In the aftermath of the Thailand-Cambodia border skirmishes in July and December 2025, the scale of scam center operations in Cambodia has captured international attention. The fighting revealed major scam operations on the Thailand-Cambodia border. Originally, the Royal Thai Army attacked Cambodian casino complexes, such as the O’Smach Casino and Royal Hill Resort, claiming they housed military installations. Upon closer investigation by Thai forces, these sites were discovered to be a front for a vast complex of scam center compounds. These compounds housed expansive operations of online scammers, some coerced and some not, who defraud international victims through lucrative investment offers, romance, and even extortion.
In Southeast Asia, investments in telecommunications, IT, and business process management services have produced thousands of jobs throughout the region. However, given global economic headwinds, many college graduates, some of whom are first-generation graduates, find themselves with fewer job opportunities. Many scam centers dress up in professional, corporate trappings—complete with offices, executive structure, titles, and salaries—and paint themselves as the right choice for many emerging college graduates seeking a better life for themselves and for their families. Nonvoluntary, captive scammers, meanwhile, are victims of false promises—an online post for an English teaching, IT, factory, or modeling job could suddenly become a traumatic, captive experience in a scam compound in Cambodia.
After years of denying the existence of scam centers within its borders, Cambodia has made widely publicized efforts to rehabilitate its reputation through new anti-scam legislation, sweeping crackdowns, and international anti-scam coalition building. While these are important steps to rebuilding international reputability, these actions alone are insufficient to dislodge prominent elite networks that continue to sustain Cambodia’s scam industry.
Legislative Activity and Law Enforcement
In April 2026, Cambodia passed its first-ever anti-scam legislation, the Law on Combatting Online Scams. The law establishes new criminal penalties on offenders, expands state investigative powers, and creates new mechanisms for scam operation dismantlement. Penalties are harsher if the scam operation involves violence, cruelty, detention, confinement, or human trafficking. The new legislation also criminalizes online scam operation recruitment and training. In addition, it tackles associated issues in money laundering, enabling the Cambodian government to seize property or funds and authorizing Cambodian courts to order the closure of associated bank accounts, online accounts, websites, and social media platforms.
The new legislation bolstered a nationwide law enforcement push that began in late 2025 under international scrutiny. This resulted in high-profile syndicate leaders and seemingly untouchable figures such as Prince Group’s Chen Zhi being arrested and extradited. Meanwhile, the Cambodian government has shut down over 200 scam centers throughout the country.
By June 2026, Cambodia had released some 200,000 victims from scam centers. However, it has struggled in helping scam victims return home. This issue is not unique to Cambodia: Scam center survivors from across Africa, Latin America, and Asia are often left stranded without their passports or repatriation assistance. Many countries do not have adequate diplomatic representation within Cambodia that victims can turn to for help; as a result, immigration detention centers in Phnom Penh, where many survivors go to try to get home, have started to overflow. Amnesty International also noted that some of the survivors it had interviewed were not recognized as victims of human trafficking by the Cambodian government, complicating efforts to leave the country. The desperate situation faced by many survivors combined with accruing visa overstay fines from the Cambodian government have led many to return to scam centers as a last resort.
A Lack of Transparency
With large-scale crackdowns complete and thousands of victims freed, Cambodia declared victory in August 2026, claiming that scam centers had been brought under control and had no presence left in the country. Despite the scale of Cambodia’s anti-scam operations, concerns remain about the veracity of its efforts. Amnesty International reports that the Cambodian government has not been transparent with its crackdown claims, citing the authorities’ lack of detailed information about which sites were investigated and absence of evidence supporting claims of center closures.
It is not clear to what extent Cambodia’s extensively broadcasted raids have impacted illicit activity. Outside observers maintain that scam center presence within the country is only expanding. Cyber scams in Cambodia are estimated to produce anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of the country’s GDP—and given the importance of illicit industries to the economy, self-interested elites are thought to have hidden their compounds out of public view. This is corroborated by eyewitness statements gathered by Amnesty International alleging that key scam centers were given warning beforehand and relocated to smaller, more subtle locations. Indeed, Amnesty International noted that over 70 percent of the compounds it identified seemed to have been ignored by Cambodia’s crackdowns.
Exiled Cambodian opposition politician Mu Sochua stressed that these law enforcement actions are only credible if Cambodia investigates all allegations “regardless of wealth, influence, or official position.” The National Democracy Institute’s Scam State Architecture report describes the extent to which elite impunity emerges from the country’s weak political institutions and strong patronage culture. The lack of accountability faced by the Cambodian elite is made possible through weak civil society, absence of free press, and captured courts and institutions, allowing the key perpetrators of the scam economy to operate without impediment.
There have been no publicly documented Cambodian government investigations into elites that the United States has sanctioned or investigated. The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Senator Kok An and 28 other Cambodian elites in April 2026 for connections to scam centers around the country. Chou Bun Eng, Cambodia’s permanent vice chairperson of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking, was identified by the NDI report as an “institutional mediator” used to deflect international criticism of the scam center situation. The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs included Chou’s name in a September 2026 list of foreign persons affiliated with online scam center operations in the Southeast Asian scam industry, requesting her investigation for potential sanctions. While international investigations and sanctions are not convictions, it is telling that Phnom Penh has so far taken no public action on these accusations of elite complicity in the scam economy.
Crackdowns and legislation can only go so far in repairing Cambodia’s reputation, which the international community continues to view as potentially unsafe for both tourism and business. The latest in Cambodia’s international image rehabilitation efforts was its two-day International Conference on Combatting Online Scams (ICCOS) 2026, held in Phnom Penh from September 23 to 24. Speaking to a crowd of officials from over 20 countries, Prime Minister Hun Manet vowed that “Cambodia will never become a safe haven for online scams,” stressing that the issue is neither uniquely Cambodian nor confined to the country. Ahead of ICCOS, Cambodia touted the scale of its law enforcement operations’ abilities with photos from a captured scam compound. The conference yielded an 11-point Phnom Penh Declaration to disrupt scam profits and organizations, deepen anti-scam public-private partnerships, and support trafficked victims. All Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states except Thailand, alongside the United States, China, Japan, and other key partners, committed to the declaration.
Implications for U.S.-Cambodia Cooperation
The United States has a vested interest in ensuring the effective dismantling of Cambodia’s scam center industry. In 2025, the United States lost $18.2 billion to Southeast Asia–based scams alone, a number that has likely increased significantly in the last year thanks to the growing capabilities of AI. Cambodia’s April 2026 Law on Combatting Online Scams is of key importance to U.S. tech companies, many of which are grappling with the issue of scam recruitment and victimization on their platforms. The law authorizes the Cambodian government to impose significant fines to maintain accountability and deter organizations from participation or facilitation in scam center schemes, and it does not exempt tech companies. “Facilitation” may be a key area of contention: Many scams originating in Cambodia and its neighbors target U.S. citizens on U.S.-owned platforms, placing additional pressure on such companies to ensure compliance. Social media, dating, and financial platforms are primary vectors for cryptocurrency, investment, and romance scams, which globally contributes to the defrauding of around $21 billion from Americans in 2025.
If the Hun Manet government is not internally motivated to push against elite actors within the country, external motivation from the United States and its partners may help move Cambodia to action. Phnom Penh seems interested in finding common ground with the Trump administration: In October 2025, it eliminated tariffs on 100 percent of U.S. products exported to Cambodia, and Hun Manet even nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize for his attempted mediation in the Thailand-Cambodia conflict last year. If the Trump administration continues to see scam centers as a national priority, it may be able to take advantage of its leverage over Cambodia to pressure it to take more concrete action against the elite institutions that keep scam centers afloat. Future investment, military cooperation, and development assistance could well hinge on demanding accountability and transparency from Cambodia.
What Comes Next?
Most crucial in countering scams are trust, transparency, information sharing, and cooperation. Trust is still scarce, with the international community deeply skeptical of Cambodia’s anti-scam initiatives. Information sharing and cooperation among the most affected countries in the region—Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand—are complicated by ongoing tensions between the first two and the civil war in the last.
Cambodia’s attempts to clean up have yielded tangible results: More scam centers are closed and their victims freed. However, reports of underground scam centers continue. In its reforms, Cambodia has not yet addressed the most crucial problem behind the scam center industry: elite impunity. More pressing than the number of shuttered compounds and crackdowns will be Phnom Penh’s resolve to dig deeper into the elite networks that sustain the industry. With renewed engagement between Washington and Phnom Penh, cooperation should center around continued transparent investigations, verification of site shutdowns, and accountability demanded from all perpetrators. Large-scale conferences, expansive crackdowns, and widely touted legal reform bear no weight if Cambodia does not look inward to hold scam-affiliated elites accountable.
Japhet Quitzon is an associate fellow in the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.