Transcript of Caught in Cambodia’s Scam Machine: Part 1

I'm Aisha Rascoe, and you're listening to The Sunday Story from Up First.

So we've come in through the back now. Security guards stopped us. They didn't allow me to take any photos.

Earlier this year, investigative reporter Shabani Mitani visited a massive industrial complex outside of Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. It's set up like an office park, but it's fortified against the outside world. There's barbed wire all all around, CCTVs.

You can see lookout posts as well on the top of the buildings.

People once lived here, about 20,000 of them.

Looks like dormitories, sort of white buildings with black rails and with bars on the windows.

And it's clear that it was abruptly abandoned.

So much trash. It's a whole little city. I mean, Times Square could fit in this.

So all of these are This cyber scam compound is among dozens in Cambodia that operated with impunity for years. Migrants were brought to these places from throughout Asia and Africa and put to work scamming people on the other side of the world. According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, the cyber scam industry managed to defraud Americans of more than $20 billion last year. And in 2024, experts estimated that profits from the cyber scamming industry were equivalent to roughly half of Cambodia's formal GDP. But in the last several months, under international pressure, the Cambodian government has accelerated a sweeping crackdown on the industry. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Scam operations have been raided and shut down. And more than 200,000 scam workers have been released. With this ongoing effort, reporters have gained unprecedented access to a previously hidden world. Today on The Sunday Story, we have an exclusive two-part series on the global cyber scam industry. We're going to take a deeper look, not from the perspective of people who were scammed, but from the people who once took part in the scamming. Hello. Shabani Mataani is based in Singapore. She's been covering Southeast Asia for more than 15 years, and she's been following the cyber scam industry for the past 3.

When we come back, Shabani Mataani takes us to Cambodia. 48 teams.

We wanna be one of the soccer powerhouses that people talk about.

16 cities.

The joy of the World Cup is that it holds up a mirror to the society that surrounds it.

One beautiful game. I think everyone knows that nothing is like a World Cup game.

The World Cup is here, and we have you covered.

Follow along on and off the pitch with the NPR app. Cyber scams cost Americans more than $20 billion last year. But who are the people doing the scamming?

I never knew the job that I was going to be doing.

On The Sunday Story, an exclusive 2-part series on the global scam industry from the point of view of the scammers themselves. Listen now to the Sunday Story from Up First on the NPR app. We're back with the Sunday Story. Here's investigative reporter Shibani Mithani.

Since January, the Cambodian government has ramped up its raids on scam compounds across the country. And as a result, some 200,000 scam workers have poured into the streets of Phnom Penh. These people are from all over the world. At least 35 countries. And I saw reports of people streaming to the embassy gates, literally waiting outside, banging on the door, asking for help to be repatriated home. And even today, many of them are still unable to get home. So this spring, I decided to go to Phnom Penh and try to speak to some of them. I wanted to know what was their firsthand experience of the scam industry. How did they end up in Cambodia? I thought they could give an unfiltered view of the inner workings of this industry. I spoke to dozens of people on that trip. Most of the scam workers were from China and also from Indonesia. But it surprised me how many of them came from Africa.

My name is Ishmael. My name is Oscar. My name is Ama.

And all the stories were actually remarkably similar.

I was trafficked in Cambodia for like a fake promise of a job. The job was offering $1,200, so I was like, wow, this is a good opportunity.

So I texted them, and in a week or two, I was able to travel and come. In recent years, crime syndicates have focused on scamming Westerners, so they've heavily recruited workers from English-speaking countries in Africa, like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone. On this trip, the majority of the Africans I spoke to were from Uganda. Sometimes, you know, it was difficult to get deep into conversation. You know, some of them were also obviously very cautious because they didn't want to expose the inner workings of scam compounds that they believed were still so powerful. But I did manage to sit down and get to know one man really, really well. And that was through a friend of mine who introduced me to him. My friend, his name is Met Dara. He's a Cambodian journalist based in Phnom Penh. And Dara and I, we spent the week together zooming around in his little tuk-tuk. He's also a tuk-tuk driver sometimes to earn extra money.

Hello.

Ready? And it was through Daraa that I got introduced to one Ugandan man in particular. His name is Shwaib, and he's 24. We would come to know each other pretty well over the next few weeks.

As-salamu alaykum.

Shwaib and I ended up meeting in person for the first time at a Cambodian burger chain called Lucky Burgers. I saw him from the back first. I could see even from the door when I went in that he was pretty tall but mostly really lanky. He was wearing a sort of dark gray baseball cap and acid-washed jeans and a grayish-black t-shirt. When we sat down, he had his phone out and he was taking little notes on his phone. And he seemed kind of nervous. [SPEAKING ARABIC] Then once he starts speaking, I had to sort of figure out times that I could interrupt him, because once he started talking, he really opened up about his story and just got really into it and kept going. Shoaib asked me to identify him by just his first name for his security, because what he shares about the inner workings of these criminal syndicates, which continue to operate today, and his own role could put him at risk. Shoaib told me his story from the beginning, before he even arrived in Cambodia. And, you know, I think it's important because it reveals the long and really the truly global reach of the scam industry.

So Shoaib is from Kampala, the capital of Uganda. One day in January of 2025, he was sick in bed scrolling TikTok when he saw something that made him stop for a little bit.

First it was on TikTok. You know on TikTok there are some kind of ads.

It was a targeted job ad on his For You page promising somewhere between $800 to $1,000 for a month's work in Cambodia.

Visa, free air ticket, whatnot. Then I was like, ah. I was like, "These are scammers." Then I left it.

So at first he actually dismissed it and, you know, he kept scrolling.

Then after scrolling some couple of days, I also, I saw it again. Then I was like, "It doesn't cost me anything to send a message. Why shouldn't I?" I sent a message on TikTok.

And right away he was sent a WhatsApp number to continue the conversation with a recruiter. The recruiter told him that there were a few different positions available that there was a lot of work. He could be a supermarket attendant, a delivery driver, or a warehouse worker. And on top of that, they would even cover his visa and his travel expenses and food and accommodation once he got there. It was a pretty big deal because in Kampala, someone like Shoaib could only earn about $150, $200 a month. The person on the other end of the phone was offering him up to $1,000 a month.

I was like, "Ah, that's a big income." I can go there, maybe like 2 years I can get some source of income. And I say, it's okay, it is okay. I don't care which work I will be doing as long as I get paid.

Shweib had always relied on himself. He has 10 siblings. And both his parents passed away by the time he was 18. So he had to drop out of school and get a job. He worked in kitchens for a few years. Eventually getting promoted to a chef.

So I was supervising, everything was going so well. Then I became sick.

Shoaib struggled for years with debilitating stomach ulcers. The stress of his work sometimes made them worse, and eventually he was forced to take bed rest.

Then I had to first take a break.

After those initial messages, the recruiter told Shoaib what they needed from him, and it actually wasn't much.

They told me, "Do you have a passport?" Then I filled up the papers, everything they asked me for.

He sent them his passport information and filled out all his personal details.

I did everything they asked me to.

And everything was just moving so quickly that it didn't seem real.

By the time I took it serious, it was when they asked me, "When are you going to travel?" And then I told them 2 weeks. Can you travel in one week? Then I was like, okay. Then after like 2 days, he sent me a visa, the visa of Cambodia. Then after like 2 days, that's when they sent me a ticket. This is a miracle. I never spent any coin. Everything came Came in so smooth, but I was like, it was too good to be true.

Shuaib had to leave in a hurry. When he got to the airport in Kampala, he met a group of 10 others, all guys who were also headed to Cambodia. They showed their passports and were quickly ushered through.

The guy was like, kind of, he was so friendly. The guy asked me, "Is this your first time to travel?" And I was like, "Yes, this is my first time to travel." He was like, "Okay, good luck." Then he stamped in.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Shreibet never stepped foot on a plane before, so as he boarded, he felt such a rush of emotion.

And I was so happy. I was so happy, I took some pictures. Then when the plane lifted off, that's when I knew that now this is real. I'm out of home. Let me go and do what? Let me go and search For for a job. get some money, then I come back home.

Shoaib landed in the Phnom Penh airport on February 10th, 2025. His new employers had sent a driver to pick him up outside the terminal.

The car, it was Lexus.

It was a Lexus?

Yeah, it was Lexus. Oh, wow.

And the driver even helped him with his bags.

We were like the bosses by that time. The guy took our bags, then he told us, "You follow me, you follow me." And they went to the car. Even the guy opened the doors for us.

It felt like VIP treatment. The group of 10 Ugandans split up into different cars. So it was just Shoaib and one other guy who got into the Lexus, bound for the same location. And then they drove and drove, and they kept driving.

We traveled for 5 hours.

They drove at night, and he really couldn't get his bearings.

So we were so silent in the car.

It was totally pitch dark, and the main thing that was illuminating the streets were just the lights of the cars on the road with him. Beyond that, there wasn't much to see. And after they drove for such a long time through these potholed roads and deserted roads, suddenly he saw a city come into view, and suddenly he felt a totally different pulse. He started to hear music.

There are a lot of people there, a lot of music.

Almost like a party.

It was like a festival.

It's like 10:00 PM, and somehow everyone was awake. He thought it was like a rave, actually, because they're playing this music, and it was music that he liked.

It is good music. It is EDM.

EDM music with heavy beats. And he stepped out of the car, and he thinks, 'Oh my gosh, like, wow, where have I landed? This is gonna be good. Like, people here seem to really be enjoying themselves.' They are partying, they are working.

Here, we are going to enjoy your life here.

As Shoaib entered the compound, the illuminated signs said 'Bevet Business Center.' Bevet Business Center. He noticed how multinational it was. He saw Chinese people, he saw Filipinos, he saw Vietnamese people. He heard a lot of different languages.

There were Pakistanis, Nepalese, the Ghanaians, Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, Tanzanians. There were a lot of people there and different tribes.

When the driver dropped him off, he left, and there was another guy who brought him in. This guy was Chinese, and he introduced himself as the boss of the company. He greeted him and asked him to hand over his passport. So Shoaib gave him his passport.

They took our passport. That's the number one.

Someone showed him a room and told him that was the room that he would be staying in and that he was going to share that room with a number of other guys, too.

Now you have to rest. We will get back to you tomorrow since you are tired. Then— then we slept.

The next day, he signed his contract.

We are called in the office. You had to sign a contract. The contract was in Chinese. Then there were also some parts of English.

And the contract stipulated that he would be paid $850 a month. They would provide him 3 meals a day and accommodation.

Then they gave us the computers.

Schweib says they walked him to his station, and to help him get set up, they told him what to download. A VPN, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and basically described it to him as sort of remote online work.

I'm just going to enjoy working on a computer. That is my hobby.

I can do this. Yeah, no problem.

Me, I was even on YouTube enjoying the music 'cause I even had some AirPods. I was enjoying the music.

Shoaib told me that he was given several days to acclimate. But right away, certain things felt a little off. After he'd signed the contract with the bosses, he was taken to a separate administrative building where Cambodian guards took his photograph and gave him an ID card to use for entering and leaving the main gates of Bavette Business Center. But Shoaib said the Chinese bosses then took that ID card away.

When we went back to the office, they removed the IDs from us.

Now he couldn't freely leave the complex.

We went outside, we made some tour around the park to see what is going on. There were a lot of buildings. What I can say, it is like a small town, a small developed town. Bars, shops, there was a hospital, there supermarkets, salons. There's nothing that you need outside.

So when did you start realizing Wait a minute, this is Tucker.

At first, I never knew the job that I was going to be doing. That's what I can say. Then after like a week, they added me phones without anything. They just used to give me phones. Now I had like 40 phones.

They gave him dozens of SIM cards and all of them were for US numbers.

After like a week, I started seeing things.

If they were just doing remote work, why were they in possession of all this stuff? Like, why did they have hundreds of computers, thousands of SIM cards? What was all of it for?

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By the end of that first week, it all started to click. Shoaib realized that he'd been brought to Cambodia to work as a scammer. And Shoaib, like many of the other Africans there, would be working at the lowest level of the operation.

We are specialized in 3 categories. There we are the developers, They were the receptionists and they were the killers.

First, there were the developers. They were IT technicians and they buy stolen data off the internet. They get access to troves of phone numbers, Instagram accounts, and other data. Then there were the receptionists like Shoaib. So were you a receptionist?

Yes, I was a receptionist.

So what does a receptionist do? Shoaib explained to me that As a receptionist, he was the first person that a client would be in contact with. That's what the victims were called, by the way, clients. His job was to be that first human touch via text message to introduce clients to basically a profitable scheme. He would lure them bit by bit with real cash rewards.

They gave me a script.

Can you give me an example of what the script was? We'll say a message.

A first message like, "Hello, how are you doing?" Like a spamming message.

And then maybe out of 10 numbers, one person would reply.

Who is this one? Now that's when I get back to the script.

I'm Sarah.

As I mentioned earlier, I just copy all of it, then I paste it, then I send.

This is a remote job opportunity. Your main task will be to help improve how products are seen and ranked on big shopping platforms.

Copying, pasting, copying, pasting, following the scripts.

Yeah. The best part? You don't need any technical skills or prior experience. So Shoaib was in charge of hooking clients into what's called a task scam. And others who I interviewed in Cambodia described how this worked to me as well. As a client, you're convinced that you've signed up for a remote marketing job and that you just have to like a few YouTube pages, Amazon products. But to get sort of further in and to be given more things to do, you have to deposit money into an account. So you deposit money, you get paid out. You deposit more, they give you more work, you get paid out more and earn commission that way. And this commission structure was sort of deliberately complex. Maybe it was a way to make it seem more real.

Mm-hmm.

In the script that Shryb used, there was a section included in it called "Personal Conversation." Small tidbits of information that would make someone trust the stranger that they were speaking to, you know, on a social networking platform. In one script, he was Antonella Camboni, an Italian living in California who deeply valued her financial security. In another, he was a 34-year-old with a dog named Toby. The tone was never pushy. So I guess most of your clients were American?

Yeah, that was the market that we are in, but some work in the USA market, some it is Canada, some it is Indian, some it is UK, some it is South Africa.

After Shoaib convinced his client to sign up, his goal was to get them to withdraw their money. That was his goal, to get them to withdraw. The client had to see that the scheme was working they had to gain something from it, you know, so that they would come back. And then once they did, once they put in a deposit, withdrew it, Shuaib would hand the client up the chain until eventually that client interacted with a killer.

But the killers were only those Chinese. We used to call them killers because what they were doing, they were killing.

This killer would convince the client to make their very last deposit. Before emptying out the whole wallet. Shoaib said that after each kill, the killers would celebrate.

They used to beat the drum like 10 times.

So, sorry, they would beat the drum when somebody get a lot of money?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They could be—

Like the actual drum?

Yes. Like the Chinese drum? Yeah, yeah.

Shoaib said he heard some of the killers boast about how they made a huge kill from a client with a hospitalized kid. He heard killers talk about targeting entire communities of retirees.

When somebody can say that, "I'm so sick, I don't have anything to eat, I've sold my house, I've sold my car, I don't have anything left, I'm done, I'm done." Then after one week, you hear the same killer is hitting the drum. Then you be like, "Eh, what happened?" These guys, maybe they have some witchcraft.

Shreib said he considered telling clients he spoke to that this was a scam so they could get out of it. Did you ever think, like— did you ever feel very emotional or very upset?

A lot of times. A lot of times.

But he and the other workers, they were under constant surveillance.

They used to check our phones. And they used to do it randomly. If they find out, like, you sent anyone a picture of what is going on here, if you send any message concerning about what is going on here, that means it was going to be bad for you.

Shuaib told me there was an isolation room on the 5th floor of the building. And he said everyone knew what happened there.

They had some room where they used to torture some guys. It was a small room.

That was where they'd bring in people who did not comply, who tried to escape, who tried to contact NGOs and rescuers, who tipped off clients to this being a scam.

I never went there to the isolation, but one of my friend went there. Like in the deep night, they punish him. After that, they leave him. They could tie him on the bed. Then they come, they beat, they go. The next time they come, they beat again. By the time the guy came back, the guy came back with a face with a lot of wounds. When I saw him, I knew that I was fucked up. That's what came in my head. I said, "I'm fucked up and I don't have any way back." Then I was like, "Ah, man, me, I have to go back home." These stories of torture, they're consistent with what I'd heard from others who got out of similar compounds.

And it's been well documented over the years in NGO reports and US government reports. Shoaib thought he still had his original return ticket, which was for a month after his arrival on that month-long tourist visa. But then someone in the compound told him, "Just forget about that.

If you don't finish your contract, you'll owe the bosses about $4,000." And I was like, "Ah, man, all my life I never had that money." And he was like, "Now you have to do everything they tell you." He felt trapped. And I knew that now this is me. I have only two options, is to work and pray so that I can get back home safe.

Every day he worried about quotas. He'd pray to God for clients.

Even you can't sleep, you can't eat when you don't have the clients, 'cause you know what is coming.

If they didn't get clients, they'd have to work longer hours or his monthly salary would be deducted. Bosses, they deducted money for everything. They called them fines. I'd heard from people who worked in other compounds that there were fines for being on the phone for too long, for briefly clicking out of the scam chat window during their 12-hour workday. One rescuer told me that someone she helped was fined because they wanted to sit close to a window. Shoaib was often fined for not getting enough clients. And there were daily expenses to account for, too. Shoaib is Muslim, and he doesn't eat pork. But the cafeteria often served pork. So he went to the company-run supermarket to buy snacks. And month after month, his wages were whittled down to almost nothing. Shoaib worked at night from 10:00 PM to 10:00 AM. It was a nocturnal schedule because of the time zones.

Work to sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep.

He said the bosses regulated how long he could talk on the phone. Sometimes they took his phone away and gave it back only for a few hours. And they told him he had to keep his phone calls short. Just quickly check in with your family, but don't tell them anything about what you do. But if you called your family and told them, like, "Hey, something is wrong." I couldn't tell them because I didn't want them to worry about anything.

Because even if I told them, there was nothing they were going to do about it.

So you didn't tell anybody anything? Mm-mm.

They never knew anything.

The guilt ate away at Shoaib slowly.

I used to get some sleeping pills. I used to purchase them. I used to take 2 pills, 2 pills, 2 pills, 2 pills, 2 pills. Till after some time, the 2 pills were no longer working. I used to sleep for only 2 hours.

His prayers started to change. Change. When he'd left Kampala, he brought a Quran with him. But rather than just praying for himself and his escape, when he said his daily prayers, he started praying that the clients who withdrew their profits wouldn't come back. But Shoaib said that he gradually came to think it wasn't just the killers who were greedy. He believed the clients themselves were also pulled in by greed.

They are greedy. Anyone who is coming is just greedy.

Because they should have known. The arrangement?

It is too good to be true.

This is a Sunday Story. Stay with us.

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Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow It's Been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeisty topics that are filling your feed. So when we say scam company, the word company, it's entirely apt. You can't think of these as sort of scrappy little criminal enterprises or mafia in the jungle. They're run like a business. Frontline scammers like Shoaib, they're managed by their team leaders who are their direct bosses. Then they have to report up to managers who in turn report to the head of a department. Then there's an HR department which handles recruitment, PR division that handles ads. Those are just the departments inside the compound itself. Outside, there's a whole infrastructure to protect and serve the criminal enterprise. There are drivers who bring migrants like Shweib over to the compound. Fruit vendors and drink sellers who move to the streets around the compounds, hoping to cash in. There are the security guards who keep watch. And then the land itself. That is owned and controlled by tycoons close to the Cambodian government.

They profit off the compounds on their land. My sources on the ground, they told me that it's the landlords who maintain a relationship with the police who tip them off to raids and who keep them protected. In July of 2025, about 5 months after Shweib arrived in the scam compound, Thailand started attacking Cambodia. The two countries do have longstanding border disputes. But later, Thai officials claimed they were targeting centers of human trafficking and the scam industry itself. Thais on social media even coined a new term: "Scambodia." But Cambodia said Thailand's claim that it was waging a war against this, quote, "scam army" was just a pretext to gain control of their territory. Tensions have continued to simmer, though there's a tentative peace deal now. Though Shoaib was far from Thailand, his bosses were getting nervous. Because these clashes near the border prompted Cambodia to announce they were cracking down on the industry. So Shweib's bosses started shifting him and the other workers around, moving them to new, more isolated compounds. [SPEAKING CHINESE] But then, in January of this year, a Chinese-Cambodian kingpin named Chen Zhe was extradited back to China following a criminal indictment in the US.

The indictment accused Chen of operating forced labor scam compounds in Cambodia. He was arrested in Cambodia, put on a plane with a bag over his head. Chen Zhe operated one of the biggest conglomerates in Cambodia and was allegedly using that as a front for his scam operations. But he was also an advisor to the Cambodian prime minister. Everyone believed he was untouchable. When he went down, scam bosses everywhere started panicking. So Shuaib was moved again. This time to a compound called Park 8. But this time, Shuaib and the other trafficked migrants, they knew what was going on. They saw it on social media, on their phones. They knew their bosses were in a vulnerable place.

And also the rumors that I heard about outside, they are ready.

I know that any time from now, And so in late January, roughly 2 weeks after Shoaib arrived in Park Gate, a number of workers started to take things into their own hands.

We knew that this is our only chance to escape from here.

They revolted. Shoaib says a crowd of people surrounded the Chinese bosses' accommodations. Some had sticks and stones.

They wanted to beat the bosses badly.

They demanded to leave.

We just want our passports.

The bosses, they were cornered. And they gave workers a choice. You can leave, or you can come with us to the next scam compound. But if you leave, you'll be out there on your own, on the streets of Cambodia, in a country now hostile to the work that you were brought here to do. Is it worth the risk? Shoaib decided he would take his chance.

So we were called one by one, one by one. We are given the passwords.

He went outside and quickly flagged down a car. He found a driver willing to take him. He paid about $150 to get to Phnom Penh. On February 1st of this year, Shoaib drove away again in the darkness, unclear where he was going and what he would do next.

In part 2, Shibani Mittani picks up Shweib's story on the streets of Phnom Penh. It was easy to get into Cambodia, but getting out would be much harder. Listen now to part 2.

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