PHNOM PENH: FBI Director Kash Patel (pic) held talks with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet on Wednesday (Juy 22) on joint efforts to combat international online scam operations that cheat victims out of billions of dollars each year.
A report issued Tuesday by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime estimated that scams caused estimated losses in the Asia-Pacific region alone of as much as US$114 billion in 2025.
It warned that even as authorities conduct raids on industrial-sized scam centers mostly located in border regions of Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, criminals have responded by shifting to other parts of the world or operating on a smaller scale.
Patel arrived in Cambodia from neighbouring Thailand which co-hosted a two-day summit with the US this week on scam centres that was attended by representatives of nearly 20 countries and hundreds of law enforcement officials.
The head of the top US law enforcement agency met with Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul for talks on joint cooperation to tackle scam centres and other transnational crimes, such as human trafficking and drug trafficking, particularly through information sharing and intelligence exchanges.
Cybercrime has flourished in South-East Asia where law enforcement is weak, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar. Scam centres are also linked to human trafficking. Thousands of foreign nationals who are employed to run "romance” and cryptocurrency scams to swindle victims are often recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions of near-slavery.
Cambodia this year claims to have accelerated a crackdown on the scam operations, whose proliferation there is "a top priority for the US government,” according a US Embassy statement. Washington appreciates Hun Manet’s pledge to counter this problem and is coordinating closely with the Cambodian government to battle the problem, it said.
The embassy said Patel’s visit "reinforces the need for strong, joint efforts to combat transnational cybercrime, including increased efforts to hold high-level scam bosses accountable and for improved information sharing regarding complicit officials and scam compound owners.”
The US also "fully supports efforts to ensure justice for victims and criminal accountability for online scam operators, those who enable or protect them, and those complicit in related human trafficking crimes,” it added.
Cambodia will host an international conference on combating cyber scams in September, Hun Manet said in a post on his Telegram social media account. - AP
