By all accounts, Cambodia’s massive scam economy is enduring its most significant disruption to date. Across the country, some of the most notorious compounds are emptying, barbed wire is coming down, and thousands of foreign workers are leaving sites that only weeks ago appeared untouchable. However, it would be a mistake to assume that this disruption reflects a turn toward reform or meaningful accountability — without which the risk of domestic reconstitution or straight-line displacement remains high.
Much of what we know about this moment comes from Cambodian journalists and local civil society groups working under extraordinary pressure, from repression, legal risks, and a collapsed funding landscape. Despite these constraints, the reporting has been both careful and courageous, documenting real change on the ground while resisting official narratives that flatten complexity or exaggerate the country’s progress. Their work makes clear that the facts on the ground are not in dispute. What remains contested is how those facts should be interpreted.
Toward that end, it is important to note that this moment is undeniably different from the performative “crackdowns” staged sporadically over the last 3.5 years, alongside broader – and well-evidenced – efforts by ruling party elites (and the institutions they control) to cultivate and protect the industry. Unlike past “crackdowns,” this one does not appear to be, principally, a coordinated campaign of law enforcement-led liberation, but rather a chaotic exodus.
While there clearly have been raids (and plenty of noise from government mouthpieces about them), much of the compound exodus appears to be preempting law enforcement action altogether. Local reporting suggests that in some compounds, workers simply awoke one day to find their bosses gone and the gates flung open – apparently having gotten word from somewhere in Cambodia’s criminalized political environs that the jig was finally up. Thousands – potentially tens of thousands – of scam workers are now pouring out into the streets, most of them lacking resources for protection or assistance, and trying to figure out what comes next.
Humanitarian implications notwithstanding, this is all likely quite costly to the syndicates who have long enjoyed reliable protection in a state where cabinet-level officials, as well as the prime minister’s family and business partners, have been convincingly demonstrated to be key co-perpetrators. That said, the divergence in scale or modality should not be confused with a difference in intent. What is unfolding now across Cambodia looks far less like the dismantling of an illicit economy than a rapid effort to manage elite risk.
There have been arrests. Unverified government claims now approach 3,000 in recent weeks (along with the eyebrow-raising claim of 110,000 deported), although precedent and local sources suggest that accountability is concentrated among low-level workers and victims that the government refuses to classify as such.
In a notable exception, the detention of Ly Kuong, a well-connected oligarch with documented scam-linked investments, is meaningful. This action demonstrates that the Cambodian state is capable of touching elite-linked actors when it chooses – even individuals it previously vociferously defended when international reports linked them to online scam centers. But, the arrest of one oligarch does not constitute accountability. This looks much more like tokenized enforcement to appease foreign pressure and protect a broader system of criminal ruling party elites. When well-connected figures such as Kok An, Try Pheap, Ly Yong Phat, Sar Sokha or Hun To begin to face durable consequences, this interpretation should change. Until then, it should not.
Another revealing feature of the current moment is the government’s continued posture toward human trafficking victims. Cambodia’s scam economy is inseparable from large-scale trafficking for forced criminality, a fact documented for years by researchers, journalists, and survivor accounts… and denied for just as long by the government. Yet even amid the current unprecedented disruption, the state’s response to trafficking remains conspicuously negligent and in many cases outright abusive.
Survivors of scam centers continue to be treated as immigration violators or criminals rather than as victims of trafficking. In many cases, government involvement has reportedly worsened conditions, with widespread reports of extortion, detention, or summary deportation prevailing instead of even notional efforts at protection and investigation. Meanwhile, much of the actual assistance work has fallen to underfunded grassroots groups and volunteer networks, as the legacy counter-trafficking architecture (comprised of international NGOs and conspicuously negligent U.N. agencies) has been effectively cowed into silent complicity. Sources from this community have, for years, quietly relayed having their local staff and MOUs threatened by the government as a means of defocusing them from the scam trafficking sector.
This pattern of systemic repression and negligence by the government is not just a moral failure; it has analytical significance. In any genuine criminal investigation, victim-witnesses are the starting point. They offer context, evidence, and pathways to understanding how crimes are organized and protected. Allowing victims to disperse chaotically (or worse, actively silencing them) fragments testimony, suppresses cooperation, and removes the most meaningful evidence from the record. Whatever else this moment represents for the government’s posture, it is not a good-faith effort to uncover the full architecture of Cambodia’s scam economy.
Underscoring this point about evidence suppression, the occupation of scam compounds in O’Smach by Thai forces (and their decision to grant journalists and foreign law enforcement officials access therein) represents a material loss of narrative control for Phnom Penh. Attempts are clearly being made by state media mouthpieces to leverage legitimate grievances with Thai territorial aggression to detract attention from the reality of how elite patronage networks have long used Cambodian sovereignty as a shield for their illicit activity. But this is an uphill battle. Evidence outside Cambodian jurisdiction cannot be easily managed, reclassified, or buried.
At the same time that Cambodia’s criminally-invested elites are enjoying continued domestic impunity and witness evidence is being chaotically scattered, the Cambodian party-state is aggressively projecting a renewed posture of legitimacy. Provincial authorities speak confidently of eliminating scams. Compound owners who also double as cabinet-level officials are declaring a campaign of “total eradication by April.” Former Prime Minister Hun Sen, who presided over Chen Zhi’s naturalization and rise, has declared that the country is now a “hell for scammers.” Unverifiable deportation and arrest numbers are being highlighted and promoted through state-aligned media. The National Bank of Cambodia (the umbrella institution now overseeing the non-transparent division of spoils and potential reconstitution strategy for Huione and Prince – more on the details there in a follow-on piece) has been proactively stumping a vision of “borderless finance” and regional integration, framing the country, against all evidence, as a responsible and forward-looking financial actor.
All this signaling and the cover-up activities behind it are best understood as reputational risk management, particularly on behalf of a class of venal elites that is starting to recognize limits to the shield Cambodia’s sovereignty has long offered them from meaningful accountability. To understand the urgency driving this posture, three acute pressures stand out.
Much has been made already about the first two: mounting U.S. sanctions and law enforcement actions, and China’s growing frustration. The United States’ sanctioning in 2025 of dozens of scam-related elites, capstoned in October by the largest criminal asset forfeiture action in history, is clearly material. China’s extradition of one of the ruling party’s chief criminal patrons and the now formal posture from Beijing that scam compounds are a major barrier to bilateral cooperation with Cambodia, all the more so. While the party-state has proven very capable of manipulating Western diplomats and deflecting Western pressure over the years, it will be more difficult for them to do so with both world powers postured strongly against their criminal cash cow.
A third pressure, discussed far less publicly but likely central to elite decision-making, is the impending mutual evaluation by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
Back in 2023, as Cambodia was being revealed as one of the most significant hosts of money laundering in history, it managed to erect the paper protocols necessary to check the boxes and extricate itself from FATF’s grey list. And now, as the 2026 re-evaluations loom, its anti-scam public narrative and efforts to appear to have opposed the compounds are closely calibrated to FATF’s non-transparent and politicized evaluation process. Yet, any reasonable assessment of Cambodia’s financial system would suggest it should again be added to FATF’s grey list. Well-documented strategic vulnerabilities extant in the financial sector have materially contributed to the Kingdom’s scam-linked money laundering ecosystem.
For all the watchdog’s deficiencies, FATF’s listing regime is one of the world’s most powerful remaining accountability mechanisms. Effectively, grey or blacklisting requires higher lending thresholds from banks, thereby threatening what matters most to Cambodia’s ruling elite: access to international capital. Because economic power is so concentrated at the top in Cambodia, FATF pressure is unusually well targeted at the Kingdom’s scam-invested elites, even if it also carries broader economic costs.
Together, these three pressures explain both the scale and the selectivity of the current disruption, which appears directly calibrated to mitigate elite financial, reputational, and legal risk exposure. What has changed is not the criminality embedded deeply in the Cambodian People’s Party’s ruling strategy, but the risk calculus of its elites relative to this specific form of crime in this very acute moment of focused international pressure. Scam operations that were once a source of rents have become a liability, at least for now.
What is unfolding in Cambodia is not a fake crackdown. It is a strategic one – real, disruptive, and selective – aimed at deflecting scrutiny and containing exposure rather than dismantling the political economy that made industrial-scale scamming possible.
But history offers a clear diagnostic rule: without elite accountability, malign systems will adapt. The precise form of that adaptation remains unclear right now, but the utter degradation of the rule of law in Cambodia has created cycling and spiraling harms, which are now felt globally.
To disrupt that cycle, international actors will need to recognize the nature of the state they are confronting, prepare to engage it accordingly, and critically, invest in the fragile remaining evidence ecosystem – high quality local journalism, victim-witness protection services, open-source intelligence, and rigorous grassroots-led research – that is existentially necessary if we hope to translate this moment of disruption into more durable accountability.
