Cambodia’s scam crackdown leaves stranded foreign workers in Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh is absorbing the human fallout of Cambodia’s anti-scam crackdown. As authorities raid compounds tied to online fraud, foreign workers and trafficking victims are being pushed out of closed sites and into the capital, turning a law-enforcement campaign into a street-level displacement crisis.

The crackdown comes after years in which Cambodia became one of the region’s most notorious hubs for cyberfraud. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says scam compounds are concentrated in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and the Philippines, and that the industry is now fused with human trafficking, underground banking and other organized-crime networks. UNODC says victims have been trafficked from more than 50 countries, with many lured by fake job ads for marketing, customer support or tech work before being confined and forced to scam others.

Cambodian officials moved hard in July 2025, saying 2,000 people were arrested in raids on scam compounds, including at least 226 Chinese nationals, after Prime Minister Hun Manet ordered law enforcement and the military to clamp down. But recent raids have also exposed the scale of the network in smaller, tightly packed sites. UNODC says some of the centers uncovered in Cambodia have held about 100 to 150 people each, a sign of how far the business has adapted under pressure.

The deeper problem is that the raids do not end the fraud economy. UNODC has warned that crackdowns often displace criminal operations instead of eliminating them, with groups reappearing in other purpose-built business parks and border areas across Southeast Asia. Its analysis says the region’s cyberfraud machine is driven by transnational syndicates and linked networks of money launderers, human traffickers and data brokers, making it resilient even when individual compounds are shut.

Rights groups say the Cambodian government’s enforcement drive has not matched the scale of the abuse. Human Rights Watch said in its 2025 Cambodia report that UN human rights officials estimated online scam centers enslave at least 100,000 people in the country and continue to operate with impunity. Human Rights Watch and other monitors have also warned that civic space, media freedom and accountability remain severely constrained, raising doubts about whether tougher raids can deliver real protection for the people they claim to rescue.

UNODC launched its Trapped in Scam Crime campaign on December 12, 2025, to warn that victims come from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and beyond. In Cambodia, the immediate result of the crackdown is visible on the streets of Phnom Penh: the scam economy is being squeezed, but the people trapped inside it are still searching for a way out.