Cambodia aims to shut down all online scam centers there by the end of April

[AP Photo]

Cambodia hopes to shut down all of the country’s notorious online scam centers by the end of next month, the head of the Southeast Asian nation’s effort to combat the cybercrime said yesterday.

Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, in charge of the Commission for Combating Online Scams, told The Associated Press in an interview that the government since July had targeted 250 locations believed to be carrying out the lucrative criminal activity, and has shut down about 80%, or 200 of them.

He said police would carry out suppression activities after April in an attempt to keep the scam centers from reemerging.

Cybercrime has flourished in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar, with scam victims around the world being bilked out of tens of billions of dollars annually, according to UN experts and other analysts.

The industry is closely involved in human trafficking, as foreign nationals are employed to run romance and cryptocurrency scams, often after being recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions of near-slavery.

In the latest crackdown the government launched 79 legal cases involving 697 alleged scam ringleaders and their associates.