Lisa was only 18 when she left her mother’s home in Thailand. She was looking for work during a break from school. She was taken across a river into Cambodia by human traffickers at night. She spent 11 months in Cambodia and was transferred, against her will, to seven different scamming compounds – locations where she and others were forced to conduct online scams – before being released in early 2025. During her time in these compounds, she was not allowed to leave and was tortured after she tried to escape. Lisa is one of the 58 survivors that Amnesty International interviewed for this report, and one of thousands of victims of Cambodia’s scamming compounds.
In this report, Amnesty International documents the alarming human rights crisis taking place within the scamming industry in Cambodia since 2022.
It has identified at least 53 scamming compounds where human rights abuses have taken place or continue to occur, including human trafficking, torture and other ill-treatment, forced labor, child labor, deprivation of liberty and slavery.
Amnesty International has also shown a pattern of failed state behavior, which has allowed serious abuses to flourish. The government’s woefully ineffective response and failure to meet its obligations to adequately prevent and investigate the scamming crisis demonstrate its acquiescence and point towards complicity in the human rights abuses taking place.
Read “I Was Someone Else’s Property”: Slavery, Human Trafficking and Torture in Cambodia’s Scamming Compounds.