Fake Indian police station, Gandhi photo: 200 scam centers shut down in Cambodia

Cambodia has long played down the existence of scam compounds in the country, and previous crackdowns have done little to stop their spread.

Cambodia has closed almost 200 scam centres in a crackdown on transnational fraud in recent weeks, a senior government official said, with authorities providing rare access to one centre in a bid to show they are tackling the sophisticated operations targeting people across the globe.

“There are about 190 locations that we have sealed off now,” Chhay Sinarith, senior minister and chair of Cambodia's Commission for Combating Online Scams, told Reuters in Phnom Penh this week before the visit to a sprawling complex in Kampot province near the Vietnam border.

Chhay said 173 senior crime figures linked to the centres had been arrested and 11,000 workers deported in a campaign that began late last year after the U.S. indicted and then China extradited a Chinaborn alleged scam kingpin in the strongest international move so far against the criminal networks.

Since then, thousands of scam workers, some of them trafficking victims confined in brutal conditions, have fled compounds in recent weeks seeking to return home, in what Amnesty International has called a “humanitarian crisis.”

At the Kampot compound, reporters were shown large workrooms with rows of computer stations and desks strewn with documents instructing how to scam Thai victims, as well as studio booths for phone calls and a fake Indian police station.

The Indian embassy in Phnom Penh did not immediately respond to a request for comment.