Freed scam workers in Cambodia face fines, detention and homelessness

Cambodia’s campaign against online scam compounds has pushed many operations out of sight, but it has also left thousands of foreign workers stranded in Phnom Penh, according to NPR. Aid groups say many of those workers were trafficked into the industry and now face homelessness, detention or the risk of being exploited again.

NPR reported that police raids and pressure on scam networks have emptied high-rise sites and large compounds that once housed illicit online operations. The closures followed foreign pressure on Cambodia and sanctions against figures and companies accused of involvement in forced-labor scam centers.

Mark Taylor, a human trafficking consultant who previously led a USAID-backed program in Cambodia, told NPR that the government had addressed only part of the problem. He said authorities were failing to deal with the vulnerable migrants who had been drawn into the scam industry and were now exposed to renewed trafficking risks.

The online fraud operations at issue include schemes often called “pig-butchering” scams by the FBI and others. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, Americans lost more than $20 billion last year to these kinds of scams, and FBI data shows the total has been rising annually.

NPR said it interviewed more than two dozen migrants from Indonesia, Uganda, Ghana and Sierra Leone who described being recruited with promises of paid work, lodging and food. They said they were then confined and forced to contact victims online under strict production demands.

One Ugandan man identified by NPR only as Shuiab, because of safety concerns, said he had been promised $850 a month to work as a delivery driver before being taken to a compound behind a casino and made to scam Americans. Another man, identified as Wilson, told NPR he was electrocuted after missing quotas and described a “black room” where compound operators punished workers.

United Nations agencies, Amnesty International and other groups have documented forced labor and abuse in the industry, NPR reported. In a June report on Cambodia’s crackdown, Amnesty said it interviewed 73 people recently released from compounds and concluded that all were trafficking victims.

The crackdown accelerated after U.S. sanctions last October against Prince Holding Group, a major Cambodian conglomerate, and the indictment of its chairman, Chen Zhi, on allegations tied to forced-labor scam compounds and money laundering, according to NPR. Chen’s lawyers have denied wrongdoing and are contesting the U.S. case. NPR also reported that China has extradited several other alleged Chinese scam bosses from Cambodia.

As compounds closed, aid workers told NPR, migrants were released without money, shelter or reliable access to food and water. Some sites had operated like enclosed towns, with shops and services inside; one compound visited by NPR after it was cleared could house 20,000 workers, according to the U.K. government, which later sanctioned its owners.

Many released workers now face visa overstay penalties, NPR reported. Cambodia has required fines of $10 a day, which can reach thousands of dollars. Embassies have sought waivers for their citizens, but aid groups said the process has been slow, while the country’s only trafficking-victim shelter available to them is full and has a waitlist in the hundreds.

NGOs told NPR that Cambodian authorities have recently increased detentions of migrants accused of visa violations. Amnesty said in its report that authorities have treated many people leaving scam compounds as irregular migrants rather than screening and supporting them as trafficking victims, leaving them in poor detention conditions without access to lawyers or embassies.

Interior Ministry spokesman Touch Sokhak rejected that criticism in comments to NPR. He said Cambodian authorities had rescued hundreds of thousands of scam workers, including trafficking victims, and repatriated them “with the utmost care, in accordance with the law.”

NPR said aid workers shared a text message from a former scam worker held in a detention facility who described limited access to free drinking water and said water otherwise cost $2. The man, who was not named because he feared retaliation, wrote that he did not know how people there would survive.

This story draws on original reporting from NPR.