The human trafficking and online scam industry will affect the future of South Korea's relations with all of Southeast Asia.
Bokor Mountain in southern Kampot Province in Cambodia is a popular tourist attraction. The mountain, verdurous and expansive, offers a panoramic view of Cambodia's southern coastline. Along its winding roads are abandoned French colonial buildings, looking eerily out of place. At its crest, a quaint Buddhist temple, gilded and mossed, rests on a cliff edge.
Since August, Bokor Mountain has become a household name in South Korea. Not for its greenery and peculiar structures, however, but for the death of Park, a 22-year-old South Korean student, who was kidnapped and tortured to death by one of the crime rings operating at Bokor Mountain.
He was found dead on August 8 in a pick-up truck near a criminal complex in Bokor Mountain. The initial autopsy revealed that he "died as a result of severe torture, with multiple bruises and injuries across his body."
It was only on October 21 that his cremated remains arrived in South Korea, following a joint Cambodia-South Korea autopsy at Teuk Thla Pagoda in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, where Park's body had been kept in a mortuary for more than two months. (Teuk Thla currently holds four more dead Korean males. According to a temple official, Koreans are brought here every two to three months.)
Reports of Park's death have forced South Korea to come to a painful, grim reckoning with the extent of South Koreans disappearing and/or dying under fishy circumstances in Cambodia. More stories and investigations have followed.
In September, a Korean man was kidnapped by a group of men while he was stepping out of a cafe in Phnom Penh. Around the same time in the same city, another Korean male disappeared and was recently discovered in a coma. On October 20, a middle-aged Korean male was found dead in Sihanoukville, Cambodia's largest port town. The following day a clip surfaced online, in which a Korean man exhorts a car driver to rescue him and to contact the Korean embassy.
According to South Korea's Foreign Ministry, 330 cases had been reported of South Koreans being kidnapped in Cambodia as of August of this year. Wi Sung-lac, the national security adviser to the South Korean president, explained that some 1,000 South Koreans were working - whether willingly or not - in online scam centers in Cambodia at the moment.
Considering the number of South Koreans departing for Cambodia and not returning home - some 3,000 each year - in addition to those traveling by land, South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) estimates that there could be more.
The Southeast Asian countries of Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have become hotbeds for online fraud. They lure or kidnap and imprison victims in their online scam mills, forcing them to bilk strangers out of money through romance scams, investment and cryptocurrency fraud, social media shopping swindles, and real estate deception.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as the global shutdown throttled their revenues, Chinese-owned casinos and hotels in Cambodia revamped their businesses with scam farming. The NIS believes that there are some 50 such scam compounds scattered across Cambodia, with about 200,000 workers of various nationalities, including 2,000 South Koreans. Meanwhile, those who escaped crime syndicates maintain that there could be as many as 400 such scam complexes in Cambodia.
The organized crime rings perpetrate heinous atrocities in locking up and coercing their victims into conducting online scams. Witness accounts say that the captors stun-gun victims, sever their fingers, pluck out their fingernails, harvest their organs, or sell them off to somewhere else. Those caught trying to flee are allegedly executed and cremated on site. Sexual slavery also seems to be common.
South Koreans have specifically been targeted for forcible recruitment and forced labor. According to Oh Chang-soo, a South Korean missionary rescuing South Korean victims of human-trafficking in Cambodia, Chinese crime rings pay more than $10,000 for one South Korean being trafficked into their dens - the highest price per head compared of any nationality.
There are two reasons that South Korean victims are themost lucrative. The scam mills bilk large amounts of money out of South Korean victims. In 2023, for instance, bogus investment schemes peddled by South Korean online scammers based in Southeast Asia netted $375 million from their fellow South Koreans. Second, South Korean families of those kidnapped pay hefty ransoms. For instance in August, a young male was released after his family wired around $25,000 worth of cryptocurrency to his captors in Cambodia.
One South Korean escapee said that one-fifth of those in Cambodian criminal compounds are South Korean nationals. Most of them limp from being tortured. Many have died, their bodies buried onsite. One South Korean resident in Cambodia said that at least one South Korean is found dead per month in Sihanoukville, the assumption being that the victim displeased their crime boss.
In February, China pressured Thailand and Myanmar to conduct massive crackdowns on transnational crime. Thai and Burmese authorities raided scam compounds and freed thousands of victims. Yet, the syndicates simply relocated through the region's porous borders, flooding into Cambodia. The Cambodian government has also been conducting raids on major criminal compounds within their borders, only for the complexes to fragment and reappear in remoter areas. For instance, the Cambodian authorities expect several new scam complexes to relocate to Bokor Mountain, where Park was imprisoned and tortured to death in August.
Critics accuse Cambodian law enforcement of tipping off the crime bosses before the performative raids. That's because these syndicates are owned by or linked to Cambodia's wealthy and politically connected. Chen Zhi, the chairman of Prince Group, is accused of large-scale human trafficking and online fraud, as detailed in recent sanctions by the United States and the United Kingdom. Yet Chen has served as an adviser to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and his father, former Prime Minister Hun Sen. He once bragged that scam operations were earning the group $30 million a day.
Hospitality, entertainment and financial businesses are also deeply enmeshed in the human-trafficking online fraud networks, being complicit in laundering illicit revenues. Cambodia's ruling class allegedly condone these activities in return for a cut their profits.
On October 15, the South Korean government sent a taskforce to Cambodia to work out a way to rescue South Koreans. As a result, some 60 South Koreans were repatriated on October 18. But the public was aghast upon finding out these South Koreans had voluntarily joined the criminal gangs and managed online scams against their compatriots. Of course, it's important to question them for more information about the scam networks' modus operandi and South Korean victims' whereabouts, and to bring them to justice on Korean soil. But what's more urgent is a thorough scouring of the human-trafficking networks crisscrossing Cambodia.
Seoul clearly lacks Beijing's brawn and ability to prod local authorities to crack down on the scammers. But even China hasn't been able to force Cambodia to clean up the mess, due to the rampant corruption involved. Even if Cambodia's government decided to take drastic action, it lacks the infrastructure and manpower needed for nationwide operations against all the criminal nodes.
As the South Korean government fails to offer a path to protecting its citizens abroad other than forming feckless taskforces, President Lee Jae-myung's approval ratings have hit their lowest point since he assumed the presidency. Both Gallup and Realmeter, two of the most trusted pollsters in the nation, cited the Lee administration's handling of the current Cambodia crisis as one of the major factors driving down his popularity.
As the sense of urgency and frustration builds up, prominent politicians have broached the necessity and possibility of dispatching South Korea's military and police forces to ferret out and raid human-trafficking online scam compounds in Cambodia. But it's against international law to deploy armed forces against another state's territory and government, unless the host country consents to such an action. The Lee administration has categorically ruled out such a military intervention.
A more likely source of leverage could be South Korea's Official Development Assistance (ODA) fund for Cambodia. It's currently $302 million per year. The foreign and finance ministries can just withhold this fund without legal or administrative hurdles. Still, it's unclear whether or not this amount of money would be enough to persuade Phnom Penh to probe into its higher-ups' corruption, shape up its police forces for effective raids, or allow South Korean personnel to operate on its soil.
The public ire is also directed at the South Korean government, especially the former Yoon administration, and its embassy in Cambodia. Cases of South Korean kidnappings have been cropping up for three years now. Nothing has been done. Rather, former President Yoon Suk-yeol quadrupled Seoul's ODA to help advance a South Korean cult's pet projects in Cambodia - even as his citizens were suffering despicable atrocities and bleeding money.
Even now, the Korea Heritage Service is continuing its restoration projects for Angkor Wat and wanted to ram through an ODA promotion event for South Korean tourists only to kibosh it upon media scrutiny.
Meanwhile, the embassy employees in Cambodia have beene neglectful and lukewarm in aiding the victims, requiring the captives to send a rigmarole of documents and making them wait for days until taking action. It recently came to light that, in April, the South Korean embassy in Cambodia turned away an escapee who had walked 200 kilometer just because the victim arrived outside of normal business hours. The same thing happened again in October.
Last November, the embassy even let a South Korean mastermind of romance scams, flagged in its search system as wanted by Interpol, walk away after declining to renew his passport.
From a broader vantage point, what's at stake isn't just Cambodia-South Korea relations but also Seoul's dealings with Southeast Asia overall. South Koreans are canceling their planned trips to Cambodia en masse. And the Cambodian tourism industry's and the police's callous attitude - diverting the blame to the South Korean victims and the South Korean government - are further fanning anti-Cambodian sentiments in South Korea. Cambodian immigrants in South Korea have been subjected to hate crimes. Encountering such news, Cambodians are becoming hostile to South Korean residents in Cambodia.
The deepening animosity and travel phobia could also affect other Southeast Asian countries. South Korean tourists spend about $14 billion abroad annually. More than a third of them go to Southeast Asia. Lately, however, they worried about the safety of traveling in Southeast Asia in general due to kidnappings in Cambodia. Indeed, their concerns are legitimate. As the sources of victims dry up and local authorities' crackdown intensifies, the crime rings relocate to nearby countries. Interpol's investigation showed the expanding presence of scam farms in Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. On October 7, a South Korean woman working for a scam center was found dead in Vietnam.
Southeast Asia is "the ground zero for the global scamming industry," according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. South Koreans, as well as other hapless nationals, will continue to disappear so long as these scam syndicates can stay alive simply traversing through different Southeast Asian countries.
President Lee will be attending the ASEAN Summit on October 26 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This issue will surely - and has to - surface in his talks with Southeast Asian leaders.
The only concrete measure to have crystalized so far, besides the repatriation earlier of criminally liable South Korean gang members, is the Cambodia-South Korea police cooperation agreement on October 20 to institute 24/7 hotlines and to stage joint investigations into online scam crimes. Much more is needed.
At the ASEAN Summit and beyond, the Lee administration has to tread firmly, albeit not without caution. Many lives depend directly, urgently, and palpably, on Lee's diplomacy - and the country is watching closely.