NPR84%
Freed from Cambodia's scam compounds, trafficking victims face a new crisis 45%
By Shibani Mahtani0%
6/21/2026, 3:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Anecdotal, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 52.6% saturation with 413 hits. Analysis detected 1,906 faulty-reasoning hits from 785 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 47.6% and a BS Rank of 45% (12,141 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 55.50% of the article peer group.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — All over this Southeast Asian city are vestiges of the multibillion-dollar online scam industry, which thrived here for more than half a decade until a recent government crackdown.
There are luxurious high-rise towers overlooking the Mekong River, where entire floors are now deserted following police raids that cleared out the illicit operations hidden there.
Disintegrating cardboard boxes and bits of Styrofoam litter the entrance of a branch of Prince Supermarket, after its parent company—the massive Cambodian conglomerate Prince Holding Group—was slapped with U.S. sanctions for allegedly running industrial-scale scam compounds.
But the crackdown has created a secondary crisis: thousands of stranded foreign workers transported to Cambodia by the online scam operators and forced to work as hostage employees are now roaming the streets of Phnom Penh, after being freed when the scam operations closed.
NGOs, including Amnesty International, say many of the workers are victims of human trafficking.
They are now at the center of a silent humanitarian crisis in Cambodia, aid workers say, left with few options and abandoned amid the highly-publicized government crackdown.
"The government has only addressed half of this problem," said Mark Taylor, a consultant on human trafficking issues who previously led a USAID-backed program in Cambodia.
"But it is totally ignoring what fueled that problem," he added, namely the tens of thousands of vulnerable migrants that were lured into the scam industry and are now at risk of re-trafficked.
The FBI and others have termed these schemes "pig-butchering" scams, and according to the agency's Internet Crime Complaint Center, Americans were defrauded of more than $20 billion last year through these types of scams.
This number has been growing every year, according to the FBI's data.
Behind these online operations was a system of coercion.
More than two dozen migrants from Indonesia, Uganda, Ghana and Sierra Leone NPR interviewed recounted similar stories: they were offered jobs with decent wages, free accommodation and food, only to find themselves held against their will and forced to meet strict quotas as scam workers.
Shuiab, a 24-year-old Ugandan man, said he was promised $850 a month as a delivery driver before being taken to a compound hidden behind a casino and forced to scam Americans.
Another man, Wilson, said he was electrocuted for failing to meet his quotas.
NPR is identifying both men by their first names only because they fear reprisals.
"They have a place called the black room," Wilson said, referring to the owners of the scam centers.
"Inside that black room, they can do anything to you."
United Nations agencies, Amnesty International and other organizations have long documented the use of forced labor and torture within this industry.
In a report on the Cambodian government's scam crackdown this June, Amnesty International said it had interviewed 73 people released from compounds in recent months, and determined all were victims of human trafficking.
Last October, the U.S. sanctioned a massive Cambodian conglomerate called Prince Holding Group and indicted its chairman, Chen Zhi, for allegedly directing "forced-labor" scam compounds in the country and laundering billions in criminal proceeds.
In January, Chen was extradited from Cambodia to China, where he was born, with a bag over his head.
Chen's lawyers have denied any wrongdoing and are fighting the case in U.S. courts.Beijing has continued to extradite several other alleged Chinese scam kingpins from Cambodia – bosses who were once thought to be untouchable, researchers with knowledge of these organized crime groups said.
Alongside the police raids, the downfall of these tycoons put pressure on scam companies, which have relocated from Cambodia in recent months, researchers and former scam workers said.
The collapse of these tycoons quickly emptied the infrastructure they left behind.
Some of the scam compounds in Cambodia were like cities themselves, massive and self-contained, with supermarkets, karaoke bars, barber shops, pharmacies, and other services inside them.
One site, which NPR visited in March after it was emptied out, could accommodate 20,000 workers, according to the UK government which sanctioned its owners later that month.
In response to questions from NPR, Interior Ministry spokesman Touch Sokhak rejected the criticism, saying authorities have "rescued" hundreds of thousands of scam workers, including trafficking victims, and repatriated them "with the utmost care, in accordance with the law."
But accounts from inside Cambodia's detention system tell a starkly different story.
In a text message shared with NPR by aid workers, a former scam worker described conditions inside one facility: free drinking water is available for only one hour a day and otherwise costs $2.
He asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
"I don't know how we will survive here," he wrote.
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