Forced labour in Cambodia's scam compounds

Cambodia has become the epicentre of what the United Nations now treats as one of the region's gravest human rights emergencies: an online scam industry that, by its own reckoning, drained between US$18 billion and US$37 billion from victims across East and Southeast Asia in 2023 alone. A workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands is caught up in these operations, a significant share held in conditions the UN describes as akin to modern slavery.

Since around 2019, fortified compounds disguised as casino resorts, industrial parks and office towers have proliferated across Cambodia, concentrated in Sihanoukville, Poipet, and the porous frontiers shared with Vietnam and Thailand. Inside these complexes, pig-butchering scams, crypto fraud, investment cons and official-impersonation schemes are run against victims on every continent.

Cambodian authorities have, under sustained international pressure, begun to respond. In July 2025 the government launched what it called its largest-ever crackdown, arresting several high-profile gang leaders and claiming to have shut down more than 200 scam centres. Over the past 12 months, authorities say they inspected more than 28,500 premises, uncovering some 737 scam operations and deporting over 21,000 foreign nationals from 38 countries. Washington and London have added their own pressure, sanctioning the Prince Holding Group, a conglomerate accused of running scam operations at industrial scale, echoing earlier sanctions against tycoon Ly Yong Phat in 2024.

Set against Amnesty's own findings, the scale of that response looks thinner. Of the 86 compounds Amnesty identified as of April 2026, there was evidence of state intervention at only 24, meaning more than 70% appeared bypassed entirely, while raids at some sites missed victims outright, leaving them exposed to further abuse even as the government publicly credited itself. Amnesty's research, drawn from 73 survivor interviews, found many compounds had relocated rather than closed. Cambodian authorities have largely failed to identify trafficking victims among those freed, let alone prosecute the syndicates and officials who profit from them. Freed workers are routinely detained for visa overstays rather than recognised as survivors, fined at $10 a day until the bill runs into the thousands, a debt their families are left to cover. With a single trafficking shelter in the country, already full, thousands of former captives end up stranded on the streets of Phnom Penh, exposed to being trafficked all over again.

Dr Ivan Franceschini, Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne and author of Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds, has spent years mapping how this system functions; not as an aberration, but as a business model with its own logic of recruitment, mobility and protection.

That mobility is the industry's defining trait. Operations cleared out of Cambodia this year have simply reappeared in Myanmar and Laos, and increasingly further afield. Dr Franceschini calls the syndicates "flexible and mobile", built to relocate, not disband, so each crackdown shifts the problem rather than solving it. Earlier Cambodian crackdowns were largely performative, confined to a handful of smaller compounds and rarely lasting more than a few weeks. The current campaign is more sustained and has genuinely disrupted parts of the industry. Where it falls short is in how it treats the people it displaces; survivors left stranded without passports, funds, or a system to distinguish them from undocumented migrants or criminals.

Many of the compounds that took root in Cambodia were, in a sense, refugees of an earlier crackdown. The Philippines and Cambodia developed as scam bases in parallel through the 2010s, particularly after President Duterte launched the POGO scheme in 2016, shut down in mid-2024, which brought Chinese-run online gambling operations serving customers barred from betting at home. When Manila moved against the sector, the operators didn't fold; Cambodia offered what the Philippines increasingly would not: cheap, fast-leased land and regulators with limited appetite to look closely. The pivot from gambling to scamming was less a new invention than a redeployment of an existing one.

This industrialisation also reflects a longer-running trend: a cottage industry of illicit IT services that has sharply lowered the barrier to entry for fraud at scale. What has resulted functions less like a fugitive hideout than a factory with a management structure. Workers are graded on output, ranked, and, when performance dips, sold on to other operators, their labour and debt priced like stock changing hands between businesses. Dr Franceschini calls this "compound capitalism": forced labour run with the bureaucratic gloss of corporate management, treating trafficked people as a renewable input. Long-term leases and a broader status as areas of exception, secured through a casino licence, in a country where offline gambling remains legal, lend several compounds a veneer of legitimate enterprise that makes raiding one site feel almost negligible when the workforce is designed to be interchangeable.

That interchangeability produces the industry's cruellest inversion. The person typing threats into a stranger's inbox is, often, also a hostage, coerced into producing fraud later reported to police as though they were its sole author. Several workers freed from Cambodian compounds have described being treated as suspects before anyone considered they might be victims, an echo of the same failure playing out at the state level.

Real change hinges less on new legislation than on political will. As Dr Franceschini notes, international pressure is the one lever that has proven capable of shifting that will: it works only once the reputational and diplomatic costs of hosting these operations outweigh the benefits. What may matter more is that pressure translating into sustained domestic commitment, not performative sweeps. Without that shift, the compounds will keep doing what they do: relocating and enduring.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
Eos Collective – Empower, Observe, Support
Home | Global Anti Scam Alliance
Blue Dragon Children's Foundation

Share This Article

What's Your Opinion?

Share your thoughts on this article