The curtain has continued to be pulled back on the stark reality of casino scam centres in Cambodia.
Enforcement action from authorities in Cambodia is further exposing how significant scams plagued the country and its casino sector in recent years.
Reuters has reported that approximately 190 scam centres have been closed down in recent weeks by Cambodian officials, 173 senior crime figures have been arrested, and thousands of workers in the scam centres have been deported.
Further reporting from one of the centres, located in Kampot province, has also laid bare the extent of the operations and how they utilised casinos.
The casino compound in question was known as My Casino, and reporters discovered rows of work stations with documents detailing how to scam Thai citizens, studio booths for phone calls and a fake Indian Police station.
These scenes echo previous discoveries by Thai officials at a similar compound in O’Smach, a town along Cambodia’s northern border with Thailand, which found rows of bunk beds used by workers and mock setups of police stations and banks.
Mao Chanmothurith, Kampot’s Provincial Chief of Police, also revealed that between 6,000 and 7,000 workers – many of whom are believed to have been trafficked in by crime groups to take part in the fraud operations – fled the compound in Kampot following the arrest of the alleged leader Kuong Li.
Li, a 50-year-old Cambodian national whose business interests include casinos, hotels and construction companies, was arrested last month and charged with illegal recruitment for exploitation, aggravated fraud, organised crime and money laundering relating to alleged offences committed in Cambodia and elsewhere since 2019.
The arrest of Li follows the extradition of Zhi to China, after he was arrested due to his alleged role as the boss of the Prince Holding Group, a multi-billion-pound conglomerate based in Cambodia, which has been accused by authorities around the globe of using casino compounds to facilitate scams totalling billions of dollars using forced labour.
Joint action from the UK and the US accused Zhi of undertaking “industrial scale” fraud and also seized 127,271 bitcoins, worth approximately $15bn, and frozen assets linked to the Prince group, including several properties in London.
“Together with our US allies, we are taking decisive action to combat the growing transnational threat posed by this network – upholding human rights, protecting British nationals and keeping dirty money off our streets,” said UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper when the sanctions were announced in October.
