Cambodia hopes to shut down all of the country’s notorious online scam centers by the end of next month, the head of the Southeast Asian nation’s effort to combat the cybercrime said on Wednesday.
The government has since July targeted 250 locations believed to be carrying out the lucrative criminal activity, and has shut down about 80 percent, or 200, of them, Cambodian Senior Minister in Charge of Special Missions and Head of the Secretariat of the Commission for Combating Online Scams Chhay Sinarith said in an interview.
Police would carry out suppression activities after next month in an attempt to keep the scam centers from re-emerging, he said.
Photo: AFP
Cambodia has launched previous crackdowns against online scam centers, but without major effect.
“The real question is whether this effort targets the system that enables the industry, not just the buildings where scams happen,” said Jacob Sims, an expert on transnational crime. “Past crackdowns in Cambodia have often left the financial and protection networks intact, allowing operations to quickly reconstitute.”
“So far there are few signs the current round of enforcement is reaching the key perpetrators among the Cambodian ruling elite,” said Sims, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center. “Moreover, continued restrictions on independent reporting and civil society actors make the government’s claims difficult to verify.”
Cybercrime has flourished in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar, with scam victims around the world being bilked out of tens of billions of dollars annually, UN experts and other analysts say.
The industry is closely involved in human trafficking, as foreign nationals are employed to run romance and cryptocurrency scams, often after being recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions of near-slavery.
In the latest crackdown, the government launched 79 legal cases involving 697 alleged scam ringleaders and their associates, Chhay Sinarith said.
At the same time, it has repatriated almost 10,000 scam center workers from 23 countries, with fewer than 1,000 awaiting official repatriation, he said.
Others who have escaped or been released from raided centers have gone home on their own.
Cambodia works closely with countries, especially China and the US, to combat the problem, he said.
Cambodian police on Tuesday raided a suspected scam center in a high-rise building in the capital, Phnom Penh, arresting about 60 Cambodians and Chinese nationals at their desks.
Earlier on Wednesday, journalists were shown equipment confiscated in raids elsewhere, including uniforms and fake identification cards used by scammers to pose online as Japanese police officers to trick and intimidate victims.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
RSS