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By Carolyn Nash
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When Kenyagi left her home in Uganda in early 2025, she believed she was embarking on a career as an English teacher at a Cambodian school. Instead, the 20-year-old was delivered by human traffickers to a scamming compound known as “Park 8”—one of hundreds of confirmed scam sites across Cambodia where people from around the world are trafficked, tortured, and forced to perpetuate billion-dollar scam operations—often defrauding U.S. citizens.
In Park 8, Kenyagi’s captors forced her to scam American men, specifically retired U.S. military personnel, under threat of torture. Her boss raped her and forced her to have an abortion, and she witnessed the death of another trafficking victim, possibly from a forced abortion. After nine months of relentless abuse, Kenyagi escaped to a safe house. But when she arrived, she learned that the shelter would only provide her a place to stay for a few weeks before moving her out. After that, she was on her own to find food, a bed, and a way back to Uganda. Other pressing needs, like psychosocial support, were out of the question.
The reason for the shelter’s lack of resources? It had lost most of its funds due to the dismantling of USAID.
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Scamming operations in Southeast Asia have emerged in recent years as a critical threat to both human trafficking victims like Kenyagi and the U.S. citizens they target. But the U.S. government’s approach to the problem—which prioritizes levying sanctions without funding survivor support—fails to recognize that the scam industry will continue to thrive until both kinds of victims receive the support they need.
The industry will not be sanctioned out of existence. The U.S. government must go beyond sanctions and invest in support for survivors like Kenyagi who understand firsthand how these centers operate.
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The FBI estimates the scamming industry defrauded U.S. citizens of more than $16 billion in 2025 alone. Successive U.S. administrations have wielded sanctions, betting that limiting financial access will disrupt criminal networks and make human rights abuses less profitable.
Results have been mixed. For instance, after the U.S. government sanctioned a scam network called the Prince Group in 2025, Cambodian authorities arrested and extradited the group’s head, Chen Zhe, to China, and some compounds linked to him were abandoned. However, other operations linked to the Prince Group appear to have just relocated.
Likewise, 2024 sanctions against Cambodian Senator Ly Yong Phat did not result in shutting down his scam network. Instead, Amnesty International found that scamming continued in at least two of the compounds that the US linked to Phat while people continued to be trafficked to a Phat-linked compound.
Sanctions can complement cogent policy that tackles human rights abuses from every available angle. But incoherent Trump administration policies have undermined the human rights goals that sanctions are meant to advance. Above all, the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to USAID in early 2025 eliminated nearly all funding for antihuman trafficking groups in the region—the very groups that could have helped Kenyagi.
Our research shows that thousands of victims released during a Cambodian government crackdown on scam compounds in 2025 still have not received the help they need, largely because rescue organizations and shelters lost U.S. funding. In one case, an escapee who had no support was forced to live on the streets, where she was raped. Other survivors, rather than being protected at safe houses, have been arrested by police and taken to detention centers.
This crisis is not only humanitarian: Escapees are survivors of rape and torture, some witnessed murder, and almost all witnessed scamming crimes defrauding U.S. citizens. These are the people who understand the operations of these centers and the reality of living inside them. They are foundational to organizations such as Amnesty in efforts to provide comprehensive research and analysis about these criminal activities. Sure enough, Kenyagi showed us photographs of conversations she had with the American men she had been forced to find and scam. We interviewed other survivors who could identify security guards and buildings where scamming took place.
But these survivors are unlikely to provide testimony to Amnesty or others if they fear for their lives or don’t have shelter, food, trauma care, and other basic needs. Kenyagi herself expressed wariness about participating in official investigations, including talking to Amnesty International, without adequate protection because, as she told us, "The man who raped me is still looking for me.”
The U.S. government has also hamstrung another vital source of evidence by slashing funding to its own media networks.
In 2024, Radio Free Asia produced the most in-depth investigation into the Prince Group to date, detailing companies linked to known scamming compounds and abuses that occurred at the sites. One year later, the U.S. sanctioned Prince Group, an action almost certainly informed by Radio Free Asia’s reporting. But then the Trump administration eliminated Radio Free Asia’s budget. Though some funding has been restored, Radio Free Asia’s journalism—including on scam compounds—has significantly reduced.
The U.S. could also do more to support Cambodian journalists who find themselves targeted after reporting on scam networks. In the last year, authorities have arrested or detained four local journalists attempting to cover the issue. Unfortunately, the U.S. has not had an ambassador to Cambodia since mid-2024, leaving vacant a role that would normally advocate for press freedom.
The U.S. government has an opportunity to change course. Earlier this month, President Trump nominated a new ambassador to Cambodia. Washington must empower the incoming ambassador to actively support efforts to help survivors and gather evidence, including by fully restoring funding to vital antihuman trafficking programs and to Radio Free Asia. Doing so would finally align US diplomatic policy with existing sanctions and go a long way to protect people like Kenyagi and prevent U.S. citizens from being targeted by online scams.
Carolyn Nash is Amnesty International USA's director of advocacy for Asia.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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