Freed from Cambodia's scam compounds, trafficking victims face a new crisis

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.

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"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 being re-trafficked.

A man who worked in scam compound in Cambodia shows the only evidence he managed to document on his phone, a photo of dozens of phones that he was given to reach out and recruit potential scam victims. Shibani Mahtani for NPR hide caption

Cambodia was an epicenter of the global scam industry until late last year, when foreign pressure pushed the government to mount a large-scale crackdown on these operations. The scams, which operate online, work by convincing victims to put their money into fraudulent investment schemes. As victims keep depositing funds, they see profits, convincing them to put more in – until, one day, all their money evaporates.

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.

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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.

Scam compounds like this one, called #8 Park, were abandoned in such a hurry that supplies like food were left behind. Shibani Mahtani for NPR hide caption

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.

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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.

With every compound that closed, tens of thousands of migrants were released onto the streets – without money, support, shelter, or even access to free food or water, according to aid workers. Instead, they've been met by a hostile bureaucracy. The Cambodian government has insisted that they pay fines for overstaying their visa, but those fines – $10 a day – can add up to thousands.

Embassies are working on behalf of their citizens to get the Cambodian government to waive the overstay fines, but the process is slow. While the stranded migrants wait, there is only one shelter for victims of trafficking in Cambodia that they can stay in, but it is full, with a waitlist of hundreds.

In recent weeks, NGOs helping the workers say the Cambodian authorities have stepped up detention of migrants for visa violations, cramming them in overcrowded detention facilities.

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"Rather than identifying and supporting trafficking victims, Cambodian authorities have consistently treated people fleeing or being released from scamming compounds as irregular migrants – detaining them in substandard immigration detention facilities without access to lawyers or embassies," the Amnesty report said, adding this is "in direct violation of…international obligations."

A group of Ugandan men and women line up to board their flight back home, after being released from scam compounds in Cambodia and then enduring compounding hardship on the streets of Phnom Penh. Shibani Mahtani for NPR hide caption

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.