Sixty-four South Koreans who had been detained in Cambodia for alleged involvement in cyberscam operations returned home Saturday and were under arrest, a police official told AFP.
South Korea had sent a team to Cambodia on Wednesday to discuss cases of fake jobs and scam centres involved in kidnapping dozens of its nationals.
“A total of 64 nationals just arrived at the Incheon International Airport on a chartered flight,” the official said.
Seoul had said around 60 South Koreans had been detained by authorities in Cambodia over the alleged crimes, and vowed to bring them home.
The individuals were arrested on board the chartered flight shortly after boarding, the official said.
Under South Korean law, a national carrier’s aircraft is considered Korean territory, allowing law enforcement to execute arrest warrants.
The official said all 64 have been taken into custody as criminal suspects upon arrival at the Incheon airport and will be transferred to the police stations with jurisdiction over their respective cases.
National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac previously said the detained individuals included both “voluntary and involuntary participants” in scam operations.
Touch Sokhak, a spokesman for Cambodia’s interior ministry, told AFP on Friday that the repatriation agreement was the “result of good cooperation in suppression of scams between the two countries”.
Seoul has said about 1,000 South Koreans were estimated to be among a total of around 200,000 people working in scam operations in Cambodia.
Some are forced under threat of violence to execute “pig butchering” scams — cryptocurrency investment schemes that build trust with victims over time before stealing their funds.
The multibillion-dollar illicit industry has ballooned in Cambodia in recent years, with thousands of people perpetrating online scams, some willingly and others forced by the organised criminal groups running the fraud networks, experts say.
Amnesty International says abuses in Cambodia’s scam centres are happening on a “mass scale”.
There are at least 53 scam compounds in the country where organised criminal groups carry out human trafficking, forced labour, torture, deprivation of liberty and slavery, according to the rights group.
Cambodia’s anti-cybercrime commission said in a statement on Wednesday that authorities had arrested 3,455 online fraud suspects nationwide from 20 Asian and African countries since late June.
Authorities sent dozens of suspected “ringleaders and their accomplices” to court in 10 of the cases involving online fraud, murder and human trafficking, according to the statement.
More than 2,800 foreign nationals were deported from Cambodia, and authorities “rescued some victims from trafficking”, it said.
South Korea’s police has said it would also conduct a joint investigation into the recent death of a South Korean college student in Cambodia.
The student, reportedly kidnapped and tortured by a crime ring, was found dead in a pickup truck on August 8.
An autopsy revealed he “died as a result of severe torture, with multiple bruises and injuries across his body”, according to a Cambodian court statement.
