A Cambodian court has denied a request for bail by the award-winning freelance journalist Mech Dara, who faces trial on charges of “incitement” for his social media posts.

The 36-year-old, who has conducted extensive reporting into human trafficking and the country’s epidemic of online scamming operations, was arrested on September 30. He has since been sent to prison in Kandal province outside the capital Phnom Penh to await trial on charges of “incitement to provoke serious social unrest.” The charges stem from a series of social media posts that he made on September 20, 23, 26, 28, and 29. If found guilty, Dara faces up to two years in prison.

In a report published yesterday, Radio Free Asia (RFA) quoted Dara’s defense layer Rim Bora as saying that he received a notice rejecting the bail application on October 18, but that the court’s reasons for denying the bail request were unclear. “If we speak of the conditions of the request for bail, it should be reasonable enough to allow him on bail, according to the criminal code,” he told RFA.

In full: https://thediplomat.com/2024/10/cambodian-court-refuses-bail-for-detained-journalist-mech-dara/

“I was taught how to hit on them for about three or four days. After being friends for about a week, you go in for the ‘kill’.”

Poom-Jai*, 17, is talking about his job. Over several months, the Thai teenager was trained to lure, befriend and defraud lonely people online, with brutal efficiency.

“I wondered when I scammed them, would they become penniless, would they face hardship.”

In full: https://news.sky.com/story/they-fall-in-love-with-me-inside-the-fraud-factories-driving-the-online-scam-boom-13234505

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

The Philippine Embassy is appealing to the Cambodian government not to file criminal charges against the 20 Filipinas rescued from alleged surrogacy schemes, Justice Undersecretary Nicholas Ty said on Tuesday.

Surrogacy is considered illegal in Cambodia.

“Currently, our embassy in Cambodia is coordinating with the Cambodian government to express our government’s desire that they not be arrested, not be treated as criminals, and instead be considered as victims of human trafficking.,” Ty said in Filipino in a press conference after the 2nd Regional Meeting of Southeast Asian National Anti-Trafficking Committees at the Diamond Hotel Manila on Tuesday.

In full: https://globalnation.inquirer.net/252546/ph-to-cambodia-filipinas-in-surrogacy-scheme-are-victims-not-criminals