Inside a Cambodian cyber scam compound

Cyber scam operations in Southeast Asia nab an estimated $10 billion a year from unsuspecting Americans.

In November, the Department of Justice formed the Scam Center Strike Force to target Chinese organized crime affiliates operating in the region. The U.S. has pressured Cambodia, a major scam hub, to put a stop to the industry, issuing 146 sanctions tied to fraud operations in the country last year.

At first glance, the Jin Zi Hui Property Management compound in southeast Cambodia looks like an office park. There are basketball courts, restaurants, and building after building of office space, just like a campus of a tech company. The only thing missing is the workers.

Inside the deserted offices of the abandoned online fraud center are rows of empty desks, upturned chairs, and scattered AT&T and T-Mobile sim cards. The people that sat at these desks until early this year were messaging people in the U.S., the U.K., and China, and scamming them out of money.

Left behind are stacks of call scripts and notebooks. One handwritten note describes how to connect romantically with a victim: Imagine a life together, a yard, a cat, a daughter, sunshine, breakfast.

Images from the Jin Zi Hui scam compound

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“What they are trying to do is to get people to make investments in some sort of a fraudulent crypto-trading app,” said Jason Tower, senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

The scam is pretty straightforward.

“Whether they use romance or investment opportunities, it leads to individuals buying crypto [and] putting it into a wallet that is under the control of the criminal actors, which they will move immediately,” he said. “They will start laundering that stolen currency.”

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

Government officials store equipment found within the Jin Zi Hui compound inside one of its buildings. A metal panel has been welded over the entrance to secure the evidence.

Inside the sealed warehouse are boxes and boxes of electronics found on the site: over 3,700 personal computers and 11,000 mobile phones, according to the Cambodian government. So-called “phone farms” use large numbers of phones as automated call centers that manage thousands of social media accounts to carry out crypto fraud.

“I would like to announce, first and foremost, that Cambodia is not a safe haven for online scam criminals,” said Seng Heang, Phnom Penh deputy prosecutor, when talking to journalists touring the compound. “It is instead an anti-scam country, and we do not tolerate online scams.”

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, according to Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Asia Center and senior advisor at Inca Digital.

“It is not just compounds, it's actually a whole tech ecosystem — like a Silicon Valley of organized crime that exists in Cambodia,” he said. “The stable coins, the crypto money laundering mixer tools. Those tools, they've been developed for a very lucrative illicit economy.”

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.