After mounting international pressure, including U.K. and U.S. sanctions imposed in October against the alleged scamming kingpin Chen Zhi, Cambodia has promised to crack down on cybercrime. Chen, a Chinese-born businessman who built the vast Prince Group conglomerate in Cambodia, was extradited to China in January.
Since then, Cambodia claims to have closed 200 scam sites, deported 30,000 suspected foreign scammers, while 210,000 others voluntarily left the country. The scam industry would be eliminated by the end of April, officials claimed. “The scam network, what we call the black economy, is destroying our honest economy. It has put a bad reputation on Cambodia,” Prime Minister Hun Manet told AFP in February.
Sims remains skeptical, however. “The Cambodian government’s PR campaign has definitely stepped it up a notch,” he says. “It’s much more coherent, it’s less bombastic, and much more speaking the language of a sanitized international organization. But their actual behavior does not really look like a country that is trying in good faith to eliminate this, but more just protecting the interests of their chief patrons.”
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