Cambodia is home to world's most powerful criminal network: report

South China Morning Post

25-05-2025

A newly released report has named senior Cambodian political figures as central players in what it describes as possibly the world's most powerful criminal network – a multibillion-dollar, Southeast Asia-based
cybercrime industry that experts warn may soon become 'too big to fail'.
Written by transnational crime and regional security specialist Jacob Sims, the report says
Cambodia is becoming the centre of an exploding global scam economy driven primarily by Chinese organised crime. It warns that the scale of illegal activities threatens global economic and political stability, and is thriving through state-sanctioned corruption.
'While
Myanmar and
Laos boast towering scam economies, one country stands above its peers in terms of likely scale and durability: Cambodia,' the report concluded. 'Cambodia is likely the absolute global epicentre of next-gen transnational fraud in 2025 and is certainly the country most primed for explosive growth going forward.'
Published by the US-funded Humanity Research Consultancy, Sims' report follows a chilling assessment by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which last month expressed alarm at the exponential growth of Southeast Asia-based transnational crime with its reach having extended to the Pacific, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.
Southeast Asian-based crime syndicates have quickly evolved from synthetic drug production to unregulated casinos and online gambling, and are now world leaders in 'industrial scale' cyber-enabled fraud and scams enabled by networks of human traffickers, money launderers, technology experts, and data brokers, according to the UNODC.
It added the 'professionalisation' of recruitment continued to attract countless, often talented but underemployed, young people from more than 60 countries through deceptive job offers, noting some became willing participants in illegal activities but many end up essentially as slaves subject to extortion and ransom demands, and coercion ranging from beatings to torture and even murder.