When the sea mist rolls across Bokor Mountain in Kampot, Cambodia, it shrouds the forested peak in an eerie cloud, reducing visibility to meters in minutes. At the summit stands a French colonial-era hotel, a crumbling chapel riddled with bullet holes from the civil war, and a modern casino encircled by half-finished condos. The mountain — one of the last holdouts of the Maoist Khmer Rouge — is said to be haunted. It’s also the site of a string of compounds used for the latest horror to sweep through the country: a brutal online scam industry controlled by Chinese billionaires with the complicity of a Cambodian political elite that not only profits from the industry but helped to build it.
The mountain, and the area around it, has been designated part of New Bokor City, just one of the supposedly state-of-the-art, “smart” satellite cities, hi-tech parks and special economic zones that have popped up in Cambodia over the past decade. These sites have been hacked out of protected national parks along the coast, snaking from Kampot province on the Vietnamese border, northwest to Ream City, then Sihanoukville — a port city notorious for casinos and violent crime — and up to Dara Sakor in Koh Kong, on the Thai border.
The construction is ostensibly part of a government effort to drive economic growth and foreign investment beyond the country’s main commercial and tourism hubs of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. But one by one, the mega casinos and satellite cities that now sprawl across the Cambodian coast are being unmasked as belonging to an illicit scamming industry staffed by people trafficked into the country and held against their will.
In full: https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-20/cambodia-cyber-scams-human-trafficking
