American and international law enforcement agencies teamed up with Meta to take down major criminal scam networks operating out of Southeast Asia, with the company disabling more than 150,000 related accounts, Meta said in a March 11 statement.
“Online scams have become significantly more sophisticated and industrialized in recent years, with criminal networks often based in Southeast Asia in countries like Cambodia, Myanmar [also known as Burma], and Laos running what amount to full-scale business operations,” Meta said.
“These operations cause real harm—they upend lives, destroy trust, and are deliberately designed to avoid detection and disruption.”
The operation, conducted last week in Bangkok, was carried out by Meta together with the Department of Justice Scam Center Strike Force, FBI, the Royal Thai Police Anti-Cyber Scam Center, and partners from the UK, Korea, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and New Zealand.
The Royal Thai Police arrested 21 individuals as part of the effort.
This was Meta’s second joint enforcement surge. In December 2025, an operation involving U.S. and global enforcement agencies resulted in the removal of 59,000 accounts, pages, and groups from the company’s platforms. Six arrest warrants were issued at the time.
Commenting on the recent operation, Chris Sonderby, vice president at Meta, said it was a “testament to how sharing information and coordinating ... efforts can make real progress in disrupting this criminal activity at its source.”
“Some of the most prolific sources of scams are criminal scam centers, often fueled by forced labor and operated by organized crime primarily in Southeast Asia,” Meta said at the time.
“We proactively detected and took down accounts before scam centers were able to operationalize them.”
In September, the State Department said U.S. citizens have lost at least $10 billion to scams originating in Southeast Asia.
“Criminal actors across Southeast Asia have increasingly exploited the vulnerabilities of Americans online,” the department said.
Commenting on the recent operation, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a March 11 post on X that this was a “big win in the fight against criminal scammers.”
“Through his Executive Order last week, President [Donald] Trump has rightly made fighting cybercrime a priority across the US government,” Kaplan said.
On March 6, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled Combating Cybercrime, Fraud, and Predatory Schemes Against American Citizens.
The order directs federal officials, including the secretary of state, secretary of war, and secretary of homeland security, to submit an action plan that identifies transnational criminal organizations “responsible for scam centers and cybercrime and proposes solutions to prevent, disrupt, investigate, and dismantle these [transnational criminal organizations].”
Cambodia Scam Centers
Cambodia is a “central hub” of scam center operations in Southeast Asia, according to a Jan. 16 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).“The country hosts more than 50 scam centers, and the revenue from these operations exceeds $12.5 billion annually, roughly half the country’s formal [gross domestic product],” the report states.
Many Cambodian officials and business elites are also reportedly involved in these activities.
In October, the Treasury Department, together with UK authorities, sanctioned criminal networks that targeted citizens of the United States and allied nations through online scams. Sanctions were imposed on 146 targets running the Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization, led by Cambodian national Chen Zhi.
According to CSIS, Chen is a Chinese Cambodian national who served as an adviser to both former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and current Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet.
Thailand acts as a major transit hub for trafficking people lured to work for the scam centers.
“Recruiters lure victims from around the world with fraudulent job postings, fly them to Thailand, then smuggle them across international borders to scam compounds often in Cambodia or Myanmar,” CSIS said.
A June 2025 report from Amnesty International states that the Cambodian government was “deliberately ignoring” the human rights abuses being carried out in more than 50 scamming compounds across the country.
For the report, Amnesty interviewed survivors from several nations, including Thailand, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Ethiopia. The organization also had access to records of hundreds of other victims from nations such as India, Nepal, the Philippines, and Kenya.
“Forty of the 58 survivors interviewed had suffered torture or other ill-treatment—almost always carried out by compound managers,” Amnesty said.
“Some compounds had specific rooms—often known as ‘dark rooms’—which were designated places for torture of people who did not or could not work or meet work targets, or who contacted the authorities.”
