But with pressure from China and other countries mounting, Hun Sen, the prime minister, last month announced a crackdown on “illegal gambling”, an umbrella term for criminality associated with casinos. The governments of at least eight Asian countries have warned their citizens about too-good-to-be-true jobs in Cambodia.Īt first the Cambodian government stuck its head in the sand. Some are released when their families pay thousands of dollars in ransom. Since then, foreign diplomats in Cambodia have been working frantically to extract their citizens. IJM began conducting rescues in April of that year, working in collaboration with the Cambodian police and relevant embassies. The first reports of human trafficking emerged in local media in early 2021. Most are deceived into travelling to Cambodia. According to the Cambodian government, the syndicates employ between 80,000 and 100,000 foreigners-a reasonable but perhaps conservative estimate, says Jacob Sims of IJM. Though some work willingly, many are held against their will. The syndicates procured their workforce by entrapping people like Mr Tan. But to hook them, they would need digitally savvy workers who could speak English or South-East Asian languages. They quickly turned their sights on Americans, Australians, Europeans and the middle classes of South-East Asia, too. So the syndicates went online and cast a wider net, targeting the Chinese diaspora and anyone else with money, wherever they lived. With the closure of borders at the onset of the pandemic, the casinos’ patrons, most of whom were Chinese, vanished. When the Chinese authorities cracked down on illicit domestic gambling a decade ago, the syndicates moved their operations south, finding a hospitable environment in the lawless eastern bits of Myanmar and the scores of special economic zones across Indochina (see map), where local authorities seem to believe that they lack jurisdiction. ![]() At first the criminals invested in casinos-ideal venues for money-laundering. The schemes are organised by ethnic-Chinese gangs, which sometimes collaborate with their local counterparts, says Jeremy Douglas of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Using official estimates of scale and revenue figures reported by witness testimonies, the International Justice Mission (IJM), an NGO, calculates that syndicates in Cambodia take in at least $12bn a year from online scams. Total losses for 2021 may have been in the tens of billions, since the “vast majority” of victims do not report the crime, reckons CipherBlade. Twice that amount was lost by those who contacted CipherBlade, an investigation firm, last year. The 1,200 victims of similar scams known to the Global Anti-Scam Organisation, a support group, have collectively lost $250m. ![]() (Mr Tan claims he never managed to con anyone.) Then, one day, the invented persona would disappear, leaving behind a baffled and broke victim. Satisfied that the platform was legitimate, the target would deposit ever more. Often the mark would, at first, be able to make small withdrawals. The sums involved grew bigger and bigger. Rather than asking for money directly, as in a traditional sting, he urged the victim to deposit cryptocurrencies in an investment platform manipulated by the criminals. Once the mark’s trust had been gained, the real scam began. His trainers also supplied him with photos and videos to support the back stories of his many personas. ![]() His handlers taught him how to win over vulnerable people like pensioners and single parents by chatting with them every day. Mr Tan was furnished with fake social-media accounts, ten mobile phones, a list of targets and information about their assets, relationships and education, as well as scripts tailored to different types of prey.
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