Behind the scenes of an abandoned cyber-scam compound

The business of scamming is getting more lucrative and sophisticated all the time. Interpol estimates scam losses totaled almost $500 billion globally last year.

In many cases, it’s not just one bad actor but an entire network of scammers. And Cambodia has become a major hub for the industry. Last year, the U.S. issued more than 100 sanctions tied to fraud operations in the country.

Reporter Leila Goldstein takes us behind the scenes of an abandoned scam compound in southeast Cambodia.

Inside the deserted offices are rows of empty desks, upturned chairs, and scattered sim cards. The people that sat at these desks were messaging people in the U.S., the U.K., China, and scamming them out of money.

“What they're trying to do is to get people to make investments in some sort of a crypto-trading app, right? A fraudulent crypto-trading app,” said Jason Tower with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

“It leads to individuals buying that crypto, putting it into a wallet that’s under the control of the criminal actors, which they’ll move immediately. They’ll start laundering that stolen currency,” he added.

But many of the workers at scam centers are victims themselves. Foreigners are promised a high salary to relocate to Cambodia. Once they arrive, their passports are taken, and they’re forced to work, facing threats and violence.

We’re ushered to another building, where a metal panel has been welded over the entrance.

“So this is the warehouse where they keep the equipment, whatever from the compound, but they’re gonna, they’re gonna break it for the media,” said an official.

Inside the sealed warehouse are boxes and boxes of electronics found on the site – over 11,000 mobile phones.

“Cambodia is not a safe haven for online scam criminals. It is instead an anti-scam country,” Phnom Penh Deputy Prosecutor Seng Heang said to journalists through an interpreter.

Before Cambodia declared this year that it had shut down all large-scale compounds following international pressure, the government spent years denying the scale of scam operations in the country.

And empty compounds don’t mean the problem is fixed, says Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Asia Center. “It is not just compounds. It's actually like a whole tech ecosystem like a Silicon Valley of organized crime that exists in Cambodia,” said Sims.

The technology that was perfected here is what’s important. “The stable coins, the crypto money laundering mixer tools and those tools, they've been developed for a very lucrative illicit economy,” Sims explained.

With few criminal syndicates or Cambodian elites facing consequences, scam operations can move to smaller sites in the country, he said. Others are setting up shop in Sri Lanka or Madagascar, and bringing what they learned in Cambodia with them.