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Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet has vowed to shut down all online scams centres in the country. It’s a hot spot for the multibillion-dollar industry run by crime syndicates, but can Cambodia, along with China’s help, bring an end to the scamming industry by its target of this April?

Scammers target victims across the world with fake romantic relationships, or bogus gold and cryptocurrency investments. Some of the people working in these scam centres are themselves victims, forced into working for the crime syndicates, allegedly mostly run by Chinese crime groups.

These compounds are largely concentrated in South East Asia, along border towns in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the industry cash in annual revenues as high as $64bn (£48.1bn).

There has been a flurry of activity in the past year in both Cambodia and Myanmar, including the extradition in January of Chen Zhi, a Chinese billionaire and alleged cyber fraud kingpin, to China. Chen Zhi’s company, the Prince Group, categorically rejects that it is involved in any unlawful activity. It’s described the allegations as baseless and says they appear aimed at justifying the unlawful seizure of assets worth billions of dollars.

On this episode of Asia Specific, host Mariko Oi speaks to two Â鶹Éç journalists, Ed Butler and Natalia Zuo, both of whom have done extensive reporting and investigation into what powers these cyber scams, who the victims are, how the industry has planted deep roots in the countries in which they operate, and why it might be difficult to obliterate them.

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