Thailand's Tourist Arrivals Down on Competition, Safety Concerns
In a statement yesterday, the ministry reported that the country saw a 7.04 percent decline in international tourist arrivals in the year to August 17, compared with the same period a year earlier. The country welcomed around 20.81 million foreign visitors during the period, the largest number of which came from China.
On the back of the disappointing figures, the National Economic and Social Development Council yesterday reduced its forecast for foreign tourist arrivals this year from 37 million to 33 million, well down on the record 40 million people who visited Thailand in 2019, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic. This comes after the Thai central bank similarly cut its projection for foreign arrivals this year from 39.5 million to 37.5 million in May.
The Thai tourism industry, the region's largest, has struggled to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused international tourism arrivals to plummet from 6.7 million in 2020 and then to just 428,000 in 2021. Thailand received 35.54 million foreign tourists last year, an increase of more than a quarter on 2023's figures. But the latest figures suggest that the recovery may have crested, raising questions about the short to medium-term outlook for the economically pivotal industry.
It is hard to pinpoint a single cause for the slump. One is the growing competition from other regional destinations, particularly Vietnam, the Southeast Asian tourism market that has performed the best since COVID-19. Last year, Vietnam welcomed 17.5 million international visitors, just shy of its pre-pandemic record of 18 million.
Thailand is also battling growing concerns about safety. In a horrific incident earlier this month, two Malaysian tourists were set on fire in downtown Bangkok, a story that has gained widespread international coverage. The country has also been associated with online scamming operations, following the high-profile kidnapping in January of the Chinese actor Wang Xing, who was later rescued from a scamming center in Myanmar. The ongoing border dispute with Cambodia, which flared into a five-day conflict late last month, is also likely not helping Thailand's international image as a safe and welcoming destination.
According to the Bangkok Post, Thanapol Cheewarattanaporn, president of the Association of Thai Travel Agents, said that the government 'has been slow to reassure tourists about safety or take action to instill confidence in prospective travellers.'
The scam issue has reportedly had a particularly strong impact on the perception of tourists from China, whose numbers have been particularly depressed since the lifting of China's strict 'zero COVID' policy in late 2022. While China has been the top source of international visitors in the year to August 17, with 2.93 million visitors to Thailand, the figures are also on track to fall far short of the 6.7 million Chinese nationals who visited last year, let alone the record 11 million who visited Thailand in 2019.
Since COVID-19, the Thai government has introduced a number of initiatives to stimulate the tourism sector. It has loosened visa restrictions, introducing new long-term 'digital nomad' visas, while permanently waiving visa requirements for Chinese nationals in a reciprocal arrangement with Beijing.
This week, Finance Minister Pichai Chunhavajira announced an initiative known as TouristDigipay, which will allow foreign tourists to convert cryptocurrency into Thai baht for everyday purchases. The scheme, which the Thai government describes as the world's first program of its kind, will run for a trial period of 18 months. Most controversially, the government has unveiled a plan to legalize casino gambling, although this has recently stalled due to public opposition. The fact that these efforts have so far failed to revive the tourism sector only adds to the economic and political challenges facing the weak Pheu Thai government.
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The Diplomat
3 hours ago
- The Diplomat
How Cambodia's Hun Sen Is Playing the World and Buying Time
The 72-year old's border conflict theatrics and peace prize pandering aim to deflect scrutiny from a regime that can now add child sextortion to its list of malign economic interests. Former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen coordinates the country's response to the ongoing border dispute with Thailand, in a photo posted to his Facebook page on August 4, 2025. Cambodia's long-time leader Hun Sen may have entered his supposed retirement back in 2023, but he remains the region's unrivaled master of grand political theater and cunning sleight of hand. This has rarely been more apparent than in the unfolding of the Cambodia-Thailand border conflict in recent months. Back in June, he took a step that effectively reset the optics of the entire dispute. Cambodia's opposition, which has hammered Hun Sen over the years for being too close to neighboring foreign powers, was forced to fall in line after he released audio of his call with Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, directly interfering in Thai domestic affairs and putting the nail in the coffin of her floundering premiership. What began as a liability – accusations of softness toward Thailand – was reframed into a show of nationalist dominance, leaving the opposition without leverage. The message to the Cambodian people was unmistakable: whatever your grievances, only Hun Sen and the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) can defend the nation. Later in the month, Thailand attempted to re-center the conversation on Hun Sen's strong links to organized crime actors, seizing money, property, and luxury cars from CPP Senator Kok An, a scam-invested oligarch and key business partner of the strongman. By this point however, Hun Sen had already seized control of the narrative, and proceeded to goad Thailand into direct military confrontation via an array of escalating provocations along the border. As artillery fire flared in July, it was again the aging autocrat – not his West Point-educated son and dynastically appointed successor Hun Manet – who instinctively seized center stage. Clad in fatigues, Hun Sen posted images of himself bent over military maps and in video calls with generals, embodying the ideal of a national commander-in-chief in real time. In the background, he leveraged CPP rank and file to do the less glamorous work of allegedly laying fresh landmines in disputed border areas, generating pervasive fake news, and appealing to the outside world for rescue from Thai aggression. 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This was not simply about symbolic diplomacy or humoring Trump's vanity in hopes of some ephemeral downstream gain. Hun Sen's Cambodia has become the custodian of a predatory criminal economy generating billions in revenue for its elite patronage network, and Americans may now be the prime targets. Faced with mounting pressure from both Washington and Beijing, these theatrics serve an additional strategic function: to distract, delay, and mitigate accountability for a system of regime-enabled polycrime that has become synonymous with the CPP's ruling strategy. As I've argued elsewhere, protecting this stream of scam revenue from scrutiny has become an existential regime interest. Given the limited economic alternatives, divesting is not a viable option for the ruling party. Yet, many of the CPP's top elites now face significant exposure not to mere embarrassment but to sanctionable – and in many cases indictable – criminal liability in the United States, and elsewhere. That is why timing matters. The U.S. Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, mandated by Congress for release by July 1 each year, remains conspicuously unpublished nearly two months later. According to three State Department officials familiar with the process, Cambodia's draft designation in this year's report was (expectedly and deservedly) Tier 3, with the added label of 'state sponsor of human trafficking' due to 'demonstrated policies and patterns' in support of the crime – the most severe condemnation available. If, after the Nobel overtures, that designation were to be softened in the final report, it would be a grave miscarriage of justice, both for Americans defrauded by Cambodian state-abetted scams and for the tens of thousands of trafficking victims languishing at the bottom of the regime's most lucrative industry. While it is hard to say how likely this is, the risk is not purely hypothetical. The State Department's annual human rights report, released in early August, was widely panned for alleged tinkering. A last-minute course-reversal on the TIP Report, in favor of the mafia state targeting Americans, would represent a material uptick in political malpractice, not to mention callous disregard for U.S. domestic security. — For all the recent theatrics and looming risks, the real story here is the under-recognized significance of the criminal economy underpinning a Cambodian state still dominated by a ruthless and highly adept autocrat. And now, research out this week suggests the underbelly of Hun Sen's scam state is darker still. A new International Justice Mission (IJM) study cross-referenced millions of cybercrime reports to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children with IP addresses known to be used at scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos. The researchers found nearly 500 child sextortion reports tied by device data to 40 separate scam compounds. An additional 18,000 reports contained IP addresses potentially associated with those sites — underscoring the possible scale of the overlap. Among the identified compounds are some of Cambodia's largest: Jinbei, Golden Fortune, and Mango Park, as well as O'Smach Casino, which is controlled by the tycoon Ly Yong Phat, whom Phnom Penh dramatically claimed was the victim of a 'human rights violation' when the U.S. government sanctioned him last year. This new evidence means that as the CPP enables scam compounds to support its patronage economic house of cards, it is also enabling crimes against children. For U.S. policymakers, this is more than an abstract human rights issue abroad; it is a matter of protecting children from a form of exploitation that is driving American teenagers to depression and suicide in record numbers. Might this be a step too far for an American diplomatic apparatus that has been reliably susceptible to CPP manipulation over the years? That remains to be seen, but the advocacy implications of this new data are profound. Sextortion is a bipartisan concern in Washington, which has galvanized parents, educators, child-safety advocates, law enforcement, and tech platforms. What rights and democracy advocates have struggled to achieve alone – imposing serious costs on Cambodia's ruling elites – may become possible if anti-scam, anti-trafficking, and child protection movements are able to identify in CPP criminality a common enemy. Cambodia's cybercriminal economy now reaches into American households and global financial systems alike with unprecedented scale and severity. 'Pig butchering' scams are likely the top form of financial crime impacting Americans in 2025. Sextortion devastates families across the heartland. 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4 hours ago
Aichi Police Arrest 29 Fraud Suspects Extradited from Cambodia
News from Japan Society Aug 20, 2025 21:54 (JST) Tokoname, Aichi Pref., Aug. 20 (Jiji Press)--Police in Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, arrested 29 extradited Japanese nationals in their 10s to 50s on Wednesday on suspicion of involvement in phone scams conducted from a northeastern Cambodian town. The 29 people, who had been detained in Cambodia, arrived at Chubu Centrair International Airport in Aichi the same day on a chartered flight from Phnom Penh, accompanied by investigators. They were then sent to several police stations. According to investigative sources, the suspects allegedly posed as police officers investigating money laundering and other cases and called victims in the Kanto eastern Japan region to swindle them of cash. In late May, Cambodian authorities raided their base in Poipet, a town near the Thai border, and detained them in a facility in Phnom Penh. The existence of the crime base had been mentioned by an Aichi man in his 20s who was forced to work at the base under the supervision of around eight Chinese nationals. The man entered Cambodia via Thailand in late December last year, guided by a middleman he met through a major job search website, and returned to Japan in early January. [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.] Jiji Press
Asahi Shimbun
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- Asahi Shimbun
29 Japanese arrested over scam calls from Cambodian base
Japanese suspects initially detained in Cambodia arrive at Chubu Airport in Aichi Prefecture on Aug. 20. (Shigetaka Kodama) Aichi prefectural police on Aug. 20 arrested 29 Japanese nationals on suspicion of attempting to defraud victims in Japan from a base located in northwestern Cambodia, investigative sources said. The suspects were arrested on a chartered plane that departed from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, where they were initially held. They arrived at Chubu Airport in Tokoname, Aichi Prefecture, on the evening of Aug. 20 and were escorted by officers to a local police station. Police are trying to determine the roles of the suspects in the phone fraud scheme. The suspects range in age from their teens to their 50s. Three are male teenagers and one is a woman, according to investigative sources. In late May, Cambodian authorities arrested the suspects on suspicion of making fraudulent phone calls from a base in Poipet and impersonating police officers. They were apparently targeting residents in Japan's Kanto region. The investigation started after a resident of Aichi Prefecture returned to the central Japan prefecture from Cambodia in January and provided information to police. Investigators quoted him as saying, 'Japanese nationals were working as scam callers under the control of Chinese people' in Cambodia while being monitored through surveillance screens. He said he himself ended up at the base after 'applying through a job listing site.' On Aug. 19, about 80 investigators departed from Chubu Airport for Phnom Penh to arrest the 29 Japanese nationals. FRAUD BASES MOVED OVERSEAS In recent years, Japanese nationals have been arrested and repatriated over their suspected involvement in scam bases in Southeast Asia. In 2019, 36 Japanese were detained by local authorities in the Philippines in connection with their suspected involvement in fraud crimes. In 2023, 25 individuals were arrested over suspected phone fraud activity in Phnom Penh. And earlier this year, several Japanese men and teenagers were arrested on suspicion of making scam phone calls from bases in Myanmar. Japanese investigators believe fraud bases have been transferred overseas to avoid domestic crackdowns. These bases abroad take advantage of law-enforcement confusion and other security lapses due to political instability and domestic conflicts. Swindles conducted by scammers impersonating police officers have been rising. Fake police uniforms and other props discovered at the Poipet base were likely used during video calls to deceive the victims and put them at unease, investigators said. According to the National Police Agency, 4,737 phone fraud cases were identified nationwide from January to June this year, with total losses amounting to 38.93 billion yen ($264 million). Many of these calls were made from international numbers. TARGETING THE MASTERMINDS In fraud cases in Myanmar, several men have been arrested after recruiting scam callers by offering 'yamibaito' (dark part-time jobs) online. In a fraud case at a base in northwestern Cambodia, an intermediary coordinated and gave instructions for overseas travel to Japanese callers. Aichi prefectural police plan to investigate the overseas travel of the 29 suspects in detail, aiming to identify the higher-level intermediaries and masterminds. The goal, police said, is to eliminate the entire criminal infrastructure that dispatches scam callers abroad. 'We must not stop at only arresting the front-line scam callers. We need to uncover the entire system that leads to overseas deployment to prevent further expansion of these fraud schemes,' a senior police official said. (This article was written by Toshinari Takahashi and Yuka Kamagata.)
