Escaping the Compound During the Crackdown

I'm Aishi Rasco and you're listening to the Sunday story from up first . So we've come in through the back now. Security guards stopped us. They didn't allow me to take any photos. Earlier this year , investigative reporter Shibani Matani visited a massive industrial complex outside of Cambodia's capital, Penam Pen . It's set up like an office park , but it's fortified against the outside world. There's bobbed wires all around CCTV's . You can see lookout posts as well on the top of the buildings . People once lived here about twenty thousand of them. Looks like dormitories sort of white buildings with black rails and with bars on the windows. And it's clear that it was abruptly abandoned. So much trash. It's a whole little city. I mean, Times Square could fit in in this . So all of these are hallmarks of a scam compound. This cyber scam compound is among dozens in Cambodia that operated with impunity for years . Migrants were brought to these places from throughout Asia and Africa and put to work scamming people on the other side of the world . According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, the cyber scam industry managed to defraud Americans of more than twenty billion dollars last year . And in twenty twenty four, experts estimated that profits from the cyber scamming industry were equivalent to roughly half of Cambodia's formal GDP But in the last several months, under international pressure , the Cambodian government accelerated a sweeping crackdown on the industry . Scam operations have been raided and shut down , and more than two hundred thousand scam workers have been released . With this ongoing effort, reporters have gained unprecedented access to a previously hidden world. Today on the Sunday story, we have an exclusive two part series on the global cyber scam industry , we're going to take a deeper look not from the perspective of people who were scammed , but from the people who once took part in the scamming . Shibani Matani is based in Singapore . She's been covering Southeast Asia for more than fifteen years and she's been following the cyber scam industry for the past three . When we come back, Shibani Mat ani takes us to Cambodia . We're back with a Sunday story. Here's investigative reporter Shibani Matani . Since January, the Cambodian government has ramped up its raids on scam compounds across the country , and as a result, some two hundred thousand scam workers have poured into the streets of Penpen g. These people are from all over the world at least, thirty five countries . And I saw reports of people streaming to the embassy gates, literally waiting outside, banging on the door, asking for help to be repatriated home . And even today, many of them are still unable to get home . So this spring, I decided to go to Penn Pen and try to speak to some of them I wanted to know what was their first hand experience of the scam industry . How did they end up in Cambodia ? I thought they could give an unfiltered view of the inner workings of this industry. I spoke to dozens of people on that trip . Most of the scam workers were from China and also from Indonesia. But it surprised me how many of them came from Africa . My name is Ishmai . My name is Oska . My name is Ama and all the stories were actually remarkably similar. I was trafficked in Cambodia for like a fake promise of a job. The job was offering one thousand two hundred dollars. So I was like, wow, this is a good opportunity. So I texted them and in a week or two I was able to travel and come . In recent years, crime syndicates have focused on scamming westerners . So they've heavily recruited workers from English speaking countries in Africa like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone . On this trip, the majority of the Africans I spoke to were from Uganda . Sometimes it was difficult to get deep into conversation . You know, some of them were also obviously very cautious because they didn't want to expose the inner workings of scam compounds that they believed were still so powerful , but I did manage to sit down and get to know one man really, really well . And that was through a friend of mine who introduced me to him. My friend, his name is M etchar D a. He's a Cambodian journalist based in Pennom Pen . And Dar and I we spent the week together zooming around in his little Tuk Tuk . He's also a Tuk Tuk driver sometimes to earn extra money . And it was through Darath that I got introduced to one Ugandan man in particular. His name is Schweib and he's twenty four . We would come to know each other pretty well over the next few weeks . Schreib and I ended up meeting in person for the first time at a Cambodian burger chain called Lucky Burgers . I saw him from the back first at . I could see even from the door when I went in that he was pretty tall but mostly really blanky. He was wearing sort of dark grey baseball cap and acid wash jeans and a grayish black t shirt . When we sat down, he had his phone out and he was taking little notes on his phone and he seemed kind of nervous . But then once he started speaking, I had to sort of figure out times that I could interrupt him because once he started talking he really opened up about his story and just got really into it and kept going . Schweib asked me to identify him by just his first name for his security because what he shares about the inner workings of these criminal syndicates which continue to operate today and his own role could put him at risk. Schweib told me his story from the beginning before he even arrived in Cambodia and you know, I think it's important because it reveals the long and really the truly global reach of the scam industry. So Shwi is from Kampala, the capital of Uganda . One day in January of twenty twenty five, he was sick in bed scrolling TikTok when he saw something that made him stop for a little bit of ads. It was a target job ad on his for you page promising somewhere between eight hundred to one thousand dollars for a month's work in Cambodia. Visa free air ticket and I was like these are scammers . Then I left it. So at first he actually dismissed it and he kept scrolling. Then after scrolling some couple of days I was like saw it again and I was like it doesn't cost me anything to send a message Why shouldn I't? I sent a message on TikTok . And right away, he was sent a WhatsApp number to continue the conversation with a recruiter. The recruiter told him that there were a few different positions available that there was a lot of work He could be a supermarket attendant, a delivery driver, or a warehouse worker , and on top of that they would even cover his visa and his travel expenses, and food and accommodation once he got there. It was a pretty big deal because in Compala, someone like Schweib could only earn about one hundred and fifty two hundred dollars a month . The person on the other end of the phone was offering him up to a thousand dollars a month. I was like, Ah, that's a big income. I can go there maybe like two years I can get some source of income and I said it's okay it is okay I don't care which work I will be doing as long as I get paid Schweib had always relied on himself . He has ten siblings , and both his parents passed away by the time he was eighteen . So he had to drop out of school and get a job. He worked in kitch ens for a few years, eventually getting promoted to a chef Everything was going so so well . Then I became sick . Schweib struggled for years with debilitating stomach ulcers . The stress of his work sometimes made them worse and eventually he was forced to take bed rest. After those initial messages, the recruiter told Tribe what they needed from him and it actually wasn't much. I filled up the papers, everything they asked me for. He sent them his passport information and filled out all his personal details. I did everything they asked me to . And everything was just moving so quickly that it didn't seem real. By the time I took it serious , it was when they asked me when are you going to travel . Then I told him two weeks . Told them can you travel in one week ? Then I was like, okay . Then after like two days , he sent me a visa. The visa, the visa of Cambodia . Then after like two days that's when they sent me a ticket . This is the Milaco. I never spent in Unicoin. Everything came in so smooth, but I was like it was too good to be true. Schweib had to leave in a hurry . When he got to the airport in Kampala, he met a group of ten others, all guys who were also headed to Cambodia . They showed their passports and were quickly ushered through. The guy was like, Kinda is so friendly. The guy asked me, This is your first time to travel. And I was like, Yes, this is my first time to travel. He's like, okay, good luck . Then he stamped in . Then he proceeded . Shribeet never stepped foot on a plane before, so as he boarded, he felt such a rush of emotion . And I was so happy . I was so happy. I took some pictures . Then when the plane left off , that's when I knew that now this is really I'm out of home immigrant. What ? Immigrant search for get some money and I come back home . Schreib landed in the Penompen airport on february tenth, twenty twenty five. His new employer sit a driver to pick him upside out the terminal. The car it was Nexus . Yeah, it was Nexus. Wow. And the driver even helped him with his bags. We were like the bosses . The guy took our bags . Then he told us I said, You follow me, you follow me. Then I went to the car. Even the guy opened the door for us. It felt like VIP treatment . The group of ten Ugandans split up into different cars. So it was just Schwebe and one other guy who got into the Lexus bound for the same location . And then they drove and drove and they kept driving. We drive for five hours. They drove at night and he really couldn't get his bearings. So we were so silent . It was totally pitched dark and the main thing that was illuminating the streets were just the lights of the cars on the road with him. Beyond that, there wasn't much to see . And after they drove for such a long time through these pothold roads and deserted roads, suddenly he saw a city come into view and suddenly he felt a totally different pulse . He started to hear music. There are lots of people there Load of music. Almost like a party . It was like a festival. It's like ten PM and somehow everyone was awake . He thought it was like a rave actually because they're playing this music and it was music that he liked. It is good music. EDM music with heavy beat s and he stepped out of the car and he thinks, Oh my gosh, like wow where have I landed? This is going to be good. Like people here seem to really be enjoying themselves. They are parting, they are walking here, we are going to enjoy your life here . As Shribe entered the compound, the illuminated science said Bavet Business Center. Bave business center. He noticed how multinational it was. He saw Chinese people, he saw Filipinos, he saw Vietnamese people, he heard a lot of different languages. They were Pakistan, Nepadi , the Gunians, Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, Tanzanians, there were a lot of people there and different tribes . When the driver dropped him off, he left and there was another guy who brought him in. This guy was Chinese and he introduced himself as the boss of the company . He greeted him and asked him to hand over his passport. So Schreb gave him his passport. They took our passport. That's the number one. Someone showed him a room and told him that was the room that he would be staying in and that he was going to share that room with a number of other guys too. Now you have to rest . We'll get back to you tomorrow since you are tired Then we slept . The next day he signed his contract. We were called in the office. We had to sign a contract . The contract was in Chinese, then there were also some part of some part of English and the contract stipulated that he would be paid eight hundred and fifty US dollars a month . They would provide him three meals a day and accommodation . Then they gave us the computers . Schweib says they walked him to his station and to help him get set up they told him what to download a VPN, telegram, WhatsApp , Instagram, TikTok and basically described it to him as sort of remote online work. I'm just going to enjoy working on your computer. That's my hobby. I can do this. Yeah, no problem. Me I was even on YouTube enjoying the music because I even had some ear codes. I was enjoying the music . Shribe told me that he was given several days to acclimate, but right away, certain things felt a little off. After he'd signed the contract with the bosses, he was taken to a separate administrative building where Cambodian guards took his photograph and gave him an ID card to use for entering and leaving the main gates of Bavet Business Center . But Shribes said the Chinese bosses then took their ID c ard away. When he went back to the office, they removed the ID from us. Now he couldn't freely leave the complex. We went outside some tour around the park to see what is going on. There were a lot of buildings . What I can say it is like a small town, a small developed town, bars, shops, there was a hospitals, there are supermarkets, saloons , there's nothing that you need all sides . So when did you start realizing wait a minute this is not At first I never knew the job that I was going to be doing . That's what I can say . Then after like after like a week , they added me phones without anything. They just used to give me phones. Now I had like four tier phones. They gave him dozens of SIM cards and all of them were for US numbers. After like a week, I started seeing things . If they were just doing remote work, why were they in possession of all this stuff? Like why did they have hundreds of computers, thousands of sim cards? What was all of it full? You're listening to the Sunday story. We'll be right back By the end of that first week, it all started to click, Schweib realized that he'd been brought to Cambodia to work as a scammer . And Schweib like many of the other Africans there would be working at the lowest level of the operation. We are specialized in three categories. They were the developers , they were the receptionists and they were the killers . First there were the developers . They were IT technicians and they buy stolen data off the internet. They get access to troves of phone numbers, Instagram accounts and other data . Then there were the receptionists like Schweib . So were you a receptionist ? Yes, our yes, our receptionist. So what does a receptionist do? Schweab explained to me that as a receptionist he was the first person that a cli would be in contact with. That's what the victims were called, by the way, clients . His job was to be that first human touch via text message to introduce clients to basically a profitable scheme. He would lure them bit by bit with real cash rewards. They give me a script. Can you give me an example of what Stukho will say ? Fantastic . Hello, how are you doing? Like a spamming message. And then maybe out of ten numbers, one person would reply. Who is this one ? No, that's when I get back to the street . I'm Sarah. As I mentioned earlier, I just copied all of it then, I paste, then I send . This is a remote job opportunity. Your main task will be to help improve how products are seen and rent on big shopping platforms. Copping pasting, coping pasting, following the script . Yeah. The best part , you don't need any technical skills or prior experience. So Schweib was in charge of hooking clients into what's called a task scam , and others who I interviewed in Cambodia described how this worked to me as well. As a client, you're convinced that you've signed up for a remote marketing job, and that you just have to like a few YouTube pages, Amazon products , but to get sort of further in and to be given more things to do, you have to deposit money into an account . So you deposit money, you get paid out . You deposit more, they give you more work, you get paid out more and earn commission that way. And this commission structure was sort of deliberately complex . Maybe it was a way to make it seem more real . In the script that Shribe used, there was a section included it called Personal Conversation, small tidbits of information that would make someone trust a stranger that they were speaking to, you know, on a social networking platform . In one script, he was Antonella Camboni, an Italian living in California who deeply valued her financial security. In another he was a thirty four year old with a dog named Toby . The tone was never pushy . So I guess most of your clients were American . That was the market that we were in. But some market in the USA market, some it's Canada, summit it is Indian, summit is UK, summit is South Afric Africa. After Shribe convinced his client to sign up, his goal was to get them to withdraw their money . That was his goal to get them to withdraw. The client had to see that the scheme was working. They had to gain something from it, you know, so that they would come back . And then once they did, once they put in a deposit, withdrew it, Shuai would hand the client up the chain until eventually that client interacted with a killer. But the killers were home with those Chinese . We used to call them used to call them killers because what they were doing, they were killing . This killer would convince the client to make their very last deposit before emptying out the whole wallet . Schweib said that after each kill the killers would celebrate. They used to beat the drum like ten times . So sorry, they would beat the drum when somebody gets a lot of money. Yeah , yeah, yeah. Actually drum. Yes. The Chinese drum. Yeah , yeah. Schweib said he heard some of the killers boast about how they made a huge kill from a client with a hospitalized kid . He had killers talk about targeting entire communities of retirees. Somebody can say that I'm so sick. I don't have anything to eat. I've sold my house. I've sold my car . I don't have anything left. I'm done, I'm done. Then after one week , you hear the same killer is hitting the drum . Don't you be like, what happened? Maybe those guys , maybe they have some witchcraft . Schrib said he considered telling clients he spoke to that this was a scam so they could get out of it. Did you ever think like did you ever feel very like emotional or very upset? A lot of times, a lot of times. But he and the other workers they were under constant surveillance. They used to check our phones and they used to do it randomly . If they find out like you sent you sent in a picture of what is going on here if you send a message you can find about what is going on here ? That means we're going to be bad for you. Schweib told me there was an isolation room on the fifth floor of the building and he said everyone knew what happened there. They had some room there they used to some guys , it was a small room. That was where they'd bring in people who did not comply, who tried to escape, who tried to contact NGOs and rescuers, who tipped off clients for this being a scam. I never went there at the isolation , but one of my friends when they like in the deep night, they punish him . After that, they leave him. They could tie him on the bed . Then they come, they beat, they go . The next time they come they beat again . Now by the time the guy came back, the guy came back with a face wear with lots of wounds . When I saw him , I knew that I was fucked up . That's what I'm that's what came in my head . You know, I said I'm fucked up and I don't have any way back . Then I was like, Ah man me, I have to go back home . These stories of torture they're consistent with what I'd heard from others who got out of similar compounds, and it's been well documented over the years in NGO reports and U. S. government reports . Schweib thought he still had his original return ticket, which was for a month after his arrival on that month long tourist visa . But then someone in the compound told him , just forget about that. If you don't finish your contract, you'll owe the bosses about four thousand dollars. I was like, Ah, man , all my life I never had that money. And he was like, No, you have to do everything they tell you. He felt trapped and I knew that now this is me. I have only two options is to work and pray so that I can get back home safe . Every day he worried about qu arter,s he'd pray to God for clients . When you can't sleep, you can't eat when you don't have the clients because you know what is coming. If they didn't get clients, they'd have to work longer hours, or his monthly salary would be deducted. Bosses, they deducted money for everything . They called them fines. I'd heard from people who worked in other compounds that there were fines for being on the phone for too long , for briefly clicking out of the scam chat window during their twelve hour work day, one rescuer told me that someone she helped was fined because they wanted to sit close to a window . Schweib was often fined for not getting enough clients and there were daily expenses to account for too. Shreib is Muslim and he doesn't eat pork, but the cafeteria often served pork. So he went to the company run supermarket to buy snacks and month after month his wages were whittled down to almost nothing . Schweib worked at night from ten PM to ten AM . It was a nocturnal schedule because of the time zones. He said the boss es regulated how long he could talk on the phone. Sometimes they took his phone away and gave it back only for a few hours . And they told him he had to keep his phone call short. Just quickly check in with your family, but don't tell them anything about what you do. But if you called your family and told them like, hey, something is wrong. I couldn't tell them because I didn't want them to worry about anything . But even if I told them they were not hing they were going to die about it. So you didn't tell anybody anything . They never knew anything . The guilt ate away at tribe slowly. I used to get some sleeping pews. I used to purchase them. I used to take two peers, two peels, two pews, two peers, two peels. It's still after some time. The two pieces were no longer working. I used to sleep for only two, two hours . His prayers started to change . When he'd left Kampala, he brought a Quran with him . But rather than just praying for himself and his escape , when he said his daily prayers , he started praying that the clients who had drew their prophets wouldn't come back . But Tribe said that he gradually came to think it wasn't just the killers who were greedy . He believed the clients themselves were also pulled in by greed. They are greedy . Anyone who is telling is just greedy . Because they should have known the arrangement it is too good to be true This is a Sunday story . Stay with us . So when we say scam company, the word company , it's entirely apt. You can't think of these as sort of scrappy little criminal enterprises or mafia in the jungle . They're run like a business . Frontlight scammers like Schweib they're managed by their team leaders who are their direct bosses . Then they have to report up to managers who in turn report to the head of a department . Then there's an HR department which handles recruitment, PR division that handles ads . Those are just the departments inside the compound itself. Outside there's a whole infrastructure to protect and serve the criminal enterprise . There are drivers who bring migrants like Schweib over to the compound , fruit vendors and drink sellers who move to the streets around the compounds, hoping to cash in . There are the security guards who keep watch . And then the land itself that is owned and controlled by tycoons close to the Cambodian government. They profit off the compounds on their land . My sources on the ground , they told me that it's the landlords who maintain a relationship with the police, who tip them off to raids and who keep them protected . In July of twenty twenty five, about five months after Schweib arrived in the scam compound, Thailand started att acking Cambodia . The two countries do have longstanding border disputes , but later , Thai officials claimed they were targeting centers of human trafficking and the scam industry itself . Thailies on social media even coined a new term scambodia . But Cambodia said Thailand's claim that it was waging a war against this quote scam army was just a pretext to gain control of their territory . Tensions have continued to simmer, though there's a tentative peace deal now. Though Schwei was far from Thailand, his bosses were getting nervous because these clashes near the border prompted Cambodia to announce they were cracking down on the industry . So Schweib's bosses started shifting him and the other workers around, moving them to new , more isolated compounds. But then in January of this year, a Chinese Cambodian Kingpin named Chin Zeh was extradited back to China following a criminal indictment in the US The indictment accused Chen of operating forced labor scam compounds in Cambodia . He was arrested in Cambodia , put on a plane with a bag over his head . Chenza operated one of the biggest conglomerates in Cambodia and was allegedly using that as a front for his gam operations . But he was also an advisor to the Cambodian Prime Minister. Everyone believed he was untouchable . When he went down, scam bosses everywhere started panicking . So Schwei was moved again , this time to a compound called Park eight But this time , Schweib and the other traffic migrants, they knew what was going on . They saw it on social media, on their phones . They knew their bosses were in a vulnerable place. place. And also the rumors that I heard about Arts They are ready. I know that anytime from now . And so in late January , roughly two weeks after Schweib arrived in Park Eid , a number of workers started to take things into their own hands. We knew that this is our only reach to escape from here. They revolted. Schweib says a crowd of people surrounded the Chinese bosses' accommodations. Some had sticks and stones. They wanted to be their boss in muddy. They demanded to leave. We just want our passports to go. The bosses , they were cornered , and they gave workers a choice . You can leave or you can come with us to the next scam compound . But if you leave, you'll be out there on your own on the streets of Cambodia in a country now hostile to the work that you were brought here to do. Is it worth the risk Schweib decided he would take his chance . So we were called one by one, one by one. We are given the passwords . He went outside and quickly flagged down a car . He found a driver willing to take him. He paid about one hundred and fifty dollars to get to Penn Pen . On february first of this year, Schwei drove away again in the darkness , unclear where he was going and what he would do next . In part two , Shibani Matani picks up Schweib's story on the streets of Panam Pen . It was easy to get into Cambodia , but getting out would be much harder. Listen now to part two