A crackdown by Cambodian authorities on cybercrime operations has resulted in the arrests of more than 1,000 suspects in the past week.
The South-East Asian country’s Prime Minister Hun Manet issued the order authorising state action for “maintaining and protecting security, public order, and social safety”, and threatened job losses if law enforcement failed to act.
“The government has observed that online scams are currently causing threats and insecurity in the world and the region,” Hun Manet said in a statement.
“In Cambodia, foreign criminal groups have also infiltrated to engage in online scams.”
Prime Minister Hun Manet ordered a crackdown on cyberscam operations and threatened job losses if law enforcement did not comply. (AP: Agence Kampuchea Press)
More than 1,000 people were arrested in raids in at least five provinces between Monday and Wednesday, according to statements from Information Minister Neth Pheaktra and police.
Transnational crime expert Jacob Sims said like previous mass raids in 2022 and 2024, this latest government crackdown appeared “fully performative” and blaming foreign actors was a “constant refrain”.
He said that even if the public was to believe the figure which it had yet to be independently verified, it made up less than 1 per cent of the total cybercriminal workforce which he estimated to be about 150,000.
“Even if several thousand more people were removed it is a rounding error on the regime’s most profitable industry.“
Mr Sims’s 2025 report into Cambodia’s transnational crime estimated that the cyberscam industry was worth $19 to $29 billion and contributed 60 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Police seized equipment, including computers and hundreds of mobile phones. (AFP: Pool photo)
Ruling elite enables crime
Mr Sims said there was “no evidence the government was serious about tackling the industry”.
If anything, he criticised the Cambodian government for enabling the sector to proliferate because the ruling elite “depended on the criminal profits to sustain their grip on power”.
“As the largest and highest margin industry in the country, it was now likely too big to fail for the regime.“
The suspects detained in the latest crackdown in the capital Phnom Penh and the southern city of Sihanoukville reportedly included 85 Cambodians, more than 200 Vietnamese, 27 Chinese, and 75 suspects from Taiwan.
Police also seized equipment, including computers and hundreds of mobile phones.
At least 270 Indonesians, including 45 women, were arrested on Wednesday in Poipet, a town near the Thai border that was notorious for cyberscam and gambling operations, the information minister said.
Suspects arrested in Sihanoukville were from Vietnam, Taiwan, China, and Cambodia. (AP: Agence Kampuchea Press)
Elsewhere, police in the north-eastern province of Kratie arrested 312 people, including nationals of Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Twenty-seven people from Vietnam, China and Myanmar were also arrested in the western province of Pursat.
Last month Amnesty International published the findings of an 18-month investigation into cybercrime in Cambodia, which the human rights group said “point towards state complicity in abuses carried out by Chinese criminal gangs”.
“The Cambodian government is deliberately ignoring a litany of human rights abuses including slavery, human trafficking, child labour and torture being carried out by criminal gangs on a vast scale in more than 50 scamming compounds located across the country,” it said.
Many of those freed from South-East Asian scam centres say they were trafficked or lured there under false pretences.
There are at least 53 scam compounds in Cambodia where organised criminal groups carried out human trafficking, forced labour, child labour, torture, deprivation of liberty and slavery, the Amnesty report said.
Mr Sims said the government also used a number of mechanisms that sustained the industry like encouraging criminal migration via a corrupted “citizenship by investment scheme”, facilitating human trafficking through Phnom Penh’s international airport, and the use of Cambodian security services to guard compounds.
“It all boiled down to the disturbing reality that the industry’s top perpetrators are also the country’s most powerful people.“
He said tip-offs reported to the government were not acted upon and none of the key compounds had been raided.
He said the world was now experiencing the harm that Cambodia’s rulers previously only inflicted domestically.
The Cambodian government did not respond to the ABC’s request for comment.
ABC/AFP
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