Cambodia Has the Tools to End Scams: Now It Needs Results

IMAGE: Some of the ringleaders of online scam operations who were arrested in Phnom Penh in 2025. Supplied

#Opinion

Cambodia is facing a defining challenge. Online scam syndicates have become one of the most urgent criminal threats affecting our society, our economy and our international reputation. Cambodian authorities have taken serious steps in recent years through crackdowns, regulatory measures and cooperation with foreign partners. These efforts reflect increasing commitment and goodwill in confronting a complex and evolving threat.

Yet the next phase cannot be measured by headlines alone. The real question is whether we are dismantling criminal syndicates or merely responding to their visible symptoms.

Online scams today are not isolated fraud cases. They are organised systems involving recruitment, coercion, digital deception, money laundering and cross-border asset conversion. International bodies such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime have warned that scam compounds across Southeast Asia are increasingly linked to trafficking and organised crime. These networks function like enterprises, with managers, financiers, recruiters and laundering channels. They survive when leadership remains untouched.

Cambodia is not without legal tools to address these crimes. Fraud, extortion, unlawful confinement and organized criminal conduct are prosecutable under the Penal Code. Coercive compound operations fall within Cambodia’s anti-trafficking framework. Anti–money laundering mechanisms also allow the freezing and confiscation of illicit proceeds. The issue is not the absence of law, but whether enforcement reaches the top of these criminal structures. Justice cannot stop at the compound gate.

Recent Cambodian measures reportedly expand responsibility to provincial leadership where scam centres operate and impose penalties on property lessors whose buildings facilitate criminal activity.

This reflects an important truth: syndicates cannot operate without physical infrastructure, weak oversight or local tolerance. At the same time, accountability must remain lawful and targeted. Administrative responsibility can encourage vigilance, but criminal liability must depend on evidence of knowledge, facilitation or wilful blindness — not automatic punishment without due process. The rule of law is the foundation of credible enforcement.

Enforcement success cannot be measured only by arrest and deportation numbers. Large crackdowns may produce statistics, but statistics do not dismantle syndicates. Too often, enforcement sweeps up low-level individuals, some of whom may themselves be victims of trafficking, forced labour or coercion. Deportations may remove people from compounds, but they do not necessarily remove the command structure. Cambodia must shift decisively from quantity to quality. The measure of success is not how many are arrested, but whether ring leaders are prosecuted.

Financial disruption must become central. Online scams are profit-driven crimes. If syndicates keep their money, they keep their power. Cambodia’s next phase must strengthen its capacity to trace illicit flows early, target mule accounts and cash-out brokers, prosecute laundering intermediaries and confiscate scam-linked assets. Asset seizure is not secondary; it is deterrence. When criminals lose their money, networks collapse faster than when they lose replaceable workers.

Victim protection must also be institutionalised. A defining feature of many scam compounds is coercion. Individuals are often recruited through deception, trapped under threats or held in debt bondage. Cambodia’s anti-trafficking framework must therefore be paired with systematic victim screening, protection mechanisms, and coordinated repatriation processes. A victim-centred approach is not only humane but strategic. Victims are witnesses, victims provide intelligence and victims strengthen prosecutions.

Cambodia’s vulnerability should not be reduced to a single cause, nor should responsibility be shifted unfairly. At the same time, it is a fact that scam networks exploit global digital and financial infrastructure, including encrypted messaging, social media recruitment, cryptocurrency laundering and cross-border payment systems.

Recognising this does not diminish Cambodia’s responsibility; it highlights the need for cooperation across jurisdictions and engagement from platforms to prevent abuse. Online scams cannot be eliminated by one country alone.

Cambodia now has an opportunity to define its next phase of enforcement by real outcomes: Ring leaders prosecuted, assets confiscated, victims protected and networks dismantled. Cambodia’s next success must be judged by prosecutions of organisers and confiscation of illicit assets, not only by the number of arrests. Mass arrests and deportations may produce numbers, but they do not end syndicates. Victims must be protected and repatriated, while traffickers and kingpins must face justice.

Only when syndicates lose their leaders, their money and their protection will this crisis truly end.

Panhavuth Long is founder and an attorney-at-law of Pan & Associates Law Firm. The views and opinions expressed are his own.

-Phnom Penh Post-