The director of a major anti-human trafficking campaign group in Cambodia has been prevented from returning to the country by his organization after he publicly spoke out against the kingdom’s booming online fraud industry based on slave labour.
The U.S.-based International Justice Mission directed its then-country director Jacob Sims not to return to the South-East Asian nation since last July because of “credible warnings about various potential threats,” the non-governmental organization told Nikkei Asia.
The alleged threats emerged shortly after Sims appeared in an explosive Al-Jazeera documentary “Forced to Scam: Cambodia’s Cyber Slaves.” The program highlighted the scale of an industry that the international police organization Interpol warned this month has spread from Cambodia to become “a global human trafficking crisis.”
