America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), China’s Ministry of Public Security, Interpol and premium investigating agencies in other countries have tried to combat scammers who carry out their operations on social media, dating apps, financial and lottery apps. Despite several steps being taken, including warnings issued by telecom companies, the scanning industry thrives.

Scanning centers are found in casinos, hotels, resorts, residential and office complexes spread throughout Cambodia. One can recognise such centers by looking at the windows and balconies that are secured with bars and barbed wire fences. Every entrance is tightly secured and are impenetrable expect to those that run the criminal syndicates.

Many foreign nationals, including Chinese, Thais, Vietnamese, Indonesians, Malaysians and Indians are entrapped and trafficked into Cambodia by fraud syndicates, who involve them in cyber and lottery scams and dating apps, among other such fraudulent activities.

The entrapped people are thrashed with sticks, and electric batons in front of other workers, when they are handcuffed to iron beds. Videos and photographs of these atrocities surfaced through videos and photographs on the internet in 2021.

Some of these workers are sold for $12,000 and re-sold to another company at $16,700 and to a third company at $ 18,000. Large profits are made from cryptocurrency, while in romance scams wealthy Chinese women living abroad are targeted.

While Sihanoukville is the epicenter, cyber-slave compounds exist throughout Cambodia. Just 50 km from Sihanoukville across the bay, victims emerge from another scam compound - Long Bay, marketed as a luxury resort, lies within the country’s biggest real estate development, owned by a Chinese conglomerate, Union Development Group. In Myanmar’s borders with China criminal networks and Chinese kingpins unite with ethnic warlords kidnapping people from all over Asia to toil in compounds that scam people online. International Police organisations say this online fraud has bilked billions of dollars from retirees and lonely hearts.

In his late 20s, with a wife, 3 year old and a newborn baby, in March 2021, Chen answered an advertisement on the Chinese social media app WeChat for office work in Cambodia offering a salary many times higher than his job in waste recycling in China. Like many others from all over Asia who answered job ads on apps such as WeChat, WhatsApp or Telegram, Chen was tricked and then trafficked into Cambodia’s cyber-scam industry. Armed traffickers drove him and many others on motorbikes across the Vietnamese border. They were smuggled to Cambodia without a passport. They didn’t expect that they would be used for online scams.

The criminals running the centers would beat, thrash with an electric baton if the assigned task is not completed, says Chen, after suffering for a year. He tried to jump to escape from the first floor of the scam compound. Twenty three year old Chinese national, Tao was sold between three different compounds. He was a chef and he accepted the job offer in Cambodia but ended up in a job promoting online games. He had his airfare and accommodation paid, only to discover that he had been sold to a scam syndicate. He had to do everything from online gambling to cryptocurrency and romance scams. Chinese cyber-scam operations are big business as they steal tens of billions of dollars a year. The scammers target not just their own countrymen but those from Europe, USA and Australia.

A 24-year-old Xiang was an aspiring golf coach but was duped by someone promising a job in a factory with a salary of $ 3000 pm. However, he was made to contact scam victims on Chinese social media app QQ, build a relationship, entice them to invest in a lottery by downloading two apps, a legitimate lottery programme and the scam company’s fake one. He says they were not allowed to tell victims that they would never be able to collect their winnings or ever get back the money invested. “When he didn’t want to invest more, we had to block his account so that he couldn’t cash out,” he says.

Large profits are made from cryptocurrency and romance scams and for this the scam company creates fake persona using videos and photos from the internet to make the victim believe that he is handsome, positive and had a steady job. He had to tell his life story to make the victim believe that he is a genuine person. The company’s success rate was quite high. Six people from the company could scam more than $three million and a woman in Canada was tricked for $1.5m. With sophisticated technology the companies insist on setting a target of getting 500 people a day. Further, the software enables them to log into 20 to 30 WhatsApp accounts, simultaneously.

Once the scammers persuade strangers to part with their savings, they must quickly move the money from one account to another and if necessary, from one country to another before the target (victim) discovers and informs his bank or police. For this they must launder money generated in crime within the shortest possible time. Huione is an established financial conglomerate in Cambodia and has a constellation of affiliates and not all of them are legitimate. Huione makes money at every stage of the laundering process. One such affiliate is Huione Guarantee where scammers find the necessary contacts for money laundering. There are thousands of chat groups on Telegram. On these Telegram channels anonymous users advertise money laundering services with the wink and nod of a designed language. One channel called “Demand and Supply” had more than 4,00,000 users with hundreds of daily messages including advertisements for money laundering services.

Three of the most prominent investors, Dong Lecheng, Xu Aimin and She Zhijiang have been convicted in China for financial crimes running into millions of dollars.

(The writer is a former DG of DRI and NCB)