Cambodia targets workers in crackdown on scam centers

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Cambodia’s government on Friday said that at least 2,000 people have been arrested in a crackdown ordered this week by prime minister Hun Manet on scam centers — prison-like…

Cambodia’s government on Friday said that at least 2,000 people have been arrested in a crackdown ordered this week by prime minister Hun Manet on scam centers — prison-like compounds that aid groups say run on the work of human trafficking victims.

Images and videos released by state-controlled media showed people running from alleged scam-center sites, Cambodian troops inspecting seized electronic equipment and groups of detainees in plastic wrist ties. Officials said detained workers included Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Indian nationals.

Information Minister Neth Pheaktra told Agence France-Presse that authorities had expanded the scope of their raids to nine of the country’s 25 provinces and will “dismantle every scam network no matter where they hide.”

The move comes after an Amnesty International report released last month said that the Cambodian government was “deliberately ignoring a litany of human rights abuses” at the centers, “including slavery, human trafficking, child labour and torture being carried out by criminal gangs on a vast scale” at at least 53 sites across the country.

Scam centers have also figured into Cambodia’s recent political tensions with neighboring Thailand. As she closed border crossings between the two nations last month, the now-ousted Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra cited Cambodia’s scam centers as “a hub of world-class criminality and a national threat.”

Across Southeast Asia, scam centers generate nearly $40 billion in annual profits, according to a United Nations estimate.

Rong Chhun, an adviser to the opposition Nation Power Party in Cambodia, told RFA Khmer that shutting down scam centers would require targeting organizers, not workers.

“If we only target and sweep up the workers hired by these masterminds without capturing the leaders themselves, it won’t be long before the operations reappear,” he said.

Ny Sokha, president of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, said the Cambodian government…

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