For years, Cambodia has drawn global condemnation as one of the world’s primary hubs for large-scale transnational online scam operations, criminal enterprises that have bilked billions of dollars from victims across the globe while fueling rampant human trafficking and modern-day slavery. Now, the Cambodian government is making a bold assertion: it has completely cleared its territory of the notorious fortified compounds that hosted these illegal activities.
The announcement came Friday in an official statement from Cambodia’s Ad-Hoc Commission for Combating Online Scams (CCOS), which detailed the agency’s progress at a closed-door briefing held Thursday. The meeting, led by CCOS chair and Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, was attended by roughly 50 representatives from foreign diplomatic missions and international organizations monitoring the crackdown.
According to the statement, the declaration of total eradication follows a months-long aggressive enforcement campaign that included strict legal action against perpetrators, criminal networks, and corrupt public officials found to be complicit in the scams, alongside the formal establishment of a comprehensive national cybersecurity legal framework to prevent a resurgence of the criminal activity.
Chhay Sinarith outlined key metrics of the government’s crackdown, noting that between July 2025 and August 20, 2026, Cambodian law enforcement opened investigations into 793 suspected scam locations, conducted raids on 624 sites, and took nearly 30,000 suspects from 39 different nationalities into custody. Authorities also rescued and deported 58,266 foreign nationals who had been trapped in the compounds, he said, while 3,477 criminal suspects from 29 nationalities were arrested and remanded into pre-trial detention.
The high-profile campaign scored two major wins with the arrest and extradition of two alleged scam kingpins: Chen Zhi and Li Xiong, influential Chinese businessmen who had previously obtained Cambodian citizenship. The pair were taken into custody earlier this year and extradited to face charges in their home country.
The government’s push to eliminate the scam operations was also backed by legislative action: in March, Cambodian lawmakers unanimously passed a new anti-scam law that carries maximum penalties of life imprisonment for convicted organizers, fulfilling a prior government pledge to shutter all scam compounds by the end of April.
Despite these sweeping claims of success, independent analysts and anti-trafficking organizations that have long tracked Cambodia’s scam networks are not fully convinced. The criminal operations, which have been linked to an estimated $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion in global losses in 2025 alone according to a July report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, are notorious for combining financial fraud with grotesque human rights abuses. Thousands of foreign nationals are lured to Cambodia with false promises of legitimate jobs, then forced into near-slavery to run “romance scams”, cryptocurrency fraud, and other schemes targeting victims worldwide.
Mark Taylor, an independent international anti-trafficking consultant and former head of an anti-trafficking program in Cambodia, cast sharp doubt on the government’s announcement in comments to the Associated Press. “The strong confidence placed in the government’s assertion that all scamming operations in Cambodia have been eradicated is severely misplaced,” Taylor said, adding that “there are credible indicators that significant scamming operations continue and that recruitment of foreign workers into Cambodia for scamming work continues.”
Vietnam-based anti-trafficking group Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation struck a more cautious tone, acknowledging tangible progress while stopping short of confirming full eradication. “There is no doubt that some of Cambodia’s criminal compounds used for online scamming have closed,” said Michael Brosowski, the organization’s founder and strategic director. Brosowski noted that his group has seen a drastic drop in calls for help from people trafficked into Cambodian scam compounds, though those calls have not ceased entirely. “We hope that the Cambodian government will keep its commitment to close down these compounds and give greater protection to victims of this crime,” he added.