Southeast Asia’s scam gangs regroup after Cambodia’s purge

Cambodia says it has flushed out a scam industry estimated to have stolen tens of billions of US dollars last year alone, but a string of arrests in recent days suggests the gangs behind it may have simply changed address.

Scam centres proliferated across Cambodia during the pandemic, when hundreds of thousands of jobless young people were pulled into defunct casino complexes to target victims worldwide with bogus romance, cryptocurrency and investment frauds.

Chinese criminal networks found an...