As Cambodia’s scam crackdown deadline looms, criminal gangs flee

A Thai soldier shines a torch into a room disguised as a Chinese police station inside an abandoned scam centre on the Thai-Cambodian border on March 12.

Photo: AFP Young, naive and now sleeping rough on a plastic sheet outside their embassy in Phnom Penh, Indonesians Abdul* and Hafiz* are among the expendable human resources of Southeast Asia’s scam trade.

After a year-long tumble through Cambodia’s vortex of scams, they were cast out onto a pavement – penniless and without passports – waiting for the embassy to issue new travel documents and a plane ticket home. “Our Chinese boss stole all of our passports,” said Abdul, 20, gesturing to a dozen or so of his defeated compatriots squinting in the sun from behind a jumble of bags and umbrellas. “He didn’t want any responsibility for us and did not pay any salary,” added Hafiz, 19, giving only one name like his friend. “Some people worked for one month, some for four months or for one year.

Nobody has any money to take home.” A Cambodian military official shows computer equipment seized from raided cyberscam centres on March 11.

Photo: AFP Under pressure from China and the US, Cambodia says it is scorched-earth time for the scammers, vowing they will be gone for good by April.

Observers call it an ambitious deadline, especially given the scale of a criminal enterprise that has deeply embedded itself.

Across the country are dozens of compounds generating, depending on who you believe, as much as US$19 billion annually, equivalent to more than half Cambodia’s formal economy.

That money has poured into glitzy tower blocks and new developments rising from the dusty scrubland surrounding the capital – hot money bilked by 100,000 or so professional scammers, many of them tricked and trafficked into cybercrime. “This is no longer just cybercrime.

It’s organised crime.

It involves human trafficking, money laundering and corruption all wrapped into one,” said Scott Schelble, deputy assistant director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s International Operations Division, after a visit to Cambodia and Thailand in February. “It’s not as simple as one location or another … as long as there are illicit gains to be made and there is an ease to do, the situation will likely continue.” The blizzard of bad publicity has forced Prime Minister Hun Manet to concede that Cambodia has a problem.

Scam networks were “destroying our honest economy”, he told reporters, giving Cambodia “a bad reputation” as the ground

原文链接: 南华早报