted incorrect information, forcing them to send additional funds. The cycle continued with endless mistakes until the victims had lost thousands of dollars.

“Some clients intended to borrow only $2,500 but potentially lost thousands of dollars,” he said, “In just one month, I could defraud 6,500 clients who invested money.” It took Long a month to realize it was a scam platform, but due to COVID-19, jobs were scarce, and he decided to stay.

Motorbikes drive toward buildings under construction in Poipet City, Banteay Meanchey province, close to the Cambodia-Thailand border, Feb. 28, 2026. (Photo by Thang Sinorn)

Long became involved in many types of online scams. He moved between sites, including the O‑Smach Resort in northern Cambodia, the Venus Casino in Bavet city on the border with Vietnam, and finally the Nanhai Hotel in Sihanoukville.

Those locations have been listed both by online research group Cyberscam Monitor and in U.S. reports as trafficking and forced labor sites with links to online scams.

When Long arrived at a casino in Chrey Thom, a district in Kandal province near the Vietnamese border, he said that the compound owners “intended to sell me” if he took a job there. A Chinese middleman who brought me would receive $700 in “incentives,” he said. He refused to work there but stayed in the industry out of curiosity and financial pressure.

At O’Smach Resort, he recalled there being around 20 buildings that housed some 5,000 people — mostly Chinese, but also including  Vietnamese and Thais. Work was extremely stressful. “I worked 12 hours per day. If I couldn’t find a client as a target, they threatened to deduct my salary,” he said. “Some days they punished me [by making me work] 18 hours.”

Long worked with many foreign nationals and witnessed them getting beaten and having their passports seized. However, he noted that the managers “don’t dare to touch or mistreat Cambodians.”

Later, he was assigned to carry out romance scams known as “pig‑butchering” scams. “One day, I defrauded a Chinese‑Malaysian client to invest $110,000. Some months, I earned $520,000 for the company. In one month, the company could earn approximately $18 million,” he said.

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) estimated the industry’s annual revenue at more than $1 trillion globally in 2024. The same year, Americans alone lost over $10 billion to scams originating from Southeast Asia, according to the U.S. government.

Similarly, cyberscams in Cambodia have generated more than $12.5 billion annually, or around half of the country’s formal GDP, according to the United States Institute of Peace. In a recent interview with AFP, Hun Manet rejected claims that the country was reliant on the industry.

Long explained the scam technique. The first step was to create a friendship online and build trust by sharing interests and backgrounds. The next step is to disclose each other’s wealth, and invite clients to an investment group filled with hundreds of fake accounts claiming false success.

After they are successfully induced to invest, Chinese mentors guide them onto scam platforms.

“They created a crypto platform that looked the same as famous trading companies. They copied companies like Amazon and Lazada,” he said.

At first, the “clients” received financial incentives to build their trust, then they were invited to VIP investments, and after that, the victims gathered tens of thousands of dollars to invest. At this point,  the scammers would go silent.

He said the target clients were mainly in Southeast Asian countries, except for Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.

During his time in the industry, Long also witnessed human trafficking. Foreign workers were lured from the Philippines, Laos, and Thailand to work in the scam centers. His Malaysian team leader told him the networks extended to Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, the UAE, and Brazil.

He claimed that authorities protected the operators at the time, and would warn them of crackdowns. “Every crackdown is only done in small locations,” he said. “For the large companies I work for, we received the information three days before the authorities took action.”

He said only trafficked victims were arrested, while the criminals remained at large.

Scam Recruitment Persists Despite Raids

Despite the extensive crackdown on cybercrime that has taken place since January across the country, recruitment for online scam jobs continues. This reporter joined a few Telegram groups that post Cambodian job announcements to thousands of members. They recruited almost daily for positions such as “call center staff,” “translators,” “type chatting” operators, and “AI models” – young women fluent in several languages and known for their ability to carry out pig butchering scams.  They targeted diverse nationalities, including Cambodians, and most were based in known scam hubs such as  Poipet, Bavet, and Sihanoukville, as well as Kok Kong and Mondulkiri provinces. Meanwhile, recruitment on TikTok by Chinese recruiters remains widespread.

Poipet​ was a particular area of focus. The border city has been transformed in the past decade by a construction boom tied to the online crime industry. Cyber Scam Monitor has identified and profiled 38 sites involved in scam activities in Poipet.

Like the rest of the country, in January, Poipet saw widespread crackdowns on online scam locations. But as of late February, some scam operations and even recruitment appeared to be ongoing.

Linda, a recruiter for a call center and AI models based in Poipet, told The Diplomat on February 27 that recruitment continued as normal for Cambodians and Indians, despite the mass crackdown in the city.

“My company operates normally,” she added, “because we gave enough money to the police.”

One of these was Pin, 18, who took a “type chatting” job in Poipet in mid-January, amid the ongoing large-scale raids by the Cambodian authorities. This has been a source of anxiety, but she has stayed on, despite the risks.

“I was told to type on the computer on my first day,” said Pin, who spoke under a nickname. “On the fourth day, they assigned me to handle a Facebook page.”

The company, owned by Chinese operators, offered “loan services” targeting Filipinos abroad. Pin’s role was to seek clients online. She earned $500 a month — far more than the $100 she could have made in her hometown of Siem Reap.

“Our target client is Filipinos overseas,” she explained. “They [are told they] can borrow 50,000 pesos, around $840, with only the condition [of showing] their national card.”

A multi-story building believed to house a large number of foreign nationals in Poipet City, Banteay Meanchey province, Cambodia, Feb. 28, 2026. (Photo by Thang Sinorn)

Pin had recently finished high school in Siem Reap and, due to limited job opportunities, decided to move to Poipet to work with her sister in the same company with a package offer that included accommodation inside the compound.

She admitted that the company was involved in illegal activities. “It’s a scam company providing fake loan services,” she said. Once clients agreed, their information was passed to what she called a “kill team,” made up of mostly Filipino workers, who tricked victims into creating fake bank accounts and making false transactions.

Pin described the atmosphere in the scam center as tense, especially as news of government raids spread. “I heard authorities came to raid across the province. There are a lot of scam activities, just different types of scams,” she said.

A reporter visiting Poipet City in late February observed that construction on several large buildings was still ongoing. Prominent casinos remained in operation, guarded by security personnel, while a number of buildings appeared to house large groups of foreign nationals.​

During the visit, this reporter also witnessed a group of Chinese nationals hurriedly leaving one building with their luggage, raising suspicions that the premises may have been used for illegal activities.​

Outside another building, a group of Pakistani nationals stood with their luggage and personal belongings. When approached, they claimed they had been working for an online scam company. One of them told the reporter that they were preparing to relocate to Sihanoukville.

A tuk-tuk driver in Poipet city noted that raids last year had triggered a mass exodus of foreign nationals, especially Chinese, leaving the city unusually quiet. However, he noted that many foreign workers had returned by February, and he suspected that they were online scam workers.

The Centre for Alliance of Labour and Human Rights (CENTRAL), a Cambodian NGO, has created the Job Scams Detector (JSD), a Telegram bot that helps to detect job scam posts on social media platforms, specifically designed to identify Cambodian job scams across Facebook, Telegram, and TikTok.

Khun Tharo, program manager at CENTRAL, said that the jobs detector was created after observing the increasingly sophisticated recruitment tactics used by scam syndicates. These include both visible and hidden job advertisements targeting social media users — particularly on TikTok — as well as a growing focus on female victims, returning migrants, and young job seekers in Cambodian communities.

According to a JSD report provided by Central, since the tool launched on January 29, a total of 382 reports of suspected scam jobs were received from 59 unique users. The report found that 43.7 percent of all reported cases were classified as having “high-risk” characteristics, indicating active scam campaigns targeting users that “require immediate attention.”

Ministry of Interior spokesperson Touch Sokhak told The Diplomat that reports of ongoing online scam recruitment amounted to “fake news.”

“It’s true that recruitment has been announced openly, but I believe it’s impossible during the intensified crackdown and investigation of the criminal networks,” he said, adding that such job announcements spread “fake news​ confusing public opinion.”

Asked whether the government planned to reveal the people involved in cybercrime networks, Sokhak said authorities could not disclose details while investigations were ongoing, as doing so could tip off suspects and allow them to escape.

Chou Bun Eng, permanent vice chairperson of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking in Persons,  believes that the government’s efforts will not end in April 2026, stressing that the “cleaning” process will take time to remove the remaining “dust” left by criminal operations.

“We will not tolerate it if it is found that there are crimes and individuals who commit crimes destroy our society,” she said.

Political Motivations

Jacob Sims, a fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, said he did not consider the government’s figures of the ongoing raids to be reliable.

Nonetheless, he said the crackdown was “real” in the sense that raids were occurring in certain compounds across the wider industry. “It does not appear to be purely performative,” he said of the campaign.

At the same time, Sims said that it was clearly “politically motivated” and could best be characterized as a whole-of-government effort to mitigate elite risks — reputational, legal, and financial — arising from its sustained involvement as a key co-perpetrator in the industry.

Sims also pointed to signs of selectivity. Certain compounds had been raided with great fanfare, while others remained untouched, and some appeared to have been emptied beforehand, suggesting possible tip-offs ahead of law enforcement raids

Cambodia ranks 17th out of 193 countries in organized crime, second only to Myanmar in Southeast Asia, according to the 2025 Global Organized Crime Index. The index highlights alleged human trafficking, cyberscams, financial crimes, wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, and synthetic drug production, often involving transnational networks and foreign actors deeply intertwined with Cambodia’s political and economic structures.

Despite the government having intensified its crackdown, the persistence of recruitment ads and the continued movement of workers into a known scam hub raise questions about whether the raids are dismantling the industry or simply forcing it to shift locations.

“Increasingly sophisticated propaganda by scam-sheltering states, along with the straightforward displacement of operations to other countries, also played a key role,” Sims said.

Sri Lanka was reportedly emerging as the next relocation destination for scam workers displaced from Cambodia, with syndicates beginning to set up operations there.

While it was still “too early” to determine how the crackdown would end, Sims said that the most serious deficiency was the Cambodian government’s inability or unwillingness to hold the true perpetrators accountable.

“The folks who cultivated, protected, and sustained this industry are among the most powerful in the country and any meaningful crackdown would start there — with the cabinet, with senators, top officials, the family, advisers, and closest business partners to former PM Hun Sen,” Sims said.

Sinorn Thang is a journalist based in Phnom Penh. She covers press freedom, human rights, gender-sensitive, and environment-linked issues.

Cambodia scam operations

Online scamming operations

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