Dex’s Journey into the Scam Network
Dex didn’t see himself as a scammer. For the first two months at his new job in Cambodia, he followed orders. Each day, he sat before his screen, firing off scripted messages, moving from one far-away stranger to the next. Seated around him, row after row, were fellow South Koreans doing the same. With his phone and passport confiscated and guards patrolling the fenced compound, escape seemed impossible. And besides, he needed the money.
The Structure of the Scam Operation
Dex, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, had joined the hundreds of South Koreans drawn into sprawling scam networks run by Chinese crime syndicates operating across porous border regions in Southeast Asia. Many, like him, were lured by fake job postings promising quick riches – only to end up trapped and forced to run scams in their native language.
“When I had first headed to Cambodia, I thought it was ‘just a shady messaging job for a stock investment group. I didn’t realize it was an actual fraud,’” Dex told CNN. “When I arrived, they said there are two types of scams, romance and stock investment – and they run both.”
Global Scale of the Scam Network
Through them, the scam operations siphoned tens of millions of dollars from South Koreans last year, wiping out savings and ruining lives – just one branch of a multibillion-dollar global scam network that has scalped victims and bedeviled law enforcement around the world in recent years.
Escape and Legal Action
Now, having escaped, Dex has joined forces with some of the victims of his very compound, to build a case for the prosecution of the ringleaders of the Korean-language scam operation, two of whom were repatriated to South Korea on Friday.
CNN reviewed worksheets Dex provided that listed daily quotas; confirmed his identity through defrauded victims; and reviewed hundreds of screenshots that victims shared of their conversations with scammers, along with police reports, court documents and recorded calls from cases traced back to Cambodia-based networks.
Dex, who is in his early 30s, entered the compound in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh around April 2024, after responding to a Telegram ad for what looked like a stock investment chatroom job. The post, reviewed by CNN, promised around $2,000 a month for “chatters” and up to $10,000 for “callers” and “investment experts” – far above the average wage in South Korea.
As Dex soon found out, he would be enacting so-called pig-butchering scams, drawing victims in with false affection and fabricated investment gains before gutting them with devastating financial losses. The remote and often anarchic border regions of Southeast Asian nations including Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have become hotbeds of this kind of 21st-century swindle – and business is booming, with multiple compounds opening and relocating as needed.
According to the US Treasury Department, Southeast Asian scam networks siphoned at least $10 billion from Americans in 2024 alone. In 2023, South Koreans lost about $148 million to the operations, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime reported.
