A stunning new report was unveiled last week with this revelation 👉 Cambodia has become a $19 billion scam empire that is run and operated by the government.
That new report Policies and Patterns was released by Jacob Sims last week.
He warns in the report that the problem is only going to get worse, calling the country “the absolute global epicenter” of scams and is the country “most primed for explosive growth going forward”
These are the top most mind blowing revelations in the report.
#1 – Cambodia Generates $19 Billion In Scams Equal To 60% Of Their Entire GDP
According to the report, Cambodia’s scam industry generates and estimated $12.5 to $19 billion annually. Thats equivalent to 60% of the country’s GDP.
The massive criminal scam industry now dwarf’s Cambodia’s largest legitimate industry, garment manufacturing which brings in an estimated $9.3 billion annually.
This means that Cambodia has essentially become a scam state whose existence relies primarily on defrauding victims from other countries out of money.
#2 – Government Officials Are Perpetrators, Not Just Corrupt
Cambodia’s top leaders are not simply taking bribes. According to Sims, they own and operate the criminal infrastructure.
He points to two examples that prove his case. The first involves Deputy Prime Minister Sar Sokha. He is the co-founder in one of the country’s largest scam compounds – The Jinbei Casino with a Chinese criminal fugitive named Chen Zhi.
People refer to the compound as a “Scam Megaplex” and one of the most notorious scam compounds in the country.
The second involves Prime Minister Hun Manet’s cousin, Hun To, who sits on the board of Huione Group, now identified as “the largest online criminal marketplace in history”. The company has processed over $24 billion in illicit funds in just three and a half years.
“The oligarchs don’t care where the funds come from, so long as resources flow to sustain the networks upholding the system,” one expert told researchers. This isn’t about officials taking bribes on the side—criminal activity has become the primary business of governing.
#3 – Chinese Criminal Migration Fueled Cambodia’s Scam Industry
As the Chinese government cracked down on scams, Cambodia welcomed criminals into the country. Cambodia’s “investment for citizenship” scheme faciliated a large-scale migration of Chinese criminals into the country – most notoriously the Chinese Triad gangs.
Those Triad criminals setup casinos which eventually were converted into scam compounds during the pandemic as they pivoted to more lucrative schemes.
#4 – The Government Employs 64 Distinct Criminal Protection Mechanisms
Not only does the Cambodian government invest and facilitate scams, they also give the false facade of actually doing something about it.
Researchers identified 9 different functions Cambodia deploys to support criminal activity, and they implement those protections through 64 different mechanisms.
These mechanisms include:
- Fake police raids where they tip off the operations beforehand.
- Fake hotlines for people to report scams, which the government leaks back to scammers.
- Soldiers moonlighting as scam compound security guards.
- Evidence destruction and witness tampering where government systematically erases evidence that victims provide.
- Scam operators positioned as the primary points of contact for law enforcement.
#5 – Civil Society Has Been Systematically Destroyed
While the government has built up the most sophisticated and far reaching scam empire in history, they have been systematically destroying society as well.
Independent journalism is “almost fully lost” and the number of people in the country willing to take a risk for human rights advocacy now numbers “less than a dozen”.
They point to the arrest of journalist Mech Dara in 2024 for reporting on scam compounds as evidence of the decay.
Read The Full Report Here
You can read the full shocking report here. Its an amazing piece of work that shows the absolute crushing level of scams and human trafficking that have taken over Cambodia.
