Money laundering. Corruption of international financial institutions. Cyber slavery.

What do these have in common? They’re all a product of criminal activity in the Southeast Asian country of Cambodia. And they’re all receiving intense scrutiny from the most unlikely of scrutinizers: a lone prosecutor a world away, in Santa Clara County. 

Meet Santa Clara District Attorney Erin West who is a prosecutor of over 26 years and has dedicated the last 8 years of her professional life to taking down Cambodian labor trafficking and a Southeast Asian scam industry that is affecting millions globally. 

The scams not only result in financial losses for victims worldwide but are perpetrated by individuals who are themselves victims of human trafficking. West’s involvement stems from a tech-based task force in Santa Clara that led to a discovery of an estimated $3.5 billion lost from American citizens since 2023.

“After realizing that there was a much bigger problem out there, I started to do research into the origin of this [Cambodian scam industry],” West said. “I found that there was a whole world of bad actors operating in Southeast Asia. I found that this was Chinese organized crime, that was attached to the Cambodian government at the highest level and that they were using human trafficked victims to be the workforce behind this whole thing.” 

West co-founded the program ‘Operation Shamrock,’ in April which is dedicated to battling this problem.

“The only way to fix something this big is to gather all of the different stakeholders that have a piece of this,” West said. “Operation Shamrock is a way to bring together the stakeholders to work together. It’s a group that includes social media, banking, law enforcement, and Cryptocurrency exchanges. The idea is that we share information and we assist each other so that we can move forward together against this crime.”

Together, West and Jacob Sims, co-founder of Operation Shamrock, wrote a report for the United States Institute of Peace, detailing how this transnational scam industry in Southeast Asia is becoming an increasing threat to global security.

“Organized crime is a significant driver of conflict globally,” the report states. “It preys on weak governance, slack law enforcement, and inadequate regulation. It tears at the fabric of societies by empowering and enriching armed actors and fueling violent conflict. In Asia, criminal groups prop up corrupt and dangerous regimes from Myanmar to North Korea, posing a direct threat to regional stability.”

According to the USIP report, scam operations originated from loosely regulated gambling activities popular in Southeast Asia during the 1990s.

“The scamming operations proliferating in the region today have their roots in a regional network of loosely regulated casinos and online gambling that, beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the 2000s, some governments promoted as a legitimate contribution to economic development,” the report states.

Sims said this problem only started receiving attention in 2021 after the pandemic worsened the situation. People from more than 60 countries are victims and the journalists and the activists trying to help often face threats, jail, or violence. According to Sims, groups like Operation Shamrock are working to fight this and help victims of scams get their money back. 

Cambodian journalist Mech Dara was released last week after being arrested and detained for over a month due to investigative reporting on the issue in Cambodia. West said Dara’s situation brings attention to the fact that they’re dealing with more than a scamming industry but also preserving a right to speak freely.

“We are fighting a government that is not allowing information to be dispersed, and we are fighting a government where they’re going to silence people who oppose them,” West said. “It [this level of governmental control] lends a lot of credibility to what we know about the level of corruption at the highest levels of government in Cambodia. When he [Dara] got arrested, it was yet another way of calling attention to the fact that there’s some really horrible behavior going on in that part of the world.”

According to Sims, the Cambodian government is trying to eradicate reporting in Cambodia.

“The Cambodian government has effectively mounted a two-and-a-half-year campaign to eliminate everyone who’s reporting on the issue,” Sims said. “There are few who are in Cambodia actively researching and reporting on this because they’ve all either been threatened, thrown in jail, beaten up, kicked out of the country, or otherwise intimidated into silence or bought off. It’s a pretty dire civil society with media freedom in Cambodia.”

Human trafficking is the leading reason for these scamming operations to be functional. According to Sims, the lockdowns from COVID-19 dried up supply chains in the Southeast Asian region resulting in a desperate scramble for work opportunities. As a result, people got stuck in Cambodia and Myanmar according to Sims.

“We started hearing about these people who were trapped in Cambodia who thought they were coming to be tech salespeople, customer service, or IT support people,” Sims said. “They would go through seemingly normal recruitment processes, have their plane tickets bought, [but] they’d arrive in Cambodia and then be driven to these apartment buildings, casinos, and hotels that had been converted into basically a prison. They were forced to conduct complex cyber crimes against people from Southeast Asian and Western countries like the U.S.”

According to Sims, more than a quarter million personnel have been duped into this criminal workforce, which he said is unprecedented.

“We’ve documented over 60 different nationalities,” Sims said. “It started out primarily with people from China who were in this situation, but it’s expanded and now there’s people from all over the world who are getting trafficked into this industry.”

According to the USIP report, the people forced to perform scams are deceived by illegitimate ads.

“The scamming operations are powered by hundreds of thousands of people, many duped by fraudulent online ads for lucrative high-tech jobs and trafficked illegally into scam compounds, where they are held by armed gangs in prison-like conditions and forced to run online scams,” the report states.

In Southeast Asia, advanced technology has been used for online scamming and has even allowed criminal network operations to go under the radar and evade law enforcement. West founded Operation Shamrock in April and said she has since come to understand that local law enforcement is not capable of handling a crisis of this magnitude. 

“One of the things that we’ve taken really seriously is the idea of bridging the gap for law enforcement,” West said. “Bringing the people who know how to do this work together so that any victim can walk into any jurisdiction and be able to get some help for this crisis.”

Since locations, where the compounds exist, are owned by powerful people in the country, both Sims and West said there’s sufficient evidence suggesting that the network is state-affiliated.

“Senators, governors, family members of the prime minister, and advisors to the prime minister are totally untouchable.” Sims said. “In essence, this country in the last three years has gone into a complete mafia state, and its strongest economics and political interests are aligned with perpetuating this form of crime.”