"Policies and Patterns State-Abetted Transnational Crime in Cambodia as a Global Security Threat", 16 May 2025

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Cambodia’s Annual Anti-Human Trafficking Day Ceremony, usually a low-key affair, was boosted in December 2024 by impassioned speeches from the country’s top two ranking officials. Prime Minister Hun Manet took the stage to endorse the government’s commitment to combating trafficking. He was followed by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, Sar Sokha, who stressed the complexity of human trafficking and the sophistication of the involved criminals as far outstripping the technical capacity of the government to respond. Both underscored the transnational nature of human trafficking and criminal networks, rightly characterizing this as a global problem not resolvable by a single country.

... Cambodia is a major global hub for transnational organized crime, a broad set of activities which take myriad forms. Yet, in recent years, a single criminal industry has eclipsed all others in terms of its gross impact as well as the space it occupies in public discourse: human trafficking-fueled transnational organized cybercrime. As of early 2025, Cambodia is a top location—if not the premier global center—for large-scale, sophisticated scamming operations. Recent research suggests that the Cambodian organized cybercrime industry boasts a workforce of over 150,000 people and is enjoying an explosive growth trajectory. Evidence of widespread human trafficking in the industry is legion: courageously relayed by survivors, painstakingly catalogued by local civil society, researched and reported in hundreds of local, regional, and global media stories, and relentlessly denounced by Cambodian government spokespeople…

The magnificent scale of the likely profits signals a potential rationale for such denials. Scamming has become an enormously profitable domestic industry, likely unparalleled in the Kingdom’s history. Formal estimates range from $12.5 to $19 billion dollars per year, equivalent to as much as 60% of the country’s formal GDP… Moreover, there are outstanding questions about the nature of this lucrative crime wave and ongoing debates over how to combat and curtail its globally reaching damage. Yet, some facts are well established. For instance, it is not a matter of public debate whether Hun To, a cousin of Prime Minister Hun Manet, sits on the board of directors at Huione Group—a shadowy multinational corporation that serves as the foundational connective tissue for Cambodia’s transnational cybercriminal industries and hosts “the largest online illicit marketplace in history.” … It is not in doubt that the other investor in Sokha’s Jinbei casino, Chen Zhi (CEO, Prince Group Holdings), is a notorious PRC-originating organized criminal who also doubles as a cabinet-level advisor to the current and former Prime Ministers and has become a major patron of the long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party… Indeed, official public records documenting scam compound ownership provide perhaps the most damning rebuttal to the open-handed and collaborative counter-trafficking rhetoric offered by the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister at Cambodia’s most recent Anti-Human Trafficking Day Ceremony…