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Joseph, 30, didn’t know what else to do, so he took out his phone and started recording videos for TikTok. He wanted to show the world what it was like to be one of hundreds of Ugandan citizens who were smuggled into Cambodia to work in scam compounds.
Like hundreds of thousands of reported victims from more than 50 countries working in scam centres across the region, Joseph had been told he would be generously paid, in his case as a customer service agent for a supermarket in Vietnam. Instead, like the others, he was forced to scam people all over the world.
Last month, Joseph and hundreds of other workers fled their compound, as intensifying crackdowns saw a sudden mass opening of operations. He travelled to the capital, Phnom Penh. Having no money, he and the other Ugandans he met along the way slept on the street before gathering the necessary funds to share hotel rooms.
Thirty-year-old Joseph, who had worked as a journalist in Uganda, began documenting their experiences. “I contacted my friends. We did interviews to awaken our government and ministries back home,” he said.
The mass escapes from scam compounds in Cambodia have led to a new humanitarian crisis in the country. Foreign workers – many of them traumatised and with no money – have been left to fend for themselves on the streets, wondering why their embassies and humanitarian organisations like the UN’s migration agency (IOM) have been so slow to help.
In recent years, Cambodia – along with Myanmar and Laos – has gained a reputation as a burgeoning cyberscam centre, with dozens of large-scale scam “farms” springing up in rice fields in border areas.
Foreigners from China to Brazil have described being forced, even tortured, into becoming scammers, typically deceiving strangers through schemes on dating apps or on social media. Investigators have also found evidence of sophisticated money laundering operations and related cryptocurrency scams.
While South Korea and the United States have long been pressuring Cambodia to crack down on the mushrooming industry, it was the deportation of billionaire businessman and alleged crypto scam mastermind Chen Zhi to China in January that blew the scam farm operations wide open.
Chen Zhi, the founder and chairman of the Prince Group, is accused of running a multinational business conglomerate that included the operation of highly sophisticated “pig butchering” scams in which victims are deceived into relationships that end in fraudulent investment schemes – and the money laundering required to hide scam proceeds.
Soon after his deportation, dozens of videos started cropping up on Chinese-language Telegram channels, and later Khmer-language Facebook and TikTok accounts. They all showed the same thing: Hundreds of foreign workers walking, running, hauling luggage and hailing tuk-tuks or taxis: The highly secretive scam compounds had been cracked open.
Who decides who is a victim?
What was noticeable in the first weeks after the opening-up was citizens crowding in front of their embassies seeking help. In Phnom Penh, Indonesians waiting for embassy appointments passed their days at small outdoor drink shops usually frequented by local joggers around Independence Monument Park.
Chinese citizens slept on the ground in front of a shopping plaza across from their embassy. Some countries set up temporary shelters for their nationals in unused warehouses. Local media reported that some young Chinese people were on the run, hiding in livestock sheds or pig pens, as they were afraid of facing punishment if they returned to China.
What also became clear was that hundreds of foreign scam workers had also travelled – or been trafficked – from countries without embassies or consulates in Cambodia, such as Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana among others.
A 27 January Amnesty International report – based on interviews with 35 victims from 12 countries – detailed how scam workers were allegedly beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted in addition to their forced labour.
One woman said she had witnessed many deaths due to untreated sickness and torture. Two other women said they became pregnant as a result of rape by compound managers.
“This is an international crisis on Cambodian soil,” Amnesty’s regional research director Montse Ferrer said in the report. “Our researchers have met people from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. They are in urgent need of consular assistance in order to help get them home and out of harm’s way.”
“Cambodian policy is to rely exclusively on the police for the identification of victims. This is a very narrow focus on that responsibility, where other countries would allow social workers, even NGOs, to participate.”
If workers are identified as human trafficking victims, they can receive support, but it appears the Cambodian government has been slow to identify victims in the latest raids, according to Mark Taylor, former head of USAID’s Counter-Trafficking in Persons program in the country.
“Cambodian policy is to rely exclusively on the police for the identification of victims,” Taylor told The New Humanitarian, adding that only one division of the police has in practice been allowed to conduct such interviews. “This is a very narrow focus on that responsibility, where other countries would allow social workers, even NGOs, to participate.”
Given how fast the crackdown and escapes have happened – and the limited resources – Taylor said he believes few if any workers in the latest round of raids have been screened for trafficking cases, let alone identified.
Neither IOM nor many anti-trafficking NGOs will assist people who escaped scam compounds until they are officially designated as victims by the Cambodian government, Taylor said.
Interior Ministry spokesman Touch Sokhak said 2,412 people were deported as a result of online scam raids between the start of this year and 12 February. A group of almost 500 were being held for “further processing”, he told The New Humanitarian. Since the government began a clampdown in June 2025, more than 8,000 people have been deported and an estimated 210,000 foreigners allegedly involved in the scam centres have left the country voluntarily, according to a government report.
Sokhak didn’t answer questions about whether the Cambodian government was trying to identify any of these foreigners as victims, nor about the alleged smuggling or trafficking of workers into Cambodia in the first place, but he did add that the government has a goal to clear out the scam industry by April this year.
“So far, we can confirm that this crime is decreasing as we control it more and more, but there are still small groups that run from one place to another to hide in these places,” he said in a voice message. “Those are small places that we continue to clean up like garbage.”
The long way out
Claire (not her real name), a 24-year-old Kenyan citizen, said she was able to escape a scam operation inside the Crown Casino in Bavet city, near Cambodia’s southern border with Vietnam, by paying a ransom after they failed to sell her to another scam company late last year. She said she effectively “bought” her own freedom.
She said that before she could broker her escape, she sent several emails and texts to a Cambodian police hotline and to the IOM office in Cambodia, hoping they could rescue her.
Claire showed The New Humanitarian screenshots of emails she sent to IOM in June, October, November, and December last year requesting assistance, as well as several screenshots of WhatsApp messages.
“I’m sending voice notes [to IOM] over and over again, and they sent me a hotline [for the Cambodian police],” she recalled, adding that the police responded by telling her to contact her embassy. No authorities, to her knowledge, ever tried to find her.
When The New Humanitarian visited the IOM office in Phnom Penh on 19 January, we found a dozen former scam workers from African countries waiting in the foyer, saying they have no money and no idea how to leave Cambodia.
Eric (not his real name), 21, said he was referred to IOM after he tried the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Phnom Penh: They gave him water and listened to his account, but they ultimately decided that his case was outside their mandate.
Eric then caught a tuk-tuk to the IOM Cambodia office. “I was waiting there. No one comes to talk to me, just you,” he said, adding that an IOM representative did later send him a message saying they couldn’t help him but didn’t offer much explanation.
A spokesperson for IOM initially said she would reply to questions sent by The New Humanitarian, but she hadn’t responded to them by the time of publication.
Taylor said that trafficking victims from African countries without embassy presence have been surprised at the lack of response from IOM in Cambodia.
“IOM in other places in the world has sometimes been able to exert its own criteria on what is a trafficking victim, and convince governments who might not have the wherewithal or may not have the skills or the time,” he said.
Taylor said a new directive from the Cambodian government has also made the housing situation even more challenging for workers unable to get shelter from Caritas, an NGO-run shelter that is already over its capacity.
The 6 January directive on security in crowded residential areas charges property owners or managers up to 4 million riels, nearly $1,000, per foreigner hosted without proper documentation.
“It’s sort of a preemptive move by the property managers of compounds to not be held accountable for illegals that might be found in their premises,” Taylor said.
IOM appears to be wary of assisting undocumented workers for the same reason, Taylor speculated: “When this big crisis has thousands, tens of thousands of people let out, IOM finds itself hamstrung by its own approach to the problem in the past, that it can only help those who fall into those two… very small groups of people: those who have been identified as trafficking victims, which is almost nil, and those who have their passports and visas that are still valid.”
Joseph said some Phnom Penh guesthouses wouldn’t host Africans out of fear over the new directive. He and more than 20 other Ugandans eventually found one proprietor who looked the other way, but the costs were high for the group.
“Later on, we realised it was a long process. We had to call our families to have cash to survive to eat,” he said. “Since we are working as a team, we could at least manage to make some money and give it to the hotel guy so he can add two more weeks.”
While Claire successfully returned to Nairobi on 18 February and Joseph is hopeful he will be able to afford a flight back to Uganda soon, the path home is less certain for Eric.
Eric said he had not wanted to leave his home country in the African continent but had no choice after he fled conflict there. The business major, who dreamed of managing diverse companies after he completed university, was recruited instead to a compound in Cambodia’s O’Smach town, where he was forced to send spam texts to lure in potential fraud targets.
Within a month of arriving, this border town became a battleground in Cambodia’s conflict with Thailand, and portions of the town, including scam centres, were eventually captured by Thailand.
“Even while we work, we heard the bombing outside,” he said. “They tried to say this is all good, here is Chinese, no one can come here, just to make us relax.”
Eric said he grabbed the chance to escape in December, but he ran without his passport. He said he hadn’t heard back from IOM since he visited the office in Phnom Penh in January but has been able to stay in the Caritas shelter until he finds another option. He said he hasn’t heard from his parents since being smuggled past Cambodian immigration checkpoints in November, and he doesn’t have their phone numbers memorised.
Eric hopes his parents and siblings are okay. Now on the other side of the world, he has no idea when he will see them again: “[I have] no choice because of my situation now. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Translation of interviews in Khmer provided by Meng Kroypunlok. Edited by Ali M. Latifi and Andrew Gully.
