Interior Minister Sar Kheng acknowledged discovering the buying, selling and transport of foreign workers, violence and punishment, and confinement and forced labor at Cambodian compounds after police responded to 600 calls for help across at least 10 provinces.
Scam-compound raids hit Banteay Meanchey, Kampong Speu, Kandal, Koh Kong, Oddar Meanchey, Pailin, Phnom Penh, Preah Sihanouk, Pursat and Svay Rieng, Kheng said during a speech on Thursday at a Battambang police academy where he enumerated the various abuses found by authorities.
“They take money from us and they sell us to another company,” he said of victims’ accounts. “They confined them and did not allow them to go anywhere and only stay in the room and forced them to work.”
“When they make them work overtime, and we do not accept to do so, they punish us and sometimes they cut off our salary or sometimes they torture,” he continued. “There are many forms of this kind of human trafficking and we must [work to] understand.”
Kheng spoke amid an effort by police to target scam compounds that have been plaguing the country for many months, with foreign workers pleading for rescue from forced labor and violence. They were made to perpetrate global scams online that are estimated to have cost victims around the world billions of dollars.
After Kheng set up a Facebook hotline to receive foreign workers’ calls for rescue, raids began in Sihanoukville and Phnom Penh and have since fanned out elsewhere. He said there had been around 600 complaints in all: one case in Kampong Speu, five in Pailin, six in Banteay Meanchey, 12 in Pursat, 40 in Kandal, around the same in Phnom Penh and Svay Rieng, and more than 250 in Preah Sihanouk.
“The serious one is Koh Kong and Oddar Meanchey,” he added, without giving numbers.
Kheng also noted this week’s raid on the Moc Bai casino compound in Svay Rieng’s Bavet city, on the border with Vietnam, that has seen chaotic scenes of people streaming out of compounds and throwing rocks at buses. People ran through rice fields and crossed a stream to leave Cambodia for Vietnam.
VnExpress said on Thursday that more than 800 Vietnamese people had returned to Tay Ninh, which borders Svay Rieng, in just two days, with most having no legal papers and having worked at the casino compounds.
Kheng said raids needed to continue regularly, and the plight had not yet ended.
He added that operations needed to be checked for proper business licenses. “We need to place a heavy fine. If we fine them moderately, they will not learn their lesson.”
