Cambodia’s Billion Dollar Scam
Thousands of people have been trafficked into the country to work in cyber scamming compounds built with Chinese money. Now they’re stuck there.
OCTOBER 15, 2024
When the sea mist rolls across Bokor Mountain in Kampot, Cambodia, it shrouds the forested peak in an eerie cloud, reducing visibility to meters in minutes. At the summit stands a French colonial-era hotel, a crumbling chapel riddled with bullet holes from the civil war, and a modern casino encircled by half-finished condos. The mountain — one of the last holdouts of the Maoist Khmer Rouge — is said to be haunted. It’s also the site of a string of compounds used for the latest horror to sweep through the country: a brutal online scam industry controlled by Chinese billionaires with the complicity of a Cambodian political elite that not only profits from the industry but helped to build it.
The mountain, and the area around it, has been designated part of New Bokor City, just one of the supposedly state-of-the-art, “smart” satellite cities, hi-tech parks and special economic zones that have popped up in Cambodia over the past decade. These sites have been hacked out of protected national parks along the coast, snaking from Kampot province on the Vietnamese border, northwest to Ream City, then Sihanoukville — a port city notorious for casinos and violent crime — and up to Dara Sakor in Koh Kong, on the Thai border.
The construction is ostensibly part of a government effort to drive economic growth and foreign investment beyond the country’s main commercial and tourism hubs of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. But one by one, the mega casinos and satellite cities that now sprawl across the Cambodian coast are being unmasked as belonging to an illicit scamming industry staffed by people trafficked into the country and held against their will.
This illicit scam industry did not emerge by accident. Rather, it is the result of years of investment and infrastructure development designed to accommodate the industry’s needs.
In early 2023 a scamming compound on Bokor Mountain was temporarily abandoned. The Taiwanese police had recently negotiated the rescue of 31 of their citizens, and the Cambodian government was under pressure to stage a raid and release hundreds more people trapped inside. But the compound, it seems, was tipped off. On a visit in April 2023, all signs suggested people had been cleared out in a hurry. Cabinets were smashed open, furniture overturned; papers, cables and plane boarding passes were strewn across the floor.
In notebooks left behind, we found instructions and notes that give a sense of how the scam worked. A 42-point list guides the scammer through each stage, from an explanation of cross-border e-commerce to how to gather information on customers, feign personal friendships and love relationships online. It ends with the instructions: “Invitation to register — deepen feelings, deepen profit — brainwashing … keep customer hanging.”
This illicit scam industry did not emerge by accident. Rather, it is the result of years of investment and infrastructure development designed to accommodate the industry’s needs. Cambodia is hardly the first country to be plagued with high-level corruption, to see its government bow to the demands of organized crime groups or to have those in power hand lucrative public contracts to family members or sell them to the highest bidder.
But rarely has an entire country been redesigned — with new cities, highways, airports, seaports, business parks and in filled bays that literally change the shape of the country — to build an industry that is worth billions of dollars a year and has enslaved over 100,000 people in an astonishingly short amount of time.
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The beginnings of Cambodia’s dive into cyber scamming can be traced back to 2013, when the country joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative — an ambitious infrastructure project that extends huge loans to foreign countries for development projects, provided they use Chinese state-owned enterprises to build them.
Many of the self-described real estate developers flooding into Cambodia would turn out to be fugitives evading criminal charges in China or to have past convictions for crimes including money laundering, racketeering and owning illegal gambling companies.
The Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC), the government body that directly oversees all domestic and inward investment projects worth over $2 million in the country, greenlit a swathe of mega-projects, from special economic zones (SEZs) to expressways and hydropower dams. Chinese construction companies set up local branches to handle the contracts, and Chinese real estate investors poured into major towns to take advantage of the construction boom. High-rise condos and gleaming office skyscrapers sprung up in cities like Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville for the first time.
The timing was ideal. Reports of human rights abuses in Cambodia’s multi-million-dollar sugar industry saw sugar exports to Europe plummet and Australia’s ANZ bank cut ties with the sugar industry and the banking sector. An international outcry over the ruling party’s crackdown on the political opposition and independent media before the 2018 elections led the European Union to cancel a crucial trade agreement, costing Cambodia over $1 billion a year. China, meanwhile, only complained about things that directly hurt its interests.
Many of the self-described real estate developers flooding into Cambodia would turn out to be fugitives evading criminal charges in China or to have past convictions for crimes including money laundering, racketeering and owning illegal gambling companies. Several have since been placed under financial sanctions by the U.S. and U.K. governments for running human trafficking, illegal gambling and money laundering networks.
Some investors set their sights on existing, legal gambling hubs or went into business with Cambodian senators and family members of the political elite to construct new casinos and gambling-related businesses. Others were more ambitious, striking agreements with the government to build entire satellite cities from scratch in remote areas on the coast or forested borderlands, often with a mega-casino at the core.
These were not normal casinos. Their structures incorporated towering office blocks with dormitories initially rented to online gambling operations and their mostly Chinese-speaking workers — essentially a loophole for unregistered companies to shelter under the umbrella of a licensed, legal casino.
By 2019, online gambling made up around 80 percent of the gambling market in Cambodia’s biggest casino town, Sihanoukville. Reports emerged that many sites were scams, refusing payouts and stealing customers’ money; some overseas workers had their passports confiscated and were forced to work for these companies for up to six months before they could leave, according to an al-Jazeera report. Frustrated with Cambodia’s inaction, the Chinese police insisted on flying to Sihanoukville to arrest 150 Chinese members of an online extortion ring in August 2019.
By the end of that year, then Prime Minister Hun Sen finally caved to pressure from China and banned online gambling. Around 200,000 Chinese nationals left the country, practically overnight. A few months later, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic triggered border closures, cutting off the flow of predominantly Chinese casino tourists.
With the legal betting industry in tatters, casinos increasingly leased their now-empty floor space and dormitory blocks to a side industry that would soon become their main money-maker: online scamming.
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Covid-19 provided the ideal cover for the owners of online gambling and scamming compounds to exploit a growing number of workers, allowing the crisis to grow under the radar for months.
When Cambodia’s borders closed in March 2020, there were just 2,000 Chinese nationals with work permits left in Sihanoukville. Entering the country legally remained near impossible. But Cambodia, which didn’t experience an outbreak of Covid cases for another year, was one of the few places in the region where it was still possible to find work. Human trafficking into the country soared. By the time the country introduced lockdowns in mid-2021, massive compounds, some with space for tens of thousands of workers, were packed with foreign nationals — most of them Chinese.
By September 2023, the U.N. estimated that 100,000 people had been trafficked into Cambodia’s scam industry.
In desperate social media posts and in private pleas to family members, embassies, volunteer rescue groups, and later to journalists, many described being tricked and trafficked into the country for non-existent jobs, only to be sold to companies who forced them to scam. Dozens of survivors told The Dial that police regularly returned escapees to compounds.
The Cambodian government came under pressure from China in October 2022 to crack down on illegal gambling and scamming operations, and police claimed to have raided 10,000 locations. But only a few hundred people were reported to have been arrested, people living near scam compounds all over the country told The Dial they’d seen workers being moved out in advance, and by April this year, all but one of the known scam compounds The Dial visited in Sihanoukville had filled up again. It's likely that many scam syndicates simply relocated for long enough for the government to save face, then moved back in when the storm blew over. By now, it was obvious that well-connected criminal investors and scam companies no longer had to conceal their activities from the Cambodian authorities. By September 2023, the U.N. estimated that 100,000 people had been trafficked into Cambodia’s scam industry.
With workers expected to bring in anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 per scam victim per month, and at least two new victims each week, the scam industry in Cambodia — a country with an official GDP of just under $31.8 billion — is estimated to be turning over $12.5 billion every year. (That is a very conservative estimate, calculated based on workers bringing in $1,000 per scam victim and two new victims every week; The Dial’s conversations with former workers showed that many workers typically bring in up to $10,000 per scam victim, meaning the overall yearly total could be as high as $125 billion).
This money flows through complex networks of crypto wallets, complicit banks, and bespoke payment platforms, while the brick-and-mortar buildings that house cyber slaves are laundered as respectable investments. Dozens of influential ministers have been photographed celebrating the grand openings and ground-breaking ceremonies of the larger compounds that contain scamming operations. Some compounds even qualify for investment schemes and generous tax breaks under Cambodian law. (The CDC did not respond to The Dial’s request for information on whether any compounds have received tax breaks.)
Ramesh arrived in Cambodia in July 2022. A civil engineer from India, he came on the promise of a job in the booming construction sector. A friend had connected him to an employment agent, who had said Ramesh could make $1,825 per month — more than seven times what he could expect to earn in his home state of Tamil Nadu. With aging parents to support, he jumped at the chance. “The agent told me: you have a talent, so you should come to Cambodia — you can have a good job here … A good job, with a good salary. I thought it would be good for my future,” Ramesh, who spoke under a pseudonym to protect his family back home, told us.
The goal was to squeeze $1,000 out of each mark in the first month, rising to $10,000 in the second. He worked 16 hours a day.
After landing in Cambodia, he was met by another Indian national and later taken to a job interview in Sihanoukville. The smartly dressed Chinese and Indonesian men interviewing him were not interested in his engineering skills, only in his ability to type quickly and speak English. Alarm bells rang, but Ramesh was in a tight spot. The agent had charged him $5,000 to arrange the position, and he had borrowed $4,000 to pay the bill. His agent assured him that if he didn’t like the work, he could leave.
Ramesh said his new employers took him to a place called Crown Casino — located near the Sihanoukville Port, around 60 kilometers west of Bokor Mountain — where he was escorted to the dormitory he would share with eight other people, from Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Finally, he was told what the job entailed: befriending strangers on social media and dating apps using fake accounts and gradually persuading them to put their money into a cryptocurrency trading platform or onto a soccer betting site. Two models, a Thai woman and a “European” woman — he wasn’t sure exactly where she was from — were on hand for video calls. The marks would be given small payouts to convince them to put more money into the platforms, then they’d be cut off, losing it all. “It’s a scam. Total scam,” Ramesh said.
He was told to get 70 people signed up to the platforms. The goal was to squeeze $1,000 out of each mark in the first month, rising to $10,000 in the second. He worked 16 hours a day. Only the supervisors — all of them Chinese — were allowed to leave the building, which Ramesh says was patrolled by more than 50 Cambodian guards, some of whom carried tasers.
“After one day I told [my agent] I don’t like this … This is not the kind of job I want to do. I want to come out — come and take me out,” said Ramesh. But the agent told him to sit tight for two days. Those two days turned into six weeks, and Ramesh, getting desperate, went to his Chinese boss and said he wanted to leave.
“He told me, your agent sold you for nearly $3,000. If you want to go, you can. But you will have to pay the $3,000 fine to me,” said Ramesh. His family scraped together the ransom, and he was sent back to Phnom Penh, stranded and penniless, now deeply in debt.
The Dial spoke to dozens of other victims who told similar stories of being brought to work in scamming compounds under false pretenses and being unable to leave the premises. The Dial was unable to reach Crown Casino for comment.
When we met in a coffee shop close to Phnom Penh airport in December 2022, he was sharing a small room with seven Cambodians, some of whom had escaped from similar situations, while hunting for work — any work — to keep up with interest payments. “I don’t tell people back home, my close friends, because I am scared. I don’t want them to say, oh he went to scam people. Even my parents don’t know; I said I’m searching for a job. I didn’t tell them anything about it.”
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Many of the Cambodian politicians who could take action to shut down the criminal industry either helped to build it or have a financial interest in turning a blind eye.
As vice chairman of the CDC since 2008, Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chanthol has overseen most major investment decisions made in Cambodia for nearly 30 years, as well as the country’s adoption of SEZs. (The CDC is officially chaired by the prime minister, who gives a final sign-off.) His family members appear to have business ties to several of the SEZs and smart cities he has approved — including ones implicated in serious organized crime, online scams and cyber slavery.
In 2014, Chanthol’s brother Sun Kenny Keng (who goes by Kenny) launched food and beverage company CAM F & B Services that owns, among other brands, the Burger King franchise in Cambodia. His co-director was Sok Hong, whose family business, the investment group Sokimex, is developing Bokor Mountain and owns the casino and attached scam compound visited by The Dial.
Starting in 2018, Sokimex received permission to expand into a national park, secured then Prime Minister Hun Sen’s approval for the construction of New Bokor City, and saw the CDC green light a $1.3billion port development project. Kenny quietly quit as director of CAM F & B Services in December 2022. The Dial received no response to multiple attempts to reach Hong by phone; Telegram messages and emails to Sokimex went unanswered.
Sebastian Strangio, author of Hun Sen’s Cambodia and In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century, says the CDC has a long-standing reputation for taking a cut of investment projects it approves. “This is precisely how the system is set up.” Officials receive paltry salaries, Strangio explained, and are expected to use their power to generate wealth to maintain networks of “clients” — businesspeople who pay for prestige and protection.
In 2015, several months before the WorldBridge Group, owned by Cambodian businessman Sear Rithy, was awarded a $100 million state construction contract, Kenny registered a new company with Rithy under the WorldBridge brand — although it’s unclear what, if anything, it does. Sear Rithy and the WorldBridge group did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2016, Kenny and the director of the Cambodian branch of Chinese firm GWCSC, Xiao Xinming, registered New Century Construction Consultant, which has no online presence or publicly announced contracts. Figures compiled by AidData Research Lab and the China Global Investment Tracker show Chanthol signed off on at least $5 billion worth of infrastructure projects to be conducted under GWCSC’s supervision after his brother partnered with Xinming. The Dial was not able to reach representatives at GWCSC despite multiple phone calls, and Xiao Xinming did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
Also in 2016, the CDC named the Dara Sakor resort a priority project, and Kenny became co-director of construction company Diamond Alliances alongside Li Tao, the chairman of Union Development Group (UDG) — the Chinese state-owned company that won the 99-year lease to develop Dara Sakor and has since been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for serious human rights breaches and corruption.
In December 2020, Kenny and Chanthol’s wife, Sotha, joined the board of Kampot Cement (founded by Sotha’s father). Despite charging more than its competitors, Kampot Cement announced it would “supply the bulk” of the 500,000 to 600,000 tons needed to construct the $2 billion Sihanoukville expressway. Chanthol approved the project via the CDC.
The Dial contacted Sun Chanthol and Kenny by phone and email about the allegations in this article but received no answer; calls to the CDC also went unanswered. The Dial reached out to the Cambodian transport ministry about the decision to award the contract to Kampot Cement and did not receive a reply; all emails to Kampot Cement bounced back and a representative of its parent company, SCG, said they were unable to comment.
Other powerful Cambodian political figures with stakes in Chinese projects linked to the scamming industry make little effort to conceal them.
Senior government officials and their families reap “massive illegal profits” from the scamming industry, according to AHRLA’s Robertson, while many officials benefit “by simply looking the other way on criminal behavior and taking envelopes of cash to do so.”
Prime Minister Hun Manet’s cousin, Hun To, is the co-director of multiple companies in the Henghe Group, one of the most prolific investors in satellite cities and SEZs planned around compounds purpose-built for scams. His venture Huione Guarantee is also estimated to have facilitated billions of dollars in criminal transactions — and is, as Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates (AHRLA), explains, “an online marketplace for everything a cyber scam operator would ever need.” The Dial made several attempts to reach the Henghe Group by phone but received no answer.
Another Henghe Group business partner, Try Pheap, was an adviser to former Prime Minister Hun Sen (Hun Manet’s father) and is, despite being sanctioned by the U.S. in 2019, developing a $300 million seaport in Kep, close to Bokor New City. Cambodia’s Interior Minister Sar Sokha formerly co-owned the Jinbei casino and scam compound in Sihanoukville. Calls to the ministry went unanswered; Sokha has previously admitted his involvement with the casino and said he divested from the casino several years ago.
The Crown High-Tech Industrial Park, where Ramesh was sent to work, is owned by Cambodian Senator Kok An; at least two other casino complexes owned by Kok have been the sites of brutal deaths of workers and scam activities. The Dial received no answer on multiple attempts to reach Kok by phone. Another powerful senator, Ly Yong Phat, was an early partner in the land concession used for Dara Sakor. Ly and several of his companies and assets were placed under Magnitsky Sanctions in September by the U.S. Treasury, citing multiple rescues of trafficking victims forced to scam at his O’Smach Resort compound on the Thai border. The Cambodian government denies the allegations.
Senior government officials and their families reap “massive illegal profits” from the scamming industry, according to AHRLA’s Robertson, while many officials benefit “by simply looking the other way on criminal behavior and taking envelopes of cash to do so.”
“The Cambodian government is certainly complicit in the cyber slavery industry by both commission and omission,” he said. “Many massive scam compounds enjoy such comprehensive impunity that they feel no compunction to hide.”
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The official name of Crown Casino, where Ramesh was sent, is Crown High-Tech Industrial Park. Materials posted in Chinese on Facebook between August 2022 and May 2023 describe the park as a $1 billion, 300 square-meter development adjacent to Sihanoukville Port that comprises a high-tech technology incubation center, a product exhibition hall, a so-called “Crown Academy” and an enterprise cluster designed to foster innovation in digital payments and currencies, 5G communications and virtual reality.
There’s no sign any of this exists. On multiple visits to the guarded site over the past 18 months, including most recently in April of this year, we found only secure concrete compounds and a casino that security staff told us was closed to the public without a meeting with the “big boss.” The Dial was unable to reach Senator Kok An, the owner of Crown Casino, and calls to 855 Investment, which holds the license for Crown Casino Sihanoukville and lists him as sole director, went unanswered. The Dial also sent several emails to Kok An’s company, Anco Brothers, which holds the license for the Crown Casino, but received no response.
According to the Khmer Times, a pro-government newspaper, the country has built 50 or so SEZs over the past two decades. But the full list is not public; the CDC ignored multiple emails asking to confirm if the Crown High-Tech Industrial Park is on it.
Some 115 miles further along the coast toward the Thai border lies Dara Sakor — a remote, self-contained city, carved out of a protected national forest.
Ramesh finally made it home from his ordeal at the Crown Casino in 2023 and is keen to put this part of his life behind him.
The CDC signed off on the $3.8 billion project in 2008, but little happened until 2016, when the CDC, backed by China, made it a priority project. At 36,000 hectares — roughly half the size of Singapore and nearly four times the legal limit under Cambodian law — it was set to become the country’s largest SEZ yet.
Plans included a residential zone; a tourism, entertainment and casino hub; an industrial park and “innovation zone” for fostering new tech companies; an airport with a long, military-plane-friendly runway; a seaport; and brand new road infrastructure linking it to the Thai border.
When we last visited Dara Sakor in 2022, eight years after its ambitious relaunch, much of it was still a construction site. Satellite imagery from May this year shows little has progressed since. There were no hi-tech industrial parks, no innovation zones. Only two parts of the project appeared to have been completed. The first is the airport, which the US insistsis a cover for a Chinese military base. The second is the sprawling hotel-casino complex, Long Bay — which former employees, embassies, Cambodian media, and a 2022 Al Jazeera documentary say is predominantly a cyber-slavery compound, used to imprison trafficked workers and force them to conduct online scams under threat of torture.
Media coverage and early promotional materials highlight four Chinese investors: Li Tao, who represents UDG; Deng Pibing and Wu Jiangfeng of Zhengheng, the project’s main real estate developer; and She Zhijiang, a fugitive currently in custody in Thailand, where he is fighting extradition to China on a number of illegal online gambling charges.
Ramesh finally made it home from his ordeal at the Crown Casino in 2023 and is keen to put this part of his life behind him. But his compatriots continue to be trafficked to Cambodia in ever greater numbers. In March of this year, Indian media reported that more than 5,000 Indians are now trapped in Cambodia and forced to conduct scams, with only 250 rescued to date.
“Some people went to the Indian embassy, to the Cambodian police. They just said, ‘we don’t have the ability to come out there and get you out,’” Ramesh told us back when we met in Phnom Penh. “It’s very dangerous. If I’d known about Cambodia, I definitely would not have come.”
✺ Published in “Issue 20: Lessons” of The Dial
