Is Cambodia’s Scam Industry Too Big to Fail

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Is Cambodia’s Scam Industry Too Big to Fail?

New sanctions on the world’s wealthiest criminal could threaten the Hun dynasty.

By Jack Adamović Davies, :https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/cambodia-scam-industry-prince-group-sanctions/

Workers ride their motor-cart loaded with glass past a branch of the Prince Bank in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Oct. 15.Workers ride their motor-cart loaded with glass past a branch of the Prince Bank in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Oct. 15. Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP via Getty Images

December 1, 2025, 12:01 AM

Having your personal advisor indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for orchestrating the largest fraud in history would be career poison to most prime ministers. Not so for Cambodia’s Hun Manet. Under the protection of his government—and that of his father, Hun Sen, before him—a network of more than 250 scam factories has taken root across the country.

Staffed largely by what the United Nations estimates to be more than 100,000 trafficked and forced laborers, these industrial-scale fraud operations rake in billions of dollars a year. Much of that cash is hoovered up by Cambodia’s entrenched patronage politics, propping up a dynastic regime that couped its way to power in 1997 and has not shied away from repressive strongman tactics to maintain what Human Rights Watch has described as its “single-party state.”