Jason Tower is a senior expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, where he focuses on organized crime, security, and illicit economies in Southeast Asia. He joins us now live from Bangkok. Good to have you with us. So when we look at the fact that the government says it shut down 800 suspected scam sites, we have to wonder how many of them seem to be operating at a quite sophisticated level, trafficking, in some cases, people in and out.
How could all of that sort of operation have taken place for so long without the authorities knowing about it? I think that you’ve really uh hit the nail on the head there uh in that there’s no way that the authorities didn’t know about it. Um, you got to a point in 2025 where uh cyber scams uh were effectively consolidated by that point as the mainstay of the economy in the country, with there being multiple reports that um you know estimate the size and scale of that criminal market [gasps] as being in the range of 40% of. Tigray tensions rise as Ethiopian Airlines suspends flights to three airports.
the country’s gross domestic product. And you also saw where sophisticated networks of corporate fronts had been set up and consolidated into some of the largest conglomerates in the country. Um, these laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds back into the economy, real estate projects, and investments around the globe.
Cambodia scam crackdown drives cybercrime networks worldwide
But I think when the claim is made, uh, also that 800 of these operations have been shut down physically, yes, the premises have been shut down. Still, it’s also important to point out that the vast majority of these individuals that were involved in perpetrating the cyber scams have actually just left the country. So this was a mass clearance operation, not really a law enforcement operation that sought to achieve, um, the full, uh, dismantlement of the industry, uh, beneath it.
You’re not seeing continued globalization. You made me think of the question, then if you said they’ve just left the country, so they weren’t arrested, no one was apprehended. Why? And where have they gone? Are they just operating from somewhere else now? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think the whole operation was quite ad hoc.
So, you saw at the start of the year that one of the um criminal kingpins involved was suddenly, after being targeted by US UK sanctions by uh an indictment and a seizure of 15 billion US dollars in illicit funds, that the head of this network, this criminal organization, the Prince transnational criminal organization was uh just very suddenly, almost secretly, extradited to uh to China.
Um, this seems to have triggered, uh, really a mass outflow out of compounds across the country. The authorities then started to take action to crack down, but by that point, you had seen where hundreds of thousands of people, and this is by the government’s own admission, had left the country. Um, so what we’re seeing now is an increase in the global expansion of this activity.
We released a report on these networks in countries across South Asia, where a k. As is the case in p.e Sri Lanka, you have large numbers of these syndicates that are now running the country and beginning to secede. This is at this point.
You’re seeing it happen across Africa into the Middle East, and really all across the globe at this point. What’s happened in Cambodia and, more broadly, in Southeast Asia is displacement rather than the real eradication of this activity. Jason, I’d like to understand why it’s so difficult to stop scammers.
But listening to your answer there, when you’re talking about things like this, people being secretly, uh, transferred back to their extradited, I think was the word you used, secretly extradited to their home countries. It sounds like there’s a degree of complicity from authorities. Is that ultimately what you’re saying, or between the lines of what you’re saying? Well, there are elements of this.
One of the key problems, and this is also the case for Cambodia, is that you don’t have working institutions that can hold perpetrators and enablers accountable. Um, so you often see that even when they’re able to arrest people, these individuals are not dealt with in local courts; they’re often just extradited home. Trump Scolds CNN Journalist At UN: Says You Should Not Be Here.
Um, you’re, I think, also seeing, globally, that there are so many places these cyber scam syndicates can operate at this point. Many countries are not aware of the operating modalities. They’re not on the lookout for this. You’ve also seen that these cyber-scam operations have become highly professionalized.
They’re behaving almost like multinational businesses at this point, with supply chains that spread different parts of the crime across many jurisdictions. So, prosecuting and going after these individuals is often extremely difficult. And you see where, um, you know, across the board in the US, across Europe, in Japan, and many other countries, prosecution rates are very low.
Often, it’s hard to find the perpetrators. And by the time that’s done, the money has long been laundered. This illustrates some of the key challenges in dealing with these issues. On a personal, or shall we say, an individual level, what’s the biggest scam threat people are facing today? Briefly, sir, yeah, I think we’re really seeing many of the scams are in cryptocurrency, so scammers are exploiting the fact that many people have low literacy when it comes to cryptocurrency and digital assets. However, there’s an awareness that
Those assets can often be quite lucrative, or there can be ways to make significant amounts of money from them. So you see where crypto scams are on the rise, romance scams are also very common. We’re increasingly seeing customized scams. This is where scammers identify, in very specific detail, information about their victims and then target the vulnerabilities that they identify in those particular victims.
