By Taryn Wilson
O’Smach, Cambodia, Oct 2, EFE.- Replica police stations and banks, romantic scripts, fake $100 bills, entertainment precincts and a medical clinic: this sprawling Cambodian complex looks like a town or movie set. But the reality is much darker.
The site in the Oddar Meanchey provincial border town of O’Smach is just one of hundreds in Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries such as Laos and Myanmar that have been used for defrauding people around the world out of their savings.
Southeast Asia emerged as an epicenter for multi-billion-dollar cyberscams, from romance to cryptocurrency, during the Covid-19 pandemic when organized crime syndicates, many of them Chinese, set up bases in empty resorts and office buildings.
Millions of people globally have been lured into compounds by fake job ads offering attractive salaries and ended up working – some willingly, but many of them trafficked and held under slavery-like conditions – to defraud people using sophisticated methods including spoofing and AI voice cloning.
«The level of sophistication is worrying. We are talking about a tech-driven criminal economy, but the human manipulation inside of it, in and of itself, is powerful,» the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) spokesperson for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Laura Gil, told EFE.
In December, Thailand bombed and then seized this part of O’Smach during the two neighbors’ brief cross-border war. Thailand claims Cambodia was using it as a military base during the conflict, which Phnom Penh denies, but Thai troops continue to occupy the area under the Dec. 27 ceasefire deal.
Journalists, including from EFE, were recently taken into the now-empty complex by the Thai military for a firsthand look inside the inner workings of cyberfraud operations. It now stands unusua
Replica police stations, exposed personal data
Of the more than 150 buildings across an area of nearly 1 square kilometer, the Thai military estimated 29 were once occupied by up to 20,000 people from various countries working to defraud people.
In one six-storey building, shards of glass from blown-out windows littered the floor, metal and paneling hung from the ceiling, and water pooled on the floor. The building appeared to have been abandoned in haste, with dead plants, uneaten food, clothes, props and furniture strewn throughout.
Police uniforms and badges lay around rooms set up as fake police stations for countries such as Brazil, Australia, China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore, complete with flags.
A large section appeared dedicated to India, including a ‘Reserve Bank,’ interrogation rooms for Delhi police and a ‘Central Bureau of Investigation.’
In another section, there were rows of soundproof booths with chairs and scam-call scripts inside, and an area that the Thai military suspect was staffed by Brazilian workers, with all writing in Portuguese, and rows of desks topped with foam-lined sound-containment boxes.
On the desks sat scripts and pages of exposed personal data such as names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers and notes on workers’ contact with each of these people. EFE was able to verify that some of the Brazilian numbers are still active and match the names on the list.
‘Small secrets’ and ‘psychological games’
In both the India section and an Indonesian police station area, scripts and flow charts appeared to show escalation plans for made-up identity-theft crimes against targeted individuals.
«This is a psychological game. You must ask the customer if they are able to go to the police station or not. When the customer says they can’t, you come in to help them,» a note written in Indonesian said. «Don’t show strong eagerness to process it online, because if you’re too aggressive, the customer will find it suspicious and feel that this is a scammer.»
The documents also showed that workers were apparently instructed to use social engineering, isolation and silencing tactics, including what they called the «Small Secret» – telling victims that they will be in danger if they disclose the supposed ID theft to anyone, including family and friends, especially in the first 72 hours.
There were also Indonesian-language data-collection forms for targets that included personal identification such as name and national ID number down to phone type and battery percentage; demographics and education level; family and employment information; and financial profiling, including investment, e-wallet, savings and deposit account information.
In other parts of the vast complex, there were buildings with clothes hanging inside barred windows, large workrooms with busted computers and a section thought to be used to target American and European victims, with SIM cards for T-Mobile (which has a German parent company and the US as its largest market), time sheets and leave requests. A whiteboard in this area showed romance scripts apparently used to get close to potential victims on dating sites, with references to «screening» people during their chats for the «qualities needed.»
A bullet-riddled building with a burnt-out car outside held what the Thai military suspect to be solitary confinement rooms in the basement. These small rooms, lockable from the outside, contained only bottles of what was reportedly urine, although EFE could not verify this. In some of them, a CCTV camera was attached to the top corner. Solitary confinement has been documented by the UN as a punishment tactic used in some scam sites.
In another area, there was a medical clinic called ‘Zhong Nan Hospital’ with consultation rooms including medical records, X-rays and forms printed in Chinese for ordering blood tests, as well as patient wards, an operating room and a fully stocked pharmacy with signs displaying the prices of medical tests and drugs.
The clinic was situated in an area that also featured an entertainment zone complete with restaurants, shops and massage parlors.
Grave abuses and a multi-billion-dollar global industry
At least 300,000 trafficked workers from over 80 countries were being held in Southeast Asian scam compounds, the UN estimated in July.
On arrival, their passports are often confiscated and they face coercion, violence, sexual abuse, torture and other «grave abuses,» rights organizations and the UN have documented.
Vietnam-based anti-trafficking non-profit Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation said it has rescued almost 800 victims from scam centers in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia since early 2022 and nearly every one «has experienced physical and psychological violence» such as sleep and food deprivation, solitary confinement, electroshocks and sexual violence, founder and strategic director, Michael Brosowski, told EFE.
Even given the hundreds of thousands of workers estimated to be working in the illicit industry, the scale of losses is mind-boggling.
Last year alone, scam-related losses reached $88-$114 billion across East and Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, the UNODC estimated in July. For regional comparison, last year Cambodia’s GDP sat at around $52 billion and Myanmar’s at $82 billion, according to World Bank estimates.
In addition, transnational criminal organizations defrauded Americans out of at least $18.2 billion through cyberscams in 2025, the US Treasury said last week.
‘This goes all the way to the top’
Phnom Penh had come under increasing international pressure and criticism that it hadn’t done enough to shut down the compounds, and last year publicized a crackdown. At the end of August it announced it had raided 800 locations, and that there were «no more large-scale scam compounds left» in the country.
More than 500,000 foreign nationals have been deported or left voluntarily, and more than 2,000 Cambodians and foreigners have been arrested and detained, facing prison sentences from 5-25 years, Interior Minister Sar Sokha said last week.
The crackdown has also included the high-profile arrests and extraditions to China of two Chinese alleged kingpins: the Prince Holding Group founder and advisor to Cambodia’s prime minister sanctioned by both the United States and United Kingdom, Chen Zhi, as well as Huione Pay chairman Li Xiong.
Two casino tycoons in Cambodia have also been sanctioned by Washington for their alleged links to scam operations in the country.
Ly Yong Phat, a ruling party senator who was reportedly appointed personal adviser to Hun Sen in 2022, as well as his LYP Group and its O’Smach Resort were sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2024 for their alleged «role in serious human rights abuse related to the treatment of trafficked workers subjected to forced labor in online scam centers.»
O’Smach Resort, located in the area visited by EFE, has been linked to alleged cyberscam and trafficking activity in various news reports, including one by Radio Free Asia in 2025 which documented the breakout of nearly 60 foreign workers that a witness said were fed up with physical punishment they faced there, while the independent Cyber Scam Monitor listed O’Smach Casino Resort on its website in June 2025, stating it had «gathered evidence of online operations at this site.»
«Documentation by NGOs and open-source intelligence analysis have also linked compounds within the O’Smach area to scam activity,» analyst and visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, Jacob Sims, wrote in a new report, ‘Scam State Architecture.’
In April, the US Treasury also sanctioned senator Kok An, who it described as a «scam center kingpin», as well as his Crown Resorts and Anco Brothers business, and 28 others.
Thai authorities separately also issued warrants for their arrest last year over alleged links to cyberfraud operations.
Both senators have rejected all allegations in interviews with Cambodian media. EFE’s calls to each for comment went unanswered.
Information Minister Neth Pheaktra said on Monday that authorities were conducting investigations into large-scale compounds, including their financiers and protectors, and that legal action has been taken in four cases involving 15 officials. He did not say who the officials were, nor how high up.
Sims told EFE that the challenge in truly dismantling the illicit operations will be the political ecosystem behind the compounds.
«What are the key protection structures that would allow something like this to exist in the first place on such a magnificent scale, and the sort of things that would allow it to adapt into new forms of harmful cyber-enabled activity? The answer to that is elite-level, from the top-down, vertically integrated corruption and elite participation in the crime itself,» he said.
«Until Cambodia addresses the rot that’s at the core of Cambodia’s scam economy, which is elite involvement (…) all the way up to tycoons with close connections to family members of advisors of the prime minister, cabinet-level officials – this goes all the way to the top – they’re not really going to root out the underlying issue.»
Another problem that officials acknowledge is that amid the crackdown, the criminal networks are adapting.
«They are evolving into smaller operations conducted out of rental rooms, guesthouses, condominiums, private residences, vehicles, coffee shops, and other locations,» said Chhay Sinarith, Cambodia’s head of the Secretariat of the Commission for Combating Online Scams, last month.
The UNODC had seen operations «often reappearing in office buildings shared with legitimate companies, with scammers disguised as conventional nine-to-five office workers,» Gil said.
As well as relocating within Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar and Laos, the UN has now reported scam activity based in Pacific Island countries, South Asia, the Gulf, West Africa and the Americas.
The crackdowns have also produced a new humanitarian crisis, with NGOs and rights groups warning that trafficking victims are not being properly identified, with some criminalized and prosecuted, some detained, and others unprotected and without passports or money to return home.
«This criminal industry is constantly shifting. It’s not just a regional problem but a global threat. Ending it will also require a global effort to dismantle the criminal enterprises behind it and, most importantly, to work on the ground to protect people who have been exploited and prevent those at risk from being trafficked,» Blue Dragon’s Brosowski said. EFE
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