Phnom Penh. Cambodia aims to shut down all of the country’s notorious online scam centers by the end of next month, the head of the government’s cybercrime crackdown said Wednesday.

Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who leads the Commission for Combating Online Scams, told The Associated Press that authorities have targeted 250 locations believed to be involved in the lucrative criminal activity since July and have shut down about 80%, or 200 sites.

He said police will continue suppression efforts after April to prevent the scam centers from reemerging.

Cambodia has launched previous crackdowns on online scam operations, but with limited long-term impact.

“The real question is whether this effort targets the system that enables the industry, not just the buildings where scams happen,” said Jacob Sims, an expert on transnational crime. “Past crackdowns in Cambodia have often left the financial and protection networks intact, allowing operations to quickly reconstitute.”

“So far, there are few signs the current round of enforcement is reaching the key perpetrators among the Cambodian ruling elite,” added Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center. He also noted that restrictions on independent reporting and civil society groups make the government’s claims difficult to verify.

Cybercrime has flourished across Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar, with victims worldwide losing tens of billions of dollars annually, according to United Nations experts and other analysts.

The industry is closely linked to human trafficking, as foreign nationals are often recruited with false job offers and then forced to run romance and cryptocurrency scams under conditions resembling modern slavery.

Chhay Sinarith said the latest crackdown has resulted in 79 legal cases involving 697 suspected ringleaders and associates.

Authorities have also repatriated nearly 10,000 scam center workers from 23 countries, he said, with fewer than 1,000 still awaiting official repatriation. Others who escaped or were released during raids returned home independently.

Cambodia is cooperating with several countries, particularly China and the United States, to combat the problem, Chhay said.

On Tuesday, Cambodian police raided a suspected scam center in a high-rise building in Phnom Penh, arresting about 60 Cambodian and Chinese nationals at their desks.

“They chatted with people in Europe to convince them to invest money, but the investments were fake and fraudulent,” said Bun Sosekha, deputy commissioner of the Phnom Penh Municipal Police.

Earlier Wednesday, journalists were shown equipment seized in other raids, including uniforms and fake identification cards used by scammers posing as Japanese police officers to intimidate victims online.

Chhay said scam operations in Cambodia first appeared on a smaller scale around 2012, using voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) calls that allowed criminals to disguise their identities and locations.

The scams expanded rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when casinos — many already involved in online gambling — lost in-person customers and turned to online fraud on an industrial scale.

Since then, scam centers have spread globally, reaching regions as far as Africa and Latin America.

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