PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — All over this Southeast Asian city are vestiges of the multibillion-dollar online scam industry, which thrived here for more than half a decade until a recent government crackdown.

There are luxurious high-rise towers overlooking the Mekong River, where entire floors are now deserted following police raids that cleared out the illicit operations hidden there. Disintegrating cardboard boxes and bits of Styrofoam litter the entrance of a branch of Prince Supermarket, after its parent company—the massive Cambodian conglomerate Prince Holding Group—was slapped with U.S. sanctions for allegedly running industrial-scale scam compounds. 

But the crackdown has created a secondary crisis: thousands of stranded foreign workers transported to Cambodia by the online scam operators and forced to work as hostage employees are now roaming the streets of Phnom Penh, after being freed when the scam operations closed. NGOs, including Amnesty International, say many of the workers are victims of human trafficking. They are now at the center of a silent humanitarian crisis in Cambodia, aid workers say, left with few options and abandoned amid the highly-publicized government crackdown. 

“The government has only addressed half of this problem,” said Mark Taylor, a consultant on human trafficking issues who previously led a USAID-backed program in Cambodia. “But it is totally ignoring what fueled that problem,” he added, namely the tens of thousands of vulnerable migrants that were lured into the scam industry and are now at risk of being re-trafficked. 

A man who worked in scam compound in Cambodia shows the only evidence he managed to document on his phone, a photo of dozens of phones that he was given to reach out and recruit potential scam victims.

Shibani Mahtani for NPR

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Shibani Mahtani for NPR

Cambodia was an epicenter of the global scam industry until late last year, when foreign pressure pushed the government to mount a large-scale crackdown on these operations. The scams, which operate online, work by convincing victims to put their money into fraudulent investment schemes. As victims keep depositing funds, they see profits, convincing them to put more in – until, one day, all their money evaporates.