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ABC News
3 days ago
- Politics
- ABC News
Cambodian elites complicit in cybercrime despite latest government crackdown, experts warn
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." 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. 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. 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". 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. 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. 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
AllAfrica
16-06-2025
- Politics
- AllAfrica
Francophone summit turns blind eye to Cambodia's cybercrime
The French-speaking world, as represented by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), will be holding its summit in Cambodia in 2026. So what could possibly go wrong? Plenty, actually. The OIF, which has 93 members, held its last summit in France in 2024. It has not held the event in the Asia-Pacific region since 1997, when Vietnam played host. So the idea of holding the summit in a poor country that usually struggles for attention, such as Cambodia, is logical and laudable. But everything is in the timing. The decision to hold the summit in Siem Reap, Cambodia, was announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in October 2024. It comes alongside an increasing body of evidence that organized cyber-criminals are operating inside Cambodia with Cambodian government protection. The country is the 'absolute global epicenter' of transnational fraud in 2025 and is primed for further growth in cyber-criminality, according to research authored by Jacob Sims and published in May 2025 by the Humanity Research Consultancy (HRC), a UK-based group that campaigns to end modern slavery. The Cambodian government had denied the claims made in the HRC report. The research finds that the cyber-scam industry, which relies on the forced labor of the victims of human trafficking, generates US$12.5 billion to $19 billion per year, or as much as 60% of Cambodia's GDP. An estimated 150,000 people are involved in cyber scams in Cambodia, according to the report. The HRC confirms a wealth of other research that cybercrime on an industrial scale is taking place in Cambodia, as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The HRC finds that 'endemic corruption, reliable protection by the government, and co-perpetration by party elites are the primary enablers of Cambodia's trafficking-cybercrime nexus.' 'Cambodian state institutions systematically and insidiously support and protect the criminal networks involved in transnational fraud and related human trafficking,' the report says. Many of those accused of playing leading parts or obscured but purposeful roles in organized cybercrime are either connected with the ruling regime or are its core members. Hun To, a cousin of Prime Minister Hun Manet, is a director of Huione Pay, a financial conglomerate which has been cut off from the US financial system due to its alleged role in cybercrime. Ly Yong Phat, a permanent member of the central committee of the ruling Cambodian People's Party, was sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury in 2024 for human rights abuses of trafficked workers subjected to forced labor in online scam centers. Cambodia's legal system, universally acknowledged as being completely under government control, is powerless to tackle the situation. It ranked 141 out of 142 countries globally in the 2024 World Justice Project Rule of Law Index. Among lower-middle-income countries, Cambodia ranks 38th out of 38. The idea of a global French-speaking community is in itself a dubious colonial relic. During the colonial period, France concentrated the Southeast Asian version of its mission civilisatrice on Vietnam and paid relatively little attention to Cambodia and Laos, which together made up French Indochina. French missionaries in the 19th century devised a system for transcribing the Vietnamese language into Roman letters, known as quoc-ngo, which became the national standard. The use of Chinese characters to write Vietnamese was stamped out at French insistence. This was a compromise solution in face of the extreme view of some French colonialists that Vietnam should simply abandon its language with everyone being made to speak French. There was no such romanization of the Khmer language, and the idea that Cambodia is a meaningful part of a 'French-speaking world' is a tenuous fiction. Today, the OIF estimates that only about 3% of Cambodians speak French. The historical Western focus on Vietnam as the region's main player continued into the post-Khmer Rouge period. During the 1990s, senior diplomats such as the US Ambassador to Cambodia Kenneth Quinn were specialists on Vietnam, not Cambodia. Quinn believed that the Hun Sen regime, a result of the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, was the best way to bring lasting peace and stability to Cambodia. With the country now recognized as a hub for state-protected organized cybercrime, the project has clearly not gone to plan. The best possible outcome from the summit, which the organizers may hope for, would be for Cambodia to make a sustained effort to combat organized cybercrime. We can expect some high-profile raids on cyber-slavery compounds as part of the summit preparations. However, previous Cambodian compound raids have left the organizers untouched, and the compounds have simply reappeared elsewhere in the country. Victims of human trafficking who thought they had been rescued by the Cambodian police were sold back into slavery. The evidence that the compounds are operating under government protection indicates that the pattern is likely to be repeated. If the idea is to try to hold the summit in Cambodia to make amends for the disastrous French colonial record in Southeast Asia, this is hardly the way to do it. David Whitehouse is a freelance journalist who has lived in Paris for 30 years. He has both French and British nationality.
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Nikkei Asia
06-06-2025
- Business
- Nikkei Asia
Cambodia strongly rebuts report on growing cybercrime sector
BANGKOK -- The Cambodian government has lambasted a report alleging the kingdom is the regional epicenter of a growing online crime industry in which mostly Chinese syndicates control up to 350,000 people and generate annual revenues estimated at between $50 billion and $75 billion. Authored by Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Asia Center, the 68-page report published last month said: "As of early 2025, Cambodia is a top location -- if not the premier global center -- for large-scale, sophisticated scamming operations."
South China Morning Post
25-05-2025
- South China Morning Post
Cambodia is home to world's most powerful criminal network: report
A newly released report has named senior Cambodian political figures as central players in what it describes as possibly the world's most powerful criminal network – a multibillion-dollar, Southeast Asia-based cybercrime industry that experts warn may soon become 'too big to fail'. Written by transnational crime and regional security specialist Jacob Sims, the report says Cambodia is becoming the centre of an exploding global scam economy driven primarily by Chinese organised crime. It warns that the scale of illegal activities threatens global economic and political stability, and is thriving through state-sanctioned corruption. 'While Myanmar and Laos boast towering scam economies, one country stands above its peers in terms of likely scale and durability: Cambodia,' the report concluded. 'Cambodia is likely the absolute global epicentre of next-gen transnational fraud in 2025 and is certainly the country most primed for explosive growth going forward.' Published by the US-funded Humanity Research Consultancy, Sims' report follows a chilling assessment by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which last month expressed alarm at the exponential growth of Southeast Asia-based transnational crime with its reach having extended to the Pacific, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. Southeast Asian-based crime syndicates have quickly evolved from synthetic drug production to unregulated casinos and online gambling, and are now world leaders in 'industrial scale' cyber-enabled fraud and scams enabled by networks of human traffickers, money launderers, technology experts, and data brokers, according to the UNODC. It added the 'professionalisation' of recruitment continued to attract countless, often talented but underemployed, young people from more than 60 countries through deceptive job offers, noting some became willing participants in illegal activities but many end up essentially as slaves subject to extortion and ransom demands, and coercion ranging from beatings to torture and even murder.
ABC News
18-05-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Report finds Cambodian government active in one of the world's most powerful criminal networks
A landmark report has accused Cambodia's ruling party of actively running what could be the world's most powerful criminal network - fuelling a multi-billion dollar cyber-scam industry built on human trafficking and state protection. The US government-funded study warns that Southeast Asia's scam economy - centred in Cambodia - now rivals the scale of entire national economies. And given how lucrative and powerful they've become, the crime syndicates are now almost quote "too big to fail." The report names senior Cambodian officials, including relatives of the Cambodian Prime Minister, as central players in a vast transnational enterprise - whose reach and impunity pose a growing threat to global security and regional stability. Guest: Jacob Sims, report author, and visiting fellow at Harvard University's Asia Centre Producer: Anne Barker
