“It’s decentralising criminality so it can be sustained,” said a human rights investigator who did not want to be named.
Investigations by Nikkei Asia and other media outlets over the past year, with more than a dozen victims from such operations as well as several rescuers, have uncovered a vast illicit scam industry that has taken root in the Southeast Asian state.
According to those victims, the groups, largely run by Chinese nationals, enslave workers from China and other countries in the region, luring or smuggling them to Cambodia with promises of well-paid employment.
On arrival, victims are held captive, told they owe large debts and, under threat of violence and torture, forced to perpetrate online scams. These include romance scams or fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes that target people around the globe and are estimated to net hundreds of millions of dollars, if not significantly more, according to the Global Anti-Scam Organization, a US-based non-profit body dedicated to exposing the industry.
For months, Cambodian authorities have dismissed the increasing number of media reports on the human trafficking crisis, including estimates from sources spoken to by Nikkei that tens of thousands of people are enslaved at sites around the country.
However, international pressure has steadily built, including a decision by the US to downgrade Cambodia’s status in its annual “Trafficking in Persons” report. On a recent trip to the coastal city of Sihanoukville, where many of the scam operations are located, the US ambassador to Cambodia Patrick Murphy said more needed to be done.
“Unsafe boats, trafficking, scam centres, abandoned buildings, a casino glut. There’s a real need for broad action to address the storm clouds here,” he wrote on Twitter.
The ambassador’s reference to an unsafe boat concerns a wooden fishing boat that sank off Cambodia’s coast on Sept 22. The vessel was said to have been used to smuggle people from China. So far three bodies have been found, seven more have washed up on a beach in Vietnam, and one is still missing, Reuters reported last month.
Vitit Muntarbhorn, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia, also spoke out against the illicit online scam industry in August, saying victims experienced a “living hell” often resulting in “torture and even death”.
Public pressure has also come from countries in the region, whose citizens have been lured and trapped by the gangs.
A spokeswoman for Vietnam’s foreign ministry recently said more than 1,000 Vietnamese have so far been rescued from illegal work in Cambodia. But recently, one person drowned when he and 41 others tried to swim across a river to Vietnam’s southwestern province of An Giang.
Representatives from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and India have also called for action or warned their citizens about taking work in Cambodia. Taiwanese police, meanwhile, arrested five people in September for involvement in recruiting Taiwanese to travel to Cambodia to defraud people online.
In recent weeks, Cambodian officials have started to publicly address the issue of such scam operations, which they often refer to under the somewhat broad term of illegal online gambling. Officials have long used the term as a synonym for illegal activities regardless of the specifics and have thus diluted the seriousness of crimes.
Prime Minister Hun Sen acknowledged that “thousands” of foreigners had been lured to Cambodia but claimed that only “hundreds” were real victims. Senior interior ministry official Sok Phal estimated that some 100,000 people had been involved in illegal online gambling in Cambodia. He later claimed about 90% of operations had shut themselves down.
Cambodia’s minister of interior Sar Kheng was among the first senior figures to acknowledge the emergence of what he called a “brutal” new type of crime in the country. However, Sar Kheng was quick to say the illicit activities were carried out by foreigners. Several government officials have also tried to frame cases of captive workers as labour disputes.
Several raids have been carried out in the coastal city of Sihanoukville. Between Sept 18 and Sept 22, raids on three compounds in the city led to the release of 1,045 foreign nationals from Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, reported Cambodian news outlet VOD.
Hundreds more were released after raids on 11 locations in Phnom Penh including condos and hotels. Local news reports recorded several arrests on suspicion of trafficking and illegal detention, however, it appears no formal charges have been brought so far.
Sources within compounds say many scam groups have been able to relocate before and during the crackdown.
“The important people have slipped out of the park, and they are all playing a game of cat and mouse,” said Wu, a worker at the recently raided Jinbei 4 compound, who requested his real name not be used.
The human rights investigator who had been observing the situation said other areas around the country’s borders that are known to host scam operations have been left untouched.