They Don’t Shut Down, They Move: Inside Cambodia’s Scam Cities

The road narrows long before the compound appears. There are no shops, no lights, no sign that anything substantial should exist this far out. And then, suddenly, it does.

A wall. Then another. Then a structure rising out of the dark—too large, and too deliberate to belong here.

“It was almost like a Jaws moment,” Erin West says. “You’re looking at one thing and then all of a sudden you realize: oh my god, there’s a 16-story building sitting here in the dark.”

They are near the Vietnam border, deep in rural Cambodia. There is no listing of these buildings on Google Maps, and no official marker. Just floodlights, guards, and the unmistakable outline of a self-contained system. The sheer scale of these constructions “in the hinterlands, in the very remote end of a dirt road location” raised a more unsettling question: how many more of these places exist, simply because no one has gone looking?

This is not an abandoned site. It is a city.

What Erin West came to find

For years, Cambodia has been one of the most visible centers of the global scam-compound economy.

The country’s coastal city of Sihanoukville, once known mainly as a beach destination, transformed rapidly in the late 2010s under a wave of Chinese investment. Casinos, hotels, apartment towers, and gambling complexes reshaped the city. When Cambodia banned online gambling in 2019, much of that infrastructure remained in place.

However, it did not stay empty.

Over the following years, many of those properties were repurposed into scam compounds—large, controlled spaces where organized criminal networks could house workers, manage operations, and scale fraud across borders.

That visibility eventually brought international pressure.

Avid reporting by human rights groups, media investigations, and growing scrutiny from foreign governments pushed Cambodia’s scam-compound economy further into public view. Authorities conducted raids and crackdowns, officials publicly promised enforcement, and several of the country’s most notorious operators and business networks came under sharper scrutiny.

That was the backdrop to Erin West’s trip. After 26 years as a prosecutor, much of it spent on high-tech and crypto cases, she now runs Operation Shamrock, a nonprofit focused on exposing the global scam economy from the ground up. Now, partnered with Sumsub for a first-hand report, her eyes were on Cambodia.

Her question was simple: Is Cambodia’s crackdown on scam compounds real, or is it a performance?

The timing mattered. Recent developments had created the appearance of momentum against Cambodia’s scam-compound economy. Chen Zhi—the businessman associated with the Prince Group empire—had come under increasing scrutiny, and his January 2026 indictment pushed the issue into headlines. Reports suggested compounds were closing. In Sihanoukville, Chinatown—the industry’s most visible hub—had gone noticeably quieter.

But West wasn’t looking for headlines. She was looking for what remained.

What Erin found reframed the story entirely.

The scams are the product. The bigger story is the machine behind them and who keeps it running.

Erin West

Founder of Operation Shamrock

The buildings that are “shut down”

Erin West flew into Cambodia, rented a car with her associates, and went to see the places that had supposedly been shut down.

She saw in person that in Phnom Penh, properties associated with the Prince Group—one of the names most closely linked to Cambodia’s scam-compound economy—appeared quieter than before. The scrutiny around Chen Zhi had already pushed the issue into international headlines, and in Sihanoukville, parts of the scam infrastructure that had once operated more openly no longer looked the same.

At first glance, it could have been read as progress.

What West found inside these constructions suggested something more complicated.

A quieter compound does not necessarily mean the end of an operation. In several locations, the infrastructure remained intact: dormitory-style rooms, workstations, controlled access, and buildings still fully capable of restarting operations quickly. From the outside, scam compounds can pass as office buildings or hotels. Inside, they operate more like prisons—densely packed, tightly controlled, and built to extract value at scale. Not just from victims online, but from the people forced to perform those scams. 

This is what a compound that was in business last week looks like. Honestly… it looks like they could just start this thing right back up.

Erin West

Founder of Operation Shamrock

That distinction became central to the reporting. The question was no longer whether certain compounds had become less visible. It was whether the underlying organization had actually been disrupted.

The deeper we went, the clearer it got: “shut down” might just mean moved.

Erin West

Founder of Operation Shamrock

Step inside Erin West’s investigation into Cambodia’s scam cities—and see what happens after the headlines move on. Watch the full video below.

Where the industry actually goes

When Cambodia banned online gambling in 2019, the infrastructure in Sihanoukville didn’t disappear but underwent an insidious change. A June 2025 Amnesty International report found that nearly half of the 53 identified scam compounds in Cambodia were linked to casinos.

Many of these operations simply turned empty casinos and hotels into large-scale scam compounds. The truth is that what now looks like a network of purpose-built scam facilities is, in many cases, something else entirely: repurposed real estate, already designed for scale, control, and constant occupancy.

That history matters because it changes how recent crackdowns should be read.

What surprised West most was not what had gone quiet in the cities, but the scale of new construction in places far removed from public scrutiny.

That broader pattern helps explain why places like Mansion 8 matter.

Mansion 8 is a notorious scam compound in Cambodia owned by the Changsheng Group, which was mentioned in different reports regarding coerced labor and online scams in 2025. It’s one of the large compounds that has come to symbolize the newer phase of Cambodia’s scam economy: not improvised operations hidden inside city blocks, but major, purpose-built infrastructure positioned far from public view. 

Mansion 8 has since been sanctioned by the UK—but even that barely scratches the surface. As West puts it, targeting one compound is like sanctioning the basketball stadium, but not the football stadium on the same campus. The surrounding infrastructure remains vast, active, and largely untouched.

Given the scale of investment, these sites are unlikely to vanish. People are not going to walk away from that easily, in West’s opinion—especially in remote areas where oversight is minimal and accountability is difficult to enforce.

A system that adapts faster than it’s policed

The scale of the money helps explain why crackdowns rarely land where they intend to. According to the UNODC, scam networks generate nearly $40 billion annually. Revenue on that scale does not disappear because a few compounds go quiet. It buys time, mobility, and insulation.

That insulation can take different forms.

During the trip, West heard repeated accounts of enforcement being anticipated before it arrived. In later reflections, Erin noted that, given the size of some compounds, even larger bribery figures would not be surprising.

The practical effect is simple: by the time authorities move, the operation is often already underway. Workers can be transferred, devices can be shut off, and dormitories can be emptied. What appears to be a successful intervention can amount to little more than a temporary evacuation.

That is not only because of corruption, but also due to enforcement itself being slow. Building a case and identifying operators takes time. Securing warrants, especially across jurisdictions, takes even longer. Scam networks, by contrast, are built for speed.

While enforcement proceeds through the legal process, recruitment continues openly. Job ads still circulate online. In some compounds, workers are instructed to film videos portraying the sites as legitimate workplaces, feeding controlled narratives into platforms like TikTok.

What emerges is a system designed from the start to absorb pressure and keep operating.

Two victims, one system

The story of scam compounds is usually told from one side: the person who loses money.

That victim is real. Pig-butchering schemes, romance fraud, and fake investment scams are built to exploit trust over time. By the time the money is gone, the victim has often spent weeks or months emotionally invested in the person on the other end of the screen. Reporting the fraud means admitting not only financial loss—but the embarrassing fact that the manipulation worked.

That shame is not incidental. It is part of the design.

But there is often a second victim in the same exchange.

The person sending those messages may also be trapped inside the system. And that second victim is less visible and often less understood.

The overwhelming majority of workers inside scam compounds did not freely choose to be there. Some were lured by fake job offers, transported across borders, and then coerced into fraud through debt, surveillance, fines, and threats. Even when—or if—they later escape, coming forward is difficult: after all, they were the ones sending the messages. 

One of the clearest accounts West heard came from someone who had lived it: Shakilu, a trafficking survivor who had worked inside one of the compounds and later collaborated with investigators. His description was not of isolated deception, but of industrial routine:

You send 20 to 25 messages… How are you doing? How are you feeling? You pretend to be a blissful girl.

Shakilu

Trafficking survivor

He describes managing hundreds of conversations at once, each one a potential victim. Supervisors monitored everything in real time, and every delayed message carried a penalty.

You are not leaving this client. $50 fine. $100 fine… At the end of the day, you will have zero.

Shakilu

Trafficking survivor

The targets were structured to be unreachable. The fines accumulated. Debt replaced wages. That’s how labor became captivity.

They don’t want to make it seem like trafficking people… They pretend to make it a job. They put posters—torturing people is not allowed… If you get into a problem, call the police. But the police are part of the system. All the people there, they wear police uniforms… That’s the end of your life.

Shakilu

Trafficking survivor

This brings us to why so much of this system remains hidden. One victim is reluctant to report out of shame. The other is reluctant to report out of fear.

And both silences help keep the business running.

What does this mean beyond Cambodia?

What West saw in Cambodia does not stop at Cambodia’s borders.

These compounds are nodes in a much larger network—one that depends on global financial infrastructure to function. The scams begin in chat windows and dating apps, but they end somewhere else: in accounts, wallets, and payment rails that move money across borders faster than enforcement can follow.

These mechanics are familiar to fraud teams in the form of layered transactions, mule accounts, identity misuse at a large scale, and much more. On top of that, fake onboarding turns verification systems into entry points rather than barriers.

Pig-butchering schemes and romance scams are only the surface. Beneath them is a system optimized for laundering—one that is fragmented across jurisdictions, shielded by regulatory gaps, and constantly shifting to stay ahead.

What makes it difficult to stop is not a lack of visibility but a lack of coordination. Enforcement remains uneven because financial institutions operate within national frameworks. The networks they are up against do not. What financial institutions misunderstand is the size, the scale, the gravity of what is happening. Many see only isolated incidents, not the wider plot behind them.

West says that this is an industry and a competing business: one with sales targets, structured operations, and global reach.

Cambodia, in this sense, is not an outlier. It is a case study.

The fire is still burning

By the end of the trip, the pattern was harder to ignore.

Some compounds had switched lights off. Others had not. Between those two facts lay the real conclusion of the investigation: visible disruption is not the same as structural decline.

What Erin found on her trip was not an industry retreating under pressure, but one adjusting to it. Operations that become too exposed in cities can move outward—to border regions, corridors off the beaten path, and newly built compounds where oversight becomes harder.

That is why the story does not end with one compound, one sanction, or one country.

The house is on fire. The only question is whether we act like it. Because what we found here feels like one node in a much bigger network, built to stay one step ahead. Cambodia is just one stop on a much larger map. And this journey is far from over.

Erin West

Founder of Operation Shamrock