Cambodia's scam compounds keep growing despite crackdowns, Amnesty says

Cambodia's criminal scam compounds — where victims are held through trafficking and fraud and forced to work as phone scammers — have continued to grow in number despite sweeping government crackdowns, a new analysis shows.

Amnesty International, in a report released Monday, counted 86 such compounds operating across Cambodia as of April — a roughly 62 percent increase from 53 a year earlier.

Of those compounds, only 24 had been subject to government enforcement action. The Cambodian government announced that since last July it had raided 250 compounds and shut down 200, but those figures diverge sharply from reality.

"Cambodia's crackdown has failed in critical areas," Amnesty said in the report. "It has failed to investigate and shut down some of the most well-known scam compounds in the country, and it has failed to protect and support victims who have escaped."

The Cambodian government announced last month that its intensified operations had resulted in charges against 1,458 people linked to fraud operations at the compounds and the deportation of 18,864 people from 33 countries who had worked within them. But the credibility of those official figures has come into serious question.

Amnesty said that many of the thousands freed from the compounds were treated not as victims but as illegal immigrants, and were left to rely on local charities, residents and foreign embassies to arrange their departure.

Julia Dixon, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Bloomberg that most of Cambodia's enforcement actions still amount to little more than performance. "They probably warned key people inside the scam operations before the raids, so the real key figures were never arrested," she said. Dixon added that she had observed significant movement of operations within Cambodia — from large compounds near the border to smaller ones in urban areas that are harder to track, or simply relocating elsewhere.

Dixon said some of those released from the compounds had been trafficked again within Cambodia. "You would have seen people pouring out into the streets during the crackdowns," she said. "They have nowhere to go and no way to get home, so some end up at another compound — some voluntarily, some not."