KAMPOT: Cambodia has closed almost 200 scam centres in a crackdown on transnational fraud in recent weeks, a senior government official said, with authorities providing rare access to one centre in a bid to show they are tackling the sophisticated operations targeting people across the globe.
“There are about 190 locations that we have sealed off now,” Chhay Sinarith, the deputy chief of Cambodia’s Secretariat of the Commission for Combating Online Scams, told Reuters in Phnom Penh this week before the visit to a sprawling complex in Kampot province near the Vietnam border.
Chhay said 173 senior crime figures linked to the centres had been arrested and 11,000 workers deported in a campaign that began late last year after the US indicted and then China extradited a China‑born alleged scam kingpin in the strongest international move so far against the criminal networks.