Cambodia will deport on Friday 59 South Koreans who worked in cyberscam schemes, police said, after Seoul sent a team to investigate the fate of dozens of its nationals.
South Korea banned its citizens on Wednesday from travelling to parts of Cambodia and sent officials to Phnom Penh to discuss cases of fake jobs and online scam centres that Seoul says have ensnared dozens of its nationals.
The multibillion-dollar illicit industry has ballooned in Southeast Asia 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.
Seoul’s mission followed a public outcry in South Korea over the torture and killing of a Korean college student in Cambodia this year, reportedly by a crime ring.
“Authorities plan to deport 59 South Korean nationals… who have been rescued by Cambodian authorities or detained for other crimes to their country with cooperation from the embassy of South Korea,” Cambodia’s national police said in a statement on Thursday.
Cambodian authorities received requests to help 60 South Koreans in relation to scam operations this year, police said.
Forty of them were found following the requests from their families and the South Korean embassy.
However, police were still looking for 76 South Koreans missing in Cambodia, the statement said.
Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet met with South Korea’s vice foreign minister Kim Jina and her delegation on Wednesday, he said in a statement on social media.
They discussed “joint efforts in combating transnational crimes, particularly online scams — emphasizing that cooperation between the Cambodian and Korean authorities over the years has yielded many fruitful outcomes”, he said.
The two countries would “continue to strengthen” their collaboration to combat online scams, Hun Manet added.
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.
Seoul has said 63 South Koreans were believed to have been detained by Cambodian authorities, and officials vowed to bring them home.
National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac told reporters that the 63 included both “voluntary and involuntary participants” in scam operations.
Touch Sokhak, a spokesman for Cambodia’s interior ministry, told AFP on Wednesday that 80 South Koreans were “not in detention” but “being taken care of” by Cambodian immigration authorities.
He could not confirm whether the South Koreans with Cambodian immigration were the same individuals reported missing by Seoul.
South Korea’s foreign ministry also said on Thursday it was “unclear whether the 80 South Koreans announced by Cambodia and the roughly 60 nationals the South Korean government is seeking to bring home are the same individuals”.
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.
