Sue-Lin Wong
speaker
62 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Sue-Lin Wong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Cambodia's government has been facing growing international pressure to crack down on industrial-scale scamming, often run by organised criminal gangs from China.
And that's led to an uptick in police and military raids.
Journalists are often invited to these newly empty compounds to see banks of phones and computers, targets for scam profits, and lists and lists of phone numbers for scammers to call.
But though selective enforcement has toppled some scam compounds, the system that protects them is still in place.
And the industry is adapting rather than dying, with operations shifting to Laos and Myanmar, which are the other main hosts of the world's scam compounds, and to new countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
When you receive a message on WhatsApp asking if you've picked up your latest delivery or if you're free to meet for coffee still on Wednesday, that isn't some random guy in a hoodie sitting in his parents' basement.
That is a message being sent by an incredibly sophisticated industry that we labeled Scam Inc.
in our podcast series that came out last year.
And this industry is now estimated to make more than 500 billion US dollars a year globally, where you have these sophisticated criminal gangs, mostly based in Southeast Asia, targeting victims all over the world, whether they're in Europe or the US or elsewhere.
That means that this industry is now roughly the same size as the global illicit drug trade.
And so it's really important that we think of this as an industry
So online scams in Cambodia alone are estimated to generate up to 19 billion US dollars a year for the country, which would make it equivalent to 40% of the country's formal GDP, bigger than Cambodia's garment manufacturing industry, which is its largest legitimate industry.
So scamming actually started in China.
It was mostly Chinese criminals targeting ordinary Chinese citizens.
And about 10 years ago, the government had enough and really cracked down.
And as a result, these criminals were pushed out across Southeast Asia, including to Cambodia.
So Cambodia's information minister was saying that over the past year, the government has closed more than 90 casinos.
The point that he's trying to make there is that scam operations are often run from inside casinos, which then also help launder the proceeds and the profits made.
The government has been very keen to show over the past few months that it's really trying to address the scam center epidemic.
And we've been seeing a lot more publicity around raids.
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