Inside a scammers' compound

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Abandoned compounds expose scam scripts, target profiles and staged rooms

A room set up to imitate a Brazilian police station. Oddar Meanchey province, Cambodia. REUTERS/Chalinee Thirasupa

In a Cambodian compound with rooms designed to look like Singapore and Australia police offices, papers were strewn across desks and floors: the detritus of a fraud factory abandoned in haste.

This week Reuters reporters went inside a bombed-out compound near the Thai-Cambodian border. It offered one of the clearest windows yet into the industrial-scale fraud that has fleeced billions of dollars from victims globally.

Police raids and military air strikes have forced criminal gangs to flee scores of scam compounds in Cambodia in recent weeks. The visit to the site, known as Royal Hill, was facilitated by the Thai military, which bombed it during a brief border conflict in December and has since occupied the surrounding area.

Reuters is the first news organization to authenticate some of the papers, which document the sophisticated manner in which the scams are carried out.

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