Cambodia’s scam crackdown leaves stranded trafficking victims in Phnom Penh

Being pulled out of a scam compound did not end the abuse for many trafficking victims in Cambodia. In Phnom Penh, thousands of foreign workers freed from forced labor networks were left stranded without support, documentation or a clear path home, turning rescue into a second crisis.

That gap sits at the center of Cambodia’s anti-scam crackdown. The U.S. State Department’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report kept Cambodia on Tier 3, saying officials and advisers financially benefited from forced labor and forced criminality in scam operations, while authorities did not systematically screen workers for trafficking indicators and thousands of victims remained trapped in compounds. The country had become a regional hub for online fraud, where workers were forced to run investment scams that promised easy profits until victims’ money disappeared.

The scale of the industry was enormous. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in April 2025 that law-enforcement pressure was displacing scam centers across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines, and that the regional criminal economy was generating just under $40 billion in annual profits. UNODC and partners also created a regional emergency-response network to help rescue victims and dismantle compounds, a recognition that the problem had outgrown any single border.

Cambodia launched what officials described as its largest-ever crackdown on scam operations in July 2025 and later said it had shut down more than 200 scam centres and freed more than 3,000 trafficking victims. But Amnesty International’s follow-up in June 2026 said more than 70 percent of the compounds it identified had appeared to be bypassed. Its researchers documented 86 compounds in total, found only 24 with evidence of state intervention, and interviewed 73 survivors from 16 countries, many of whom described abuse including rape.

Amnesty had already warned in January 2026 that thousands of people were stranded in Cambodia without support and should not be forcibly sent back to countries where they could face persecution. That warning underscored the policy failure now visible in Phnom Penh: dramatic raids can empty compounds, but they do not automatically provide shelter, legal status, medical care or safe transport.

The criminal network itself has also adapted. In October 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Chen Zhi, the chairman of Prince Holding Group, alleging he directed forced-labor scam compounds across Cambodia. Prosecutors tied the case to crypto “pig butchering” schemes and a forfeiture action involving about 127,271 bitcoin, worth roughly $15 billion, the largest forfeiture action in the department’s history. As enforcement pushes operations across Southeast Asia, the harder task is no longer just breaking the compounds open. It is building a system that can keep the victims from being trapped again.