I was recently in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and approached a group of young people in front of the Indian embassy. I told them I was a researcher at the University of Toronto.
I asked him, “Are you from the fraud compound?” Fraud compounds are complex on an industrial scale where trafficked workers are locked up and forced to commit online fraud.
They were. A man in his early 30s named Akshit told me his story.
Akshit was not your typical victim of human trafficking. His English is perfect, he is educated and has worked in banks and call centers. But he was trafficked. In 2024, a friend told him about a friend who knew of a job in Cambodia paying double what he was earning in India.
After a quick interview, he paid $500 to fly to Phnom Penh via Kuala Lumpur. His flight and drive to Sihanoukville, a coastal city in southwestern Cambodia, were comfortable, and on arrival at an apartment block he was given a welcome bag and a nice room. Everything seemed above.
It was anything but. He was in a scam complex where hundreds of workers sat in front of computers and convinced Asians and Westerners to invest in bogus schemes or love interests. The workers were arranged in teams of eight, led by a team leader, with a manager overseeing several teams and a Chinese crime syndicate above them. His recruiter had sold him for $5,000.
Labor violations
Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked in Cambodia and Myanmar alone. Media coverage of fraud compounds is often focused on beatings, broken bones and workers screaming as they are tasered. These insults are real, but they are only the most extreme form of abuse.
At the core of the fraud compounds is a system of paid but forced labor: 15-hour days, seven days a week, numerous open conversations, text messages to victims in English and the workers’ native languages.
Akshit worked in English and Hindi, targeting South Indians. The talks started at 10.30am – latecomers were fined – and ended at 2am.
They followed a fluid but predictable script: a “developer” sends texts to multiple clients. When they engage, he moves them into a “chat.” Talks with the victim for three to four days, determining whether they are interested in love or financial gain. He then passes them on to the “killer”, who seals the deal by instructing the victim how to transfer the funds.
Akshit moved between three roles.
The initial investment would be small—about $250—and build from there. Once the victim had transferred enough money, everything would be fine. Amounts varied by victim, but large transfers—hundreds of thousands of dollars or more—were rare; it was usually several thousand.
The role of the pandemic
Fraud compounds sprung up in Cambodia during the Covid-19 pandemic, as closed casinos and apartment blocks in cities such as Sihanoukville and the border towns of Bavet (Vietnam), Koh Kong and O’Smach (Thailand) were repurposed to house fraud operations. They then spread to Myanmar (congregating along the border with Thailand) and Laos (especially the “Golden Triangle”, where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet).
Operations at this scale are recent, but the business model is much older: big profits based on low margins per transaction.
Billions have been extracted from the victims – US losses from cryptocurrency scams alone reached $5.6 billion in 2023 — but, spread across hundreds of complexes and hundreds of thousands of workers, the returns per operation are much less impressive.
In Akshit’s team, everyone had a target of US$10,000 per month, for which they received US$800; beyond that, there was a gradual decline in growth. But not everyone reached the target.
Akshit’s payslips showed me that I logged some payments of more than US$5,000, but many were in the low hundreds, meaning they only brought in a few thousand dollars a month. Those who failed to meet the target received less or no pay. Those who refused to work were mistreated, threatened and in some cases even tortured.
One night, Akshit was awakened by screams a few doors down. A Pakistani national had refused to comply and instead pleaded for help in messages to those he was supposed to be defrauding. A team leader reported him and his supervisors and security personnel used stun batons on him.
The illusion of closures
The fixed costs of a rigging complex are high once housing, food, security, transportation and salaries of team leaders and managers are taken into account. Forced labor makes the operation profitable. In its structural dependence on free labor, in fact, human trafficking in illegal fraud compounds resembles human trafficking in the legal fish or clothing processing sectors.
The fact that so many victims come from rich Western and East Asian countries explains the tremendous pressure on the Cambodian government. Hundreds of fraud centers have been closed since January 2026and thousands of Chinese, Asian, African and Indonesian workers were on the streets of Phnom Penh, struggling to get home.
But appearances are deceiving. Akshi’s compound was raided only after the owners had been informed; they moved the workers to a hotel. Investigative reporter Danielle Keeton-Olsen told me in an interview that many of those laid off were low-level workers. This was confirmed by several other sources.
Furthermore, as Nathan Paul Southern of the Eyewitness Project explained to me:
“There’s a big difference between being raided and being shut down Prince Group (Composite) Closures. they were not raids; they just stopped working. The cops said you have to go but keep us paid. And the doors were closed.”
A lot of infrastructure remains, he noted, and some complexes are said to be filling up again. The overall profits generated by the free labor arm are very large.
Profitable enterprise
Total annual fraud revenue in Cambodia was $12.9 billion in 2023about 40 percent of the country’s GDP. Officials across Cambodia – police, border guards and civil servants – take bribes to look the other way.
Many powerful entities, including criminal organizations, businesses and politicians, have an interest in the system continuing. If scam compounds are closed in Cambodia, they will be opened elsewhere.
There are also employment agencies. Some do the work voluntarily; Akshit estimates that 40 percent in his compound were willing, earning about $5,000 a month. The figure may be exaggerated, but some clearly have an interest in the system continuing.
Globally, there are millions desperate enough to take the risk. In one form or another, fraud compounds—and the trafficking that supports them—are here to stay.
Randall Hansen is a professor, chair of Canada Research on Global Migration and director of the Global Migration Laboratory, University of Toronto.
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
