Their repatriation marks one of the largest single busts of foreign nationals in cybercrime and human trafficking
This photo taken on Sept. 25, 2022, shows pedestrians walking past a casino building previously shut down by the police, in Sihanoukville in Preah Sihanouk province. Dozens of casinos sprang up in recent years in Sihanoukville following Chinese investment, making the City a hub for gamblers and drawing in international crime groups. As travel restrictions bit during the pandemic, these groups shifted their focus from gambling to scams. (Photo: AFP)
Cambodia deported 19 Japanese suspects to their home country on April 11 for their alleged involvement in phone scams as Japan has initiated a crackdown on crime syndicates based outside the East Asian nation.
The suspects were flown in a chartered aircraft from Phnom Penh International Airport on April 12 afternoon, Kyodo News reported.
Tokyo dispatched a 50-member police team to Cambodia which arrived in the Southeast nation on April 11 to bring the suspects back to Japan.
A joint probe by police in Cambodia and Japan alleged that the suspects were duping people into paying up outstanding payments for website subscriptions.
Earlier, police had seized a manual for scams and a list of Japanese targets from the suspects, all in their 20s to 50s, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK.
Their arrest is one of the largest single busts of foreign nationals in the crackdown on cybercrime and human trafficking involving East and Southeast Asian nations.
In Cambodia, these rings are tightly tied together and widely blamed on Chinese criminal syndicates.
The deportation of the 19 Japanese suspects follows Interior Minister Sar Kheng’s instructions to police to speed up 850 pending human trafficking cases in Cambodia, saying, “If the cases continue and remain unresolved, it will give a bad impression about the country.”
Authorities in the capital Phnom Penh also said a Chinese woman will be repatriated after she contacted the Committee for Combating Human Trafficking. Her employer had refused to let her leave.
Deputy governor Long Dimanche of Sihanoukville province, a former gambling mecca funded by Chinese investors, told the Khmer Times that the Japanese suspects were engaged in cyber scam operations. Suspicions were initially raised after a hotel room was searched in January.
“We found computers and phones which were used for online fraud in their hotel rooms in Sihanoukville,” Dimanche told the newspaper.
The southern port city of Sihanoukville emerged as a hotbed for online scams and human trafficking during the Covid-19 pandemic, frustrating the Cambodian authorities who were under pressure from governments from across the region to resolve the issue.
In March last year, the embassies of Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, and China issued warnings to their citizens about trafficking and online rackets.
Quoting reports, 35 civil society groups said thousands of people, mostly foreign nationals, are found trapped in large compounds and forced to work in online scams after being kidnapped, sold, trafficked, or tricked into accepting jobs in Cambodia.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has ordered a crackdown on crime rings that use social media to recruit new members for fraud and online scams.
But police and NGOs say the issue is complicated because many people working in cyber crime syndicates are there on a voluntary basis and have not been trafficked.
In Cambodia, hundreds of Asians from Pakistan to Vietnam and Indonesia have been rescued from slave compounds where they were forced to work for online scams under threats of torture or worse.
However, non-governmental organizations, including Unbound Now, say many of those operations have moved out of the country and are now based in Myanmar, where they can operate with impunity due to the ongoing civil war involving the ruling army and rebel groups.
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