On a sunny day in December, I travelled to Sihanoukville, a coastal city in Cambodia which has become ground zero of the world’s most organised and outrageous cybercrime cartels. Operating from the city, Chinese syndicates have siphoned off billions of dollars from unsuspecting victims across the world, including India. They lure young people to Cambodia with false job offers and then confine them to “scam compounds” and force them to call and defraud their fellow nationals.
With two local journalists, I drove around one of the most notorious scam compounds in the city, Jinbei 4. The backstreet was under surveillance – CCTV cameras loomed over our heads and a wary guard looked piqued by our presence. As we passed the compound and turned left, we found the exit to the main road was blocked by a truck. The warm Sihanoukville afternoon suddenly became hot and paranoia took over. I took a deep breath and looked behind, half expecting a Chinese gang to be closing in on us.
Before I flew to Cambodia, I had met several Indians who had shared harrowing accounts of the violence they faced in these prison-like spaces before they managed to flee.
In May 2024, the Indian embassy in Cambodia evacuated 60 Indians from Jinbei 4. The compound makes news at least once a year for its scam and trafficking operations. The searing accounts of victims who manage to escape are carried in the few independent news websites that survive in Cambodia. Raids follow and the local authorities insist that the illegalities are over. But months later, Jinbei 4 comes back to life.
Scam compounds in the country enjoy political patronage because they are alleged to be located on properties owned by businessmen and politicians close to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party. This makes reporting on cybercrime risky for local journalists – they could be threatened, harassed, even arrested.
Our safety briefing was simple: drive slowly outside the scam compound, take a look and leave. Most importantly, do not step out of the car and do not go around chit-chatting.
Jinbei 4 is expertly concealed from public view. It is 12 floors high, but we had to pass through a narrow bylane to get a good look at the building.
Scam compounds in the country enjoy political patronage because they are alleged to be located on properties owned by businessmen and politicians close to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party. This makes reporting on cybercrime risky for local journalists – they could be threatened, harassed, even arrested.
Our safety briefing was simple: drive slowly outside the scam compound, take a look and leave. Most importantly, do not step out of the car and do not go around chit-chatting.
Jinbei 4 is expertly concealed from public view. It is 12 floors high, but we had to pass through a narrow bylane to get a good look at the building.
As we turned into the lane, a young man eyed our car with suspicion. This was worrying. The men who work for the syndicates are usually young, wear black and sport tattoos. He ticked all three boxes.
Luckily, he was on foot and we were in a car with tinted windows. If he pursued us, we decided we would stick to the original plan – drive about 200 metres through the bylanes, take a left, and exit onto the main road.
As we drove closer, it became clear that Jinbei 4 was designed to confine. It had high brick and cement walls topped with metallic fences. The only point for entry and exit was a small door carved into a wide metal gate at the rear, like the entrance to a prison.
Every floor had tiny balconies restricted by window guards. Those who lived behind them had put out some clothes to dry. I wondered if some of them were from the villages and towns of India, desperate to return to the country they had left behind for the promise of a better life.
Among the Indians I had interviewed before I had travelled to Cambodia was Madhana Mohanan Nair. A filmmaker from Kochi, Nair, 50, is not a jobless young man. Yet the cyber scamsters of Sihanoukville managed to entrap him.
He was in Phnom Penh in 2023, scouting for filming locations, when he ran into a man from Chennai who enticed him with a plum job. “I thought it was legitimate because Cambodia is full of hoardings that say ‘upcoming project,’” said Nair. “There seem to be many opportunities.”
The ordeal he described was similar to the experience of others I interviewed. “A local agent took me to Sihanoukville and I was kept in a compound where we were cut off from the world outside,” Nair recounted. “There were Thais, Laotians and Pakistanis stuck there. We were made to do romance scams on Telegram and I was paid $1,000 after a month.” In romance scams, cybercriminals use fake identities to draw their victims into online relationships and make them transfer their money – just one of the many ways in which cyberfraud is carried out.
Nair managed to escape the compound after five weeks because a fellow captive complained to the Indian embassy. He was lucky – many other Indians have spent months trapped inside these compounds, an official at the embassy told me when I met him in Phnom Penh.
The official, who requested anonymity since he is not authorised to speak to the press, told me that he had met hundreds of Indians who cheerfully travelled to Cambodia thinking they had bagged high-paying jobs. Instead, they were pushed into a nightmare of cyberscams inside compounds, often facing mental and physical abuse, as we detailed in this report.
Often these captives manage to escape the compounds and reach the embassy in Phnom Penh, he said, where officials interview them and kickstart a repatriation process. Sometimes the officials themselves go to the scam compounds to pick up traumatised victims, he added.
In late 2024, an Indian official received a midnight call from a man who said he was hiding in a street in Phnom Penh after fleeing from a compound. The official drove into the night to look for him, with little success. The man had shared his location but was too scared to come out in the street and make contact. Only after making several rounds of the neighbourhood did the official manage to spot him.
In another instance, an escapee hailing from Andhra Pradesh showed up at the embassy and insisted that he was being followed by Chinese gangsters in a black car. He was so scared that he initially refused to be transported to a safe accommodation arranged by the mission. He agreed only on the condition that he would be put inside the boot of an official’s car.
But once the car reached the safe house, he refused to get out, claiming that the gangsters were still trailing them. Embassy officials had to drive to and fro on the route to check whether they were being stalked. Only then did the man step out.
Scam compounds have sprung up all over Cambodia. But the biggest cluster exists in Sihanoukville – the first city I drove to.
Just over three hours from Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville used to be a sleepy town overlooking the Gulf of Thailand, dotted with vessels engaged by an old naval base built by the French. But today, it looks like a city conjured in the heady dreams of a Chinese plutocrat. Chinese food, Chinese people, Chinese casinos and Chinese hotels are everywhere. Even buildings and establishments bear signage not just in Khmer, the language spoken by most Cambodians, but also in Mandarin.
“This used to be a simple and happy town before the Chinese showed up,” lamented the local journalist accompanying me.
The Chinese initially showed up in 2016 to pour billions of dollars into projects in Sihanoukville, said Nathan Paul Southern, the director of operations at the Eyewitness Project, a research consultancy that investigates organised crime and corruption. In 2019, at the peak of foreign investment boom, 150 of the 156 hotels and guesthouses in the city were operating with Chinese capital.
At the time, China’s share in Cambodia’s foreign direct investments was more than 50%. Even highways in the country, including the one connecting Sihanoukville to the capital, were built with Chinese money.
The Chinese investment, however, proved to be a Trojan horse – with it came criminal syndicates.
In late 2019, Cambodia banned online gambling, forcing Chinese businesses in casino towns like Sihanoukville to shut overnight. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, which busted the debt-fuelled boom.
“When Covid-19 came around, the casinos in cities like Sihanoukville were essentially sitting empty,” said Southern. “Criminal organisations did not have a way to make revenue. They quickly turned this empty real estate into cyberscam compounds.”
The criminal groups established a base within these establishments – often in dedicated buildings – and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent. Initially, they targeted people in mainland China, but when the Chinese government came after them with a slew of raids and arrests, they decided to take their human trafficking and cybercrime business global.
Today, Sihanoukville has dozens of scam compounds with trafficked victims from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, and even from countries in West Asia and Africa.
Before 2024, their catalogue of scams chiefly included romance and investment scams. But over the last year, the Indian men were deployed to target their compatriots with the infamous “digital arrest” scams, in which scammers pretend to be law enforcement officials to trick and intimidate their victims into paying them huge sums.
The scam has scarred thousands of ordinary Indians, who have been manipulated by these scamsters to believe that they were under a police investigation, as we detailed in this report. Between January and September 2024, Indians lost Rs 1,616 crore to digital arrest scams, according to estimates by the Indian Cybercrime Coordinate Centre, an agency under the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The culprits operate from buildings here in Sihanoukville. One of them is the Nanhai International Hotel, where scam operations have been well documented – along with several cases of Chinese men falling to their deaths. Located in the middle of downtown Sihanoukville, it looks like a regular luxury hotel. In 2022, Al Jazeera interviewed a survivor who had nearly jumped from the building before being rescued by a volunteer group.
Another compound, known as the Crown High-Tech Industrial Park, is located on the national highway on the edges of the coastal city. It has an imposing set of buildings. Some of them are still under construction.
In 2022, the investigative news website Voice of Democracy published an account of a 24-year-old survivor who had been abducted to the Crown compound, brutalised by his captors and forced into cyberscams. The man said that the compound was home to several scam firms and had more than a thousand people.
Jinbei 4 looks dowdy in contrast to the hotel and the industrial park – and more menacing. As a truck obstructed our car in a narrow lane beside the compound, I feared a daunting confrontation with the men who are a part of Cambodia’s cybercrime syndicates.
But the lane was empty.
Our journalist friend took a swift u-turn. Seconds later, we were out of the bylane.
The reason why scam compounds can operate with impunity is their proximity to Cambodia’s one-party state system.
The Cambodian People’s Party has ruled Cambodia since 1979. Its president, Hun Sen, the country’s most powerful figure for four decades, held power by cracking down on the political opposition and cosying up to a coterie of oligarchs. Some of these oligarchs are in government and allegedly the ringleaders of Cambodia’s cybercrime syndicates.
One of them is businessman and senator Ly Yong Phat, who was sanctioned by the United States in September 2024 for allegedly owning properties that hosted Chinese scam compounds known for human trafficking abuses. Ly is a member of the Cambodian People’s Party.
Reports in the Cambodian media have also linked Try Pheam, a tycoon and a former advisor to Hun Sen, and Kok An, a businessman and senator, to scam compounds.
Nathan Paul Southern of the Eye Witness Project told Scroll that a corrupt and complicit police force has aided organised cybercrime in Cambodia, while independent news websites that investigate the issue, like Voice of Democracy, have been shut down and intrepid reporters have been silenced.
Even international media outlets like The Australian and Al Jazeera have faced lawsuits for linking powerful Cambodian oligarchs to scam operations.
In Sihanoukville, the journalist who drove us to the compounds said that the local police were not happy with his drive-bys with international journalists. “They threatened me to desist from all this, more than once,” he said. “Once, they almost ran over me with a car, just as a warning.”
Despite international attention to Cambodia’s organised cybercrime, business has been booming. In May 2024, the United States Institute of Peace estimated that the industry raked in more than $12.5 billion annually. This has fuelled an expansion of the industry to all corners of Cambodia. One of them is a town nearly 800 km away, on the border with Thailand.
“Thirsty for more,” says a large Pepsi hoarding on the highway that cuts through the town of Poipet. Just 2 km ahead, a grand, yellow pagoda marks the end of Cambodia. On the other side is Thailand, the country’s larger, wealthier neighbour. The General Department of Immigration overlooks the porous border, notorious for touts who trick naive tourists looking for a visa.
But bigger, more sinister tricks are underway in Poipet, a bustling town known for its casinos. A slew of Indian restaurants have opened up here over the past year, mostly staffed with chefs who have migrated from the villages of Uttarakhand. They are part of what Cambodians simply call the country’s “online” industry.
In one of these restaurants, the Cambodian owner, who is married to an Indian, told us that business has been very good. Curiously, it was lunch hour on a Thursday and the restaurant was mostly empty. We asked why.
“Indians mostly order food to their workplaces between Monday and Friday,” the owner said. “They work in Poipet’s casinos and are not allowed outside during the day. They venture out in the evenings and after sunset you can see many of them here.”
As we spoke, an Indian man peeped out of the restaurant kitchen. He was Vishnu Singh, who had arrived in Poipet in late 2023 from a village in Garhwal in Uttarakhand. Singh was more forthcoming about the fate of Indians in this remote border town.
“They are all doing scams,” he said. “There are more than a thousand Indians here and most of them arrived this year. They work in compounds owned by the casinos.”
In India, I had interviewed five young men from Kerala who had been trafficked to the town and confined inside a cybercrime compound controlled by Chinese men. They were forced to participate in “digital arrest” scams. They escaped to the Indian embassy in Phnom Penh as they were being sold to another compound in Bavet, a town on the Cambodia-Vietnam border.
Like the scam compounds of Sihanoukville, the compounds in Poipet are secured by barbed wires, armed personnel and CCTV cameras. Barring this common feature, they aren’t anything like the tall, conspicuous buildings of Sihanoukville – they look like warehouses. The dormitories, in separate buildings, were not higher than three floors, designed to be hidden from curious onlookers and nosy reporters.
The compound where the Malayali men were confined is a couple of kilometres down the road from Poipet’s popular night market. It was built in 2022, on a property that used to be a mango farm.
The property was barely visible from outside, thanks to high walls and a sliding gate. But as we slowly drove past it, the gate opened to allow a small carriage to exit. One of the buildings we saw was a dormitory where the apartments did not have metallic guards like Jinbei 4. A few men milled about in its open corridors.
The “digital arrest” scams in this compound take place from a structure at the back with another gate to enter and exit, the men from Kerala had told me. Before I travelled to Cambodia, I had looked up a Google street view snapshot of that building. Taken in February 2023, it showed a property that was still under construction, skirted by thin, uncongested roads with empty plots on either side. I had planned to drive through these roads to photograph this building.
But when I got there in December 2024, everything had changed. The same roads were crowded and the empty plots had disappeared under shops that offered currency exchange, mobile phones and street food. The thin road to the scam building had become thinner and was now secured by boom barriers, making it impossible for us to venture inside.
Back in Phnom Penh, I took a walk in Riverside, a teeming thoroughfare along the city’s Mekong river. I was told that I would spot many people from the Indian subcontinent if I went there in the evening.
Indeed, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are easy to spot here after sunset. They are busy with their phones, move around in gangs, and in conversation, tell you that they are tourists. It was clear that they were not.
Riverside is also home to several Indian and Pakistani restaurants. The owner of a prominent Indian restaurant has lost count of the number of Indians who have been duped into cyberslavery on the promise of high-paying jobs in Cambodia. Phnom Penh has many such compounds, and those who work there often eat at his restaurant, he said. Like Poipet, the restaurant often delivers bulk orders to the compounds.
“Just yesterday, I met a man from UP who was sent here by an agent who told him that Canada is just next to Cambodia,” said the owner. “He believed he would cross the border and settle in Canada. He lost a lot of money and will fly back to India today.”
The Indian government is now trying to raise awareness about the cybercrime traps in South East Asia. While reporting in Kerala, I saw a poster at the Kozhikode airport alerting Indians travelling to Southeast Asia about the problem. One of them showed a man in chains working on a laptop, warning that those with job offers in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos could “end up as a cyber slave”.
The poster created problems for the Indian mission in Cambodia. An official at the Embassy told Scroll that besides the general message of the visual, Phnom Penh was especially upset about two details: the poster spelt Cambodia as “Combodia” and the country’s name was in a bigger font than Myanmar and Laos.
The diplomatic fracas has led to some anxieties. After all, the Indian mission in Phnom Penh has relied heavily on cooperation from the Cambodian police and the immigration department to rescue Indians from scam compounds.
The mission is now worried that if its actions somehow offend Phnom Penh – which has been closely tracking every word written on scam operations in the Indian press – the Cambodian authorities could come in the way of rescue efforts, or worse, make life difficult for Indians living in Cambodia, especially the business community.
Despite the delicate situation, the mission has been tweeting the details of several rescue operations. “We also encourage the rescued victims to do the same, so that others who are still stuck in Cambodia’s scam compounds know that the embassy can help them,” said the official.
On the day I flew back to New Delhi, I could see many Indian faces at the immigration queue at the Phnom Penh International Airport. Three men said they were from Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh and a couple of them from the town of Sultanpur in the same state.
My curiosity was piqued by a 21-year-old woman who stood behind me in the queue. She was from Dimapur in Nagaland and guarded about what she was doing in Cambodia.
But a long flight journey allowed her time to open up.
In July, a Bangladeshi agent had trafficked her to a scam compound in Phnom Penh for $6,000, she told me. Her Chinese bosses were impressed by her English-speaking skills and put her on the “first line” of a digital arrest scam, until she pulled off a gutsy escape.
“Have you heard about people who call others and say that the airport authorities have found drugs in their courier package?” she asked. “I was the one making those calls.”
