African Youth Lured into Southeast Asia’s Booming Scam Empire

Whitehouse, in an exclusive interview with Global South World, warned that African youth, particularly English-speaking job seekers, are being increasingly targeted by traffickers linked to scam compounds.

He revealed that his long-standing engagement with Cambodia began over a decade ago through his collaboration with exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy.

“I helped him to write his English-language autobiography, which was published in 2013,” Whitehouse said. “Sam Rainsy is a former finance minister of Cambodia in the 1990s."

Whitehouse, now a freelance journalist with a special focus on Southeast Asia, believes Cambodia’s cybercrime industry represents a new phase of long-standing state corruption. “Back in the 1990s, corruption took the form primarily of illegal logging,” he says. “These days, it’s more about cyber scams being more profitable and far less labour-intensive, which, it's fair to say, make money much faster, in much larger quantities,” he noted.

“There is a large body of evidence that the same ruling elite is now being supported by the receipts of cybercrime,” he added.

Whitehouse traced the rapid rise of scam compounds to the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted tourism and left Chinese-run casinos in Cambodia idle.

“COVID-19 made it impossible for these casinos to operate. So what happened is that those casinos were repurposed… into what today are cyber scam compounds,” he explained. “This process has been quite well documented.”

He cited reports from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as well as a recent Amnesty International publication, both detailing how these facilities have transformed into heavily guarded centres where trafficked victims are forced to defraud people online.

According to reports by Reuters , Human rights group Amnesty International accused Cambodia’s government on Thursday, June 26, of "deliberately ignoring" abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds.

Amnesty said its findings revealed a "pattern of state failures" that allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, identify and assist victims, and regulate security companies and tools of torture.

“They are almost without exception sealed. You can’t walk in and out — especially you can’t walk out. They often use barbed wire and electric fences to keep people in,” Whitehouse said.

Africa in the crosshairs

Initially, the scam networks exploited Chinese-speaking victims. But as operations expanded, traffickers sought English speakers — and began targeting Africa.

“Now [they] include pretty much anywhere where there are English-speaking people,” said Whitehouse. “That certainly includes the English-speaking countries of Africa. If there are young people who need a job… those are the type of people the scammers are looking to recruit.”

He identified East African countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, and Mozambique as particularly vulnerable, citing logistical ease of travel and the influence of nearby trafficking hubs such as Dubai.

Francophone summit raises questions

Whitehouse also criticised the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) for choosing Cambodia to host its next summit.

“The danger with inviting a host of leaders from the Francophone world is that it legitimises the location as a safe, secure, legitimate place to do business and to work,” he warned. “That’s a dangerous signal for people in Africa… who may be tempted to take up job offers there, which may not be real.”

He emphasised that African governments attending the summit should be fully briefed on Cambodia’s cybercrime problem to avoid inadvertently endorsing a country linked to human trafficking and financial scams.

“There should be space for civil society in Cambodia to be represented at the summit,” he said. “Otherwise, you're simply going to get the government narrative.”

Although the U.S. has sanctioned entities like WayOne, a conglomerate allegedly linked to the Cambodian government, Whitehouse believes the global response remains piecemeal.

“There’s obviously some awareness of the issue, and some actions have been taken, but they are quite piecemeal. There’s a lot more that needs to be done,” he said.

That includes raising awareness at home. “Governments everywhere, and certainly including African governments, need to do more to warn people about the dangers of travelling to Southeast Asia to take up a job that you don't really know about.”