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. ...