Twenty-five Japanese were expelled from Cambodia this Wednesday, due to indications that they were part of a network dedicated to telephonically and electronically scamming compatriots in Japan. The deportation to their country of origin comes almost two months after their arrest, since all of them were involved in a raid carried out on September 11 in an apartment in Phnom Penh, following a tip from the Japanese police.
General Khieu Sopheak, spokesperson for the Cambodian Ministry of the Interior, thanked the authorities of that country, who chartered the return charter flight. Upon his arrival, a long interrogation awaited the suspects. They are accused of all kinds of frauds, worth hundreds of millions of yen. A random example is that of an elderly woman who was defrauded of the equivalent of three thousand euros, pretending that her application for an asylum place had been accepted.
Last April, another nineteen individuals – also, all men – were repatriated to Japan from the town of Sihanoukville, on the Cambodian coast. In this case, an example of the parallel and criminal economy under the protection of the casino boom for Chinese tourists. A phenomenon that has become more pronounced since Xi Pinping began, in 2014, a crusade against money laundering in Macau.
Something that has also been observed along the Thai border, in Poipet, or on the Burma border with China, in Laukkai. In this case, hundreds of teleoperators and other Chinese employees and clients have had to cross the border in the last fifteen days, in the heat of fighting between the army and a local guerrilla. Meanwhile, the Thai government had to mobilize to rescue its fellow citizens engaged in the same dubious activity. The television commissioner nicknamed Big Joke has excused them, implying that they were little more than kidnapped.
Although this should hardly be the case in all cases, there have been reports of misleading job offers for educated young people with high financial expectations in this type of environment, where legality is renegotiated every morning.
Last August, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights denounced the proliferation of victims of these networks in Southeast Asia, estimating them at 120,000 in Burma and 100,000 in Cambodia. Other frauds include illegal gambling or supposed online crushes with no other goal than to obtain transfers from the victim before disappearing.
Cybercrime is a major problem in this part of Asia, where there are still millions of poorly literate people, whose credulity is assaulted by organized criminals who induce them to put their money - a little, a lot or a lot - into non-existent investments or products. misleading.
Some of the teleoperators of these networks excuse themselves by claiming that they themselves had been deceived with a false promise of work with great benefits, before being subjected to isolation and even violence to carry out a minimum of scams per week.
New Delhi is also a major hub for this type of cybercrime, from internet cafes in neighborhoods like Safdarjang Enclave. Most frequently through fraudulent emails, carried out by Nigerian scammers who arrived in the country with a visa to study at real or fictitious computer schools. They are bizarre scams in English or even in tacky Spanish to participate in princely inheritances or funds diverted by foreign soldiers in conflict zones. Offers bounced hundreds of thousands of times and apparently there are always those who bite.
Finally, it can be assumed that the Phnom Penh detectives will have figured out - although they have not clarified it - how twenty-five Japanese could fit on the same floor and were also capable of maintaining as many simultaneous conversations without losing the thread.
