Sorry, I'm in my phone so I can't copy the full text of the article right now, but here's the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...fugees-thailand.html

Apparently Cambodia and Thailand have been trading shots back and forth for a while now in a "border dispute". There had been a ceasefire, but yesterday the Thai Air Force bombed some sites in Cambodia.

According to the Thais (and the article seems to lend credibility to their claim), the sites they hit are facilities directly involved in scamming operations. Like, full camps with call centers staffed by basically enslaved immigrants where the scamming industry is operating on an industrial level. Obviously, we all know scamming is a huge problem but I had no idea that they had this level of infrastructure basically in plain sight.

This begs the question...if we know these facilities exist, why are we not doing something about them? There's obviously a moral question involved in the Thai approach of just dumping bombs on them if they're being staffed by people who are basically enslaved...but aren't there other avenues available like putting pressure on the local governments to shut this crap down and round up the owners and senior people? It seems that a country like Cambodia would quickly cave to overwhelming western pressure if the civilized world got serious about it. And you'd think that the FBI and other western law enforcement agencies would be over there building cases against these people if they're operating in plain sight and with this degree of centralized organization.

Maybe I've been living under a rock...I'm well aware that scamming is a huge problem because I deal with it all the time, but I guess I always assumed that it was more individual actors and lots of small operations that were harder to track down and isolate, not massive dedicated camps and call centers. With the amount of damage that these assholes do, you'd think stuff like this wouldn't even be possible.

I am not familiar with the tensions over there right now but I have never seen an instance where the US GOV has had any interest in eliminating or curtailing these Int'l Scamming Operations - even though a significant majority of them target Americans.

Wasn’t Trump involved in quelling the tensions earlier this year as a way to get the countries tariffs reduced?

I would assume it’s like any other racket; money can buy influence and discretion.

It's not Cambodia per se. It's all China. They are using Cambodia to by pass tariffs.

They lure mostly college students from around East Asia to work as slaves in manufacturing and such.

Early this year it got so bad, ROK president threated to send in SOF to destroy all the Chinese facilities that had Koreans in them.

A) Sometimes, I think there’s lots of .pol perverts who want to use up their toys, before drones make them obsolete.

B) Obviously, scamming would be a casus belli and enslaving citizens probably demands war, of a legitimate society.