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.
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