A single minute spent in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city of 2.3 million people, is a bombardment of the senses. There are no sidewalks, so you’re standing on the roadside. Right there in the thick of it. The motorcycles and tuk-tuks speeding an arm’s length past you in all directions, following no apparent law or order, give an immediate impression of urgency and danger. The heat, which never relents, blankets your body like a second set of skin. You could almost smell the heat, were it not for the pungent odour of marinating meat that overtakes it. Food carts dot the roadside, roasting skewers over coals. Women sit on stools in the sun, selling coconuts or mangoes by the bag. Under the shade of awnings are displays of phone cases and charging cables with labels in Chinese. Random holes-in-the-wall display baskets of assorted pharmaceutical capsules and tablets sold for pennies each. You can dig through them like treasure chests and find pills that would never make it through customs on your way home.
Wander into the bazaars and you’ll get lost in the labyrinth. Each shop is tightly packed against the next, partitioned amid the damp, dark corridors. There you’ll find room after room packed with sandals, t-shirts, baby clothes, bathing suits—garments of every kind for a dollar or two apiece. Instead of air conditioning, each stall has desk fans bolted to its makeshift ceiling, powered by extension cords running up the wall. If you’re feeling claustrophobic, walk toward the light. Once outside, a woman drags a wagon in front of you. It’s overflowing with trash bags, destined for an incinerator where, once reduced to vapor, it will join its stench in the air. The scent of lemongrass and turmeric emanates from somewhere in the crowd. Raw sewage and monsoon water pool in the drainage canals a few steps away. In the daylight, food stalls sell sugarcane juice, bubble tea, chive cakes, fried insects. In the moonlight, they sell handicrafts and knock-offs.
The economy is more than visible here. It’s right up in your face. It sizes you up. It wants your money and it wants you too.
It’s too much for me, most times. So I retreat to the air-conditioned silence of my Airbnb. Sat alone in the glow of my phone screen, I find the real economy. LICADHO briefings on land concession cases sit open in a dozen different tabs.
What’s outside is almost a facade. That visible economy outside your door is merely a thin layer atop something vastly bigger underneath, covering it with the legitimizing narrative of development.
Outside, the street food vendors, tuk-tuks, and market stalls operate on margins of dollars per day. A tuk-tuk driver might make $10 or $15 on a good day. A street vendor less.
A single scam compound, by contrast, can generate hundreds of millions of dollars per year. These are heavily fortified industrial complexes, often disguised as casinos or gated housing blocks, where trafficked foreign workers are forced (by debt bondage, passport confiscation, and physical violence) to run online fraud operations targeting victims around the world. Across Cambodia, these scam operations are estimated to generate up to $19 billion annually, making it the country’s largest industry and constituting, by some estimates, up to 60% of the country’s formal GDP.1
The money doesn’t flow through the street economy. It moves through informal hawala networks, cryptocurrency stablecoins, foreign hotel development contracts, and shady Chinese casinos. It exists in a financial universe that touches nothing I can see outside.
The scam compounds, which are physically present, sometimes visible as walled compounds with guards, known to local authorities, and documented by journalists and NGOs, make up much of the semi-visible criminal economy. This middle layer is secluded but “visible” in the sense that it’s not hidden. Yet it operates with impunity because of the third layer.
This bottom layer is genuinely invisible: the shell companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, or the British Virgin Islands, the massive real estate holdings registered in no one’s name, and the political patronage networks that convert criminal capital into public infrastructure. This is where the real wealth accumulates and it leaves almost no physical trace. Who owns the real estate? Which powerful families hold the shell companies? How does laundered money recirculate as “foreign investment”? This layer, at the bottom of the economic architecture, is opaque and arguably the true engine of the system.
For example, one Cambodian conglomerate alone, the Huione Group, in which a ruling family member is a board member and a major minority shareholder, is reported to have received $98 billion in largely scam-linked crypto transactions,2 a figure that rivals the economies of many entire nations. Leading blockchain forensic analysts consider Huione, by far, the largest illicit online marketplace ever.3
The scam compounds are almost a distraction in this sense. They generate outrage from NGOs and diplomats, and periodic crackdowns happen, but the underlying financial architecture that captured those proceeds remains untouched.
At LICADHO, our work on land rights, arbitrary detention, and freedom of expression all confront this system at its human level. The Indigenous mother told by a bank credit officer to sell her teenage daughter into sex work to repay a land development loan, and the man serving years in prison for posting a Facebook reel showing how to file a formal complaint against the Ministry of Justice, are both human consequences of maintaining the invisible.
I close the tabs and step back outside, into the heat. The same woman drags the same wagon back to the market, only this time it’s empty. Waiting for its next load. A tuk-tuk driver naps in a hammock slung between the backseats. Shopkeepers sit on the curb, checking their phones or counting their earnings. Somewhere out of sight, in a building with no windows, a shell company records a USDT transaction in the tens of millions of dollars. The blockchain adds it to a ledger, instantly and forever. Someone opens Telegram and makes another order.
Liam Hunt
- Humanity Research Council (May 16, 2025): Policies and Patterns State-Abetted Transnational Crime in Cambodia as a Global Security Threat (Page 6) ↩︎
- Illiptic Research (January 2025): Huione: the company behind the largest ever illicit online marketplace has launched a stablecoin ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎