The current status of human trafficking in Cambodia investigated by international human rights organizations.

Amnesty, an international human rights organization, released a human rights report in June this year that tracked and investigated human trafficking complexes in Cambodia for approximately 1 year and 8 months from September 2023 to May 2025.

1. Research method

We listened to testimonies from survivors who escaped from Cambodian human trafficking organizations and their facilities, and based on these testimonies, we conducted undercover reporting by scouring the entire country of Cambodia for one year and eight months.

2. The scale revealed.

The reality revealed as a result of the investigation is terrifying.

Through Amnesty’s reporting alone, 53 detention facility complexes operating in 16 cities in Cambodia were discovered, and about 40 more facility complexes that Amnesty classified as ‘suspicious’ were discovered.

So, this means that in each major city in Cambodia, there is at least one such large-scale human trafficking detention facility in operation. In many places, there were up to 22 complexes concentrated in one city.

3. The method used to catch the victims.

Summarizing the testimonies heard by Amnesty, the vast majority of victims were lured into employment fraud through social media and Instagram and fell into their clutches. The victims were lured into the trap of being told they would work for their country’s government agencies and that high profits would be guaranteed, and after being kidnapped, they were transported to Cambodia. The majority of the victims are from neighboring countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, but the criminal organization’s influence is spreading deep throughout East Asia and beyond, to the extent that nationalities from eight countries were found, even though it was collected only from survivors.

4. Criminal organization.

Most of them are centered on Chinese criminal organizations that have escaped the strengthened crackdown in China, and are organized into a kind of syndicate or cartel-like network formed through cooperation with local criminal organizations.

When the Cambodian government banned internet gambling in 2019, all casinos and hotel resorts spread across the country went into decline, and the above-mentioned criminal organizations soon began purchasing and establishing themselves in these sites that were sold at low prices.

Since they were originally facilities built to accommodate large numbers of people (casinos, large-scale resorts, hotel complexes), they quickly turned into detention complexes like detention centers equipped with brutal watchtowers and surveillance facilities.

According to the common testimonies of survivors, there is a trafficking organization that primarily traffics victims to Cambodia, and through a kind of ‘slave market’ run by these organizations, the victims are sold to complexes and the organizations that operate them, and the structure is distributed. This means that a complex criminal ecosystem has already been established to the extent that primary human trafficking organizations and secondary detention facility operating organizations are differentiated.

In extreme cases, each victim had a different ‘owner’, subjugating people like real pre-modern slaves were bought and sold.

Once in an unknown confinement facility, victims are virtually unable to escape unless there is a rare crackdown by the military or police, escape on their own, or pay a ransom in their hometown. Most of them are used for the same SNS and phishing crimes for which they were caught.

Source – Contains very detailed reports and testimonies.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa23/9447/2025/en/