Dominik Konopacki

Huione users are now protesting outside the National Bank of Cambodia, demanding the release of frozen funds from their digital wallets. This after chairman Li Xiong was arrested and extradited to China this week.

The compounds are clearly shrinking, but is the scamming problem? Cambodia's crackdown has been real. Big numbers. Thousands arrested, major compounds shut down, the April deadline looming. But what's becoming clear from recent raids is that the operations that aren't fleeing the country are adapting. They're moving out of the big complexes and into less obvious places like hotels, villas, rented rooms, boreys. The Jinbian Mendu group had just relocated from Tboung Khmum. The Bangladeshi crew impersonating the World Bank was in a borey in Sen Sok. These aren't sprawling compounds anymore. They're small, mobile, and harder to find! Raiding a casino with 700 officers makes headlines and moves numbers. Tracking down a dozen people running scams out of a rental in a residential neighborhood is a different kind of work entirely. It takes sustained intelligence gathering, local level coordination, and resources that don't disappear after the deadline passes. If the government treats April as a finish line instead of a starting point, the smaller operations will just wait it out and keep going. And then there's the part nobody in an official press release will say. Scam operations took root in Cambodia because corruption let them. If that element is still in the picture, no amount of raids will change the long-term trajectory. The upcoming anti-scam law could help, if it brings real accountability and keeps enforcement visible. But laws on paper don't mean much without the political will to enforce them against people with connections.