Cambodia rounds up 1,000 ‘scammers’
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia—Cambodia on Wednesday said that an order by Prime Minister Hun Manet for government bodies to crackdown on criminal cybercrime operations being run in the country had resulted in the arrest of more than 1,000 suspects so far this week.
Hun Manet issued the order authorizing state action for “maintaining and protecting security, public order, and social safety.”
“The government has observed that online scams are currently causing threats and insecurity in the world and the region. In Cambodia, foreign criminal groups have also infiltrated to engage in online scams,” Hun Manet’s statement, dated Tuesday, said.
The United Nations and other agencies estimate that cyberscams, most of them originating from Southeast Asia, earn international criminal gangs billions of dollars annually.
Cyberscam
More than 1,000 suspects were arrested in raids in at least five provinces between Monday and Wednesday, according to statements from Information Minister Neth Pheaktra and police.
Those detained included more than 200 Vietnamese, 27 Chinese, and 75 suspects from Taiwan and 85 Cambodians in the capital Phnom Penh and the southern city of Sihanoukville. 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 on the border with Thailand notorious for cyberscam and gambling operations, the minister said. Elsewhere, police in the northeastern province of Kratie arrested 312 people, including nationals of Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam, while 27 people from Vietnam, China and Myanmar were arrested in the western province of Pursat.
Chinese criminal gangs
Amnesty International last month published the findings of an 18-month investigation into cybercrime in Cambodia, which the human rights group said “point toward 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 labor and torture being carried out by criminal gangs on a vast scale in more than 50 scamming compounds located across the country,” it said.
Human trafficking is closely associated with cyberscam operations, as workers are often recruited under false pretences and then held captive.
Feud with Thailand
“Deceived, trafficked and enslaved, the survivors of these scamming compounds describe being trapped in a living nightmare—enlisted in criminal enterprises that are operating with the apparent consent of the Cambodian government,” Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard said.
Cambodia’s latest crackdown comes in the midst of a bitter feud with neighboring Thailand, which began with a brief armed skirmish in late May over border territory claimed by both nations and has now led to border closures and nearly daily exchanges of nationalistic insults.
