Cambodians Have Lost More Than $26 Million to Cross-Border Online Scams, Police Chief Says

Cambodian nationals have lost roughly $26.2 million to online fraud rings since 2025, according to National Police Commissioner Sar Theth, who noted that the country is not just a base for scam operations preying on foreigners but is also seeing a rising number of local victims.

Addressing the International Conference on Combating Online Scams (ICCOS) on September 24, Theth reported that authorities logged 1,136 complaints from Cambodian citizens in 2025, tied to losses of around $4.7 million. Of those cases, only 51 have been resolved so far, he cautioned.

In the first eight months of this year, police recorded another 1,084 complaints amounting to about $21.5 million in losses, with just 42 of them settled, Theth said.

He did not explain how the victims were deceived, nor whether the people behind the scams were Cambodian or foreign.

Challenges in Recovering Stolen Money

Theth pointed to the fast pace of technological and telecommunications advances used by criminal groups, along with the difficulty of tracing the flow of illegal funds, as key reasons why recovering stolen money remains a complicated task. He added that public understanding of these threats is still limited.

He also said that police have generally only managed to detain low-level operators, since the leaders of the largest scam networks remain overseas. This, he warned, makes it hard to break up these criminal groups at their core.

According to Theth, authorities have faced additional hurdles in identifying some detained suspects whose identity documents had expired, which has slowed repatriation or deportation and forced Cambodia to shoulder the associated costs.

Call for International Cooperation

Theth urged stronger collaboration between nations and international bodies to “break the chain and combat these borderless crimes.”