Online scamming sites linked to two sanctioned Cambodian tycoons are among those being investigated by the Cambodian authorities, a senior official said yesterday, as the country concluded a two-day anti-scam conference.
In an interview with Nikkei Asia, Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who heads the government’s ad hoc Commission for Combating Online Scams, said that compounds linked to the businessmen Ly Yong Phat and Kok An are being investigated as part of the government’s ongoing anti-scam crackdown.
“For those two tycoons who have compounds that are linked to scams, they are being investigated,” Sinarith said, referring to the properties.
Asked for details of the investigations, Sinarith said that “investigations were ongoing at all suspect compounds and that investigators were still determining the complicity of individuals linked to locations allegedly used for online scams,” in Nikkei’s paraphrase.
As Nikkei’s correspondent Ananth Baliga noted, Sinarith’s comments mark “the first time the government has admitted such well-connected people are associated with investigations into scam operations.”
Ly Yong Phat and Kok An are not minor figures. Both were important allies and financial buttresses of Prime Minister Hun Sen during his 38-year rule, and have remained prominent figures under his son, Hun Manet, who took over the prime ministership in 2023. Both control corporate empires based in (although not confined to) the western provinces of Koh Kong and Banteay Meanchey, respectively, and are also long-serving senators for the Cambodian People’s Party.
Sinarith’s comments came on the second day of the two-day International Conference on Combating Online Scams, which the Cambodian government hosted in Phnom Penh this week.
The conference, which was co-sponsored by Interpol, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and China’s Lancang Mekong Cooperation mechanism, was intended to promote global collaboration in the fight against cyber-scams. It also marked the culmination of an anti-scam campaign that Cambodia’s government launched last year, in response to rising pressure from foreign governments, including the United States and China, over the industrial-scale scamming operations that were operating, with apparent impunity, across the country.
Ly Yong Phat and Kok An are among the group of politicians and prominent businesspeople who are alleged to have abetted and/or profited from this wave of cyber-criminality. Both are alleged to own properties where thousands of trafficked workers were held in prison-like conditions by criminal syndicates and were forced to run scams on victims across the globe.
In addition to the independent media reporting alleging such connections, Ly Yong Phat was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2024 for his role “in serious human rights abuse related to the treatment of trafficked workers subjected to forced labor in online scam centers.”
Kok An followed him onto Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals list in April of this year, when Treasury claimed that he had used his “political connections” to protect a network of scam operations that have “stolen millions of dollars from U.S. victims” through “digital asset investment fraud and other scams.”
Authorities in Thailand have also investigated both tycoons for their ties to online scamming syndicates and money laundering. They have denied any connection to cyber-scam operations.
However, while the Cambodian government’s current crackdown has resulted in the shuttering of dozens of scam compounds and the deportation of tens of thousands of foreign nationals, there have been no signs that it will investigate the allegations against well-connected individuals.
Indeed, the government has defended Ly Yong Phat and Kok An from claims of their involvement in criminal activity, particularly those made by authorities in Thailand, whom they accused of weaponizing the investigations in the context of last year’s border conflict. In 2024, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the U.S. sanctions against Ly Yong Phat as “politically motivated.”
Critics of the crackdown say that this is evidence that the current crackdown is a reputation-management exercise rather than a genuine attempt to hold protected figures to account, let alone to alter the political economy that gave Chinese scamming syndicates such a foothold in Cambodia in the first place.
With his comments to Nikkei, Sinarith was clearly trying to address these sorts of concerns – and perhaps to initiate a campaign to have the two businessmen removed from the U.S. sanctions list. However, saying that the compounds allegedly owned by or connected to Ly Yong Phat and Kok An are the subject of investigation does not automatically mean that there will be a full accounting of their alleged role.
Based on several decades of precedent, the likelihood is that these investigations will peter out once the world’s attention has moved on.
