Cambodia targets illegal gamblers, human traffickers
FORUM Staff
Spurred by global concern, Cambodian government leaders and law enforcement officials in mid-September 2022 launched a crackdown on largely Chinese crime syndicates that promote illegal online gambling and human trafficking in the gambling hub of Sihanoukville and the nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The exploitation of mostly imported workers, lured to Cambodia through various scams, has tainted the Southeast Asian nation’s reputation and damaged its once-thriving tourism industry, observers said.
Authorities arrested thousands of people and raided more than 1,000 locations. A month before the crackdown ordered by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, police detained Chinese gambling kingpin She Zhijiang on an international warrant accusing him of conspiring to run an illegal online casino, according to the Bangkok News. She, who amassed U.S. $22.2 million, recruited 330,000 gamblers and was a major player in Sihanoukville, faces criminal charges in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the newspaper reported in mid-August 2022.
The arrest also made headlines in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the PRC, Taiwan, Vietnam and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific where some human traffickers use apps to lure victims into their illicit enterprises, according to Canada’s Global News television network. Victims who resist often are tortured or sold to other criminal syndicates, numerous media reported. (Pictured: Cambodian authorities reported finding evidence of human trafficking, kidnapping and torture after raiding this Sihanoukville compound in mid-September 2022.)
Some analysts attribute Sihanoukville’s thriving gambling and sex service industries to fallout from the PRC’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure scheme, Global News reported. OBOR partners offered land and tax exemptions to Chinese investors, which attracted financiers including criminals to high-risk ventures. The PRC launched a crackdown in 2019, noting that online gambling and underground banking were drawing huge amounts of money out of mainland China, where gambling is illegal. Cambodia followed suit with increased enforcement in 2020. Online gambling and scam businesses subsequently returned to Cambodia and moved underground, according to Asia Gaming Brief.
The initial enforcement was only marginally effective because of the Phnom Penh government’s preoccupation with the COVID-19 pandemic and, critics said, a lack of will to carry out the initiatives, Radio Free Asia reported in April 2022. The country’s National Committee for Counter Trafficking reported that human trafficking cases almost doubled from 2020 to 2021.
“Authorities did not investigate or hold criminally accountable any officials involved in the large majority of credible reports of complicity, in particular with unscrupulous business owners who subjected thousands of men, women and children throughout the country to human trafficking in entertainment establishments, brick kilns and online scam operations,” said a 2022 U.S. Department of State assessment that placed Cambodia on its watchlist of nations that do not meet minimum standards to combat trafficking.
“If Cambodia doesn’t have commitment and high willingness [to crack down on scammers], it will affect the image of Cambodia, investment, tourism due to security and safety,” Am Sam Ath, deputy director of the Cambodian human rights organization Licadho, told Voice of America (VOA) in mid-September 2022.
Jason Tower, the Myanmar director for the United States Institute of Peace, told VOA that Chinese criminal networks have expanded in Southeast Asia in recent years, including Cambodia.
In Cambodia’s recent crackdown, Hun Sen has threatened to remove government officials and police officers who fail to combat gambling and human trafficking, according to Stratfor Worldview, an online publication that provides geopolitical intelligence and analysis. “Cambodia’s ongoing crackdown on human trafficking is meant to boost its ailing tourism sector and preempt political turbulence while offering a precedent for closer Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) cooperation on issues of shared interest,” the publication reported in late September 2022.
Speaking at the sixth National Interfaith Forum Against Human Trafficking in late September, Hun Sen said his order will reduce cases; ensure security, social order and safe communities; and promote harmony and wealth, according to Fresh News, an online media company based in Phnom Penh.
IMAGE CREDIT: REUTERS
