The 72-year old’s border conflict theatrics and peace prize pandering aim to deflect scrutiny from a regime that can now add child sextortion to its list of malign economic interests.
Former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen coordinates the country’s response to the ongoing border dispute with Thailand, in a photo posted to his Facebook page on August 4, 2025.
Credit: Facebook/Samdech Hun Sen Sen of CambodiaCambodia’s long-time leader Hun Sen may have entered his supposed retirement back in 2023, but he remains the region’s unrivaled master of grand political theater and cunning sleight of hand. This has rarely been more apparent than in the unfolding of the Cambodia-Thailand border conflict in recent months.
Back in June, he took a step that effectively reset the optics of the entire dispute. Cambodia’s opposition, which has hammered Hun Sen over the years for being too close to neighboring foreign powers, was forced to fall in line after he released audio of his call with Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, directly interfering in Thai domestic affairs and putting the nail in the coffin of her floundering premiership. What began as a liability – accusations of softness toward Thailand – was reframed into a show of nationalist dominance, leaving the opposition without leverage. The message to the Cambodian people was unmistakable: whatever your grievances, only Hun Sen and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) can defend the nation.
Later in the month, Thailand attempted to re-center the conversation on Hun Sen’s strong links to organized crime actors, seizing money, property, and luxury cars from CPP Senator Kok An, a scam-invested oligarch and key business partner of the strongman. By this point however, Hun Sen had already seized control of the narrative, and proceeded to goad Thailand into direct military confrontation via an array of escalating provocations along the border.
As artillery fire flared in July, it was again the aging autocrat – not his West Point-educated son and dynastically appointed successor Hun Manet – who instinctively seized center stage. Clad in fatigues, Hun Sen posted images of himself bent over military maps and in video calls with generals, embodying the ideal of a national commander-in-chief in real time. In the background, he leveraged CPP rank and file to do the less glamorous work of allegedly laying fresh landmines in disputed border areas, generating pervasive fake news, and appealing to the outside world for rescue from Thai aggression. As Reuters reported earlier this week, despite no longer being the formal head of state, Hun Sen has played an “outsized role” from day one, both in escalating the dispute and in directing the country’s response.
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This is Hun Sen at his most effective: conjuring crises to offset his regime’s vulnerabilities. Nationalism and coercive political consolidation are once again crowding out more uncomfortable conversations about intractable economic woes, gaping inequality, and endemic regime corruption.
Nowhere was this more transparent than in Cambodia’s “surprise” nomination of U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has long campaigned for Nobel recognition, and the CPP proved happy to pander to this aspiration. As Sophal Ear put it, the nomination was a “low-cost, high-profile way to curry favor with a U.S. president who remains unpredictable and transactional.”
But analysts seem to be missing the bigger stakes at play. This was not simply about symbolic diplomacy or humoring Trump’s vanity in hopes of some ephemeral downstream gain. Hun Sen’s Cambodia has become the custodian of a predatory criminal economy generating billions in revenue for its elite patronage network, and Americans may now be the prime targets. Faced with mounting pressure from both Washington and Beijing, these theatrics serve an additional strategic function: to distract, delay, and mitigate accountability for a system of regime-enabled polycrime that has become synonymous with the CPP’s ruling strategy.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, protecting this stream of scam revenue from scrutiny has become an existential regime interest. Given the limited economic alternatives, divesting is not a viable option for the ruling party. Yet, many of the CPP’s top elites now face significant exposure not to mere embarrassment but to sanctionable – and in many cases indictable – criminal liability in the United States, and elsewhere.
That is why timing matters. The U.S. Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, mandated by Congress for release by July 1 each year, remains conspicuously unpublished nearly two months later. According to three State Department officials familiar with the process, Cambodia’s draft designation in this year’s report was (expectedly and deservedly) Tier 3, with the added label of “state sponsor of human trafficking” due to “demonstrated policies and patterns” in support of the crime – the most severe condemnation available.
If, after the Nobel overtures, that designation were to be softened in the final report, it would be a grave miscarriage of justice, both for Americans defrauded by Cambodian state-abetted scams and for the tens of thousands of trafficking victims languishing at the bottom of the regime’s most lucrative industry.
While it is hard to say how likely this is, the risk is not purely hypothetical. The State Department’s annual human rights report, released in early August, was widely panned for alleged tinkering. A last-minute course-reversal on the TIP Report, in favor of the mafia state targeting Americans, would represent a material uptick in political malpractice, not to mention callous disregard for U.S. domestic security.
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For all the recent theatrics and looming risks, the real story here is the under-recognized significance of the criminal economy underpinning a Cambodian state still dominated by a ruthless and highly adept autocrat. And now, research out this week suggests the underbelly of Hun Sen’s scam state is darker still.
A new International Justice Mission (IJM) study cross-referenced millions of cybercrime reports to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children with IP addresses known to be used at scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos. The researchers found nearly 500 child sextortion reports tied by device data to 40 separate scam compounds. An additional 18,000 reports contained IP addresses potentially associated with those sites — underscoring the possible scale of the overlap.
Among the identified compounds are some of Cambodia’s largest: Jinbei, Golden Fortune, and Mango Park, as well as O’Smach Casino, which is controlled by the tycoon Ly Yong Phat, whom Phnom Penh dramatically claimed was the victim of a “human rights violation” when the U.S. government sanctioned him last year.
This new evidence means that as the CPP enables scam compounds to support its patronage economic house of cards, it is also enabling crimes against children. For U.S. policymakers, this is more than an abstract human rights issue abroad; it is a matter of protecting children from a form of exploitation that is driving American teenagers to depression and suicide in record numbers.
Might this be a step too far for an American diplomatic apparatus that has been reliably susceptible to CPP manipulation over the years?
That remains to be seen, but the advocacy implications of this new data are profound. Sextortion is a bipartisan concern in Washington, which has galvanized parents, educators, child-safety advocates, law enforcement, and tech platforms. What rights and democracy advocates have struggled to achieve alone – imposing serious costs on Cambodia’s ruling elites – may become possible if anti-scam, anti-trafficking, and child protection movements are able to identify in CPP criminality a common enemy.
Cambodia’s cybercriminal economy now reaches into American households and global financial systems alike with unprecedented scale and severity. “Pig butchering” scams are likely the top form of financial crime impacting Americans in 2025. Sextortion devastates families across the heartland. Corrupted Cambodian banks and enabling technologies launder billions through the financial system. Each new crime creates fresh victims, new jurisdictions, and new constituencies with cause to act. What once looked like an impregnable fortress of illicit wealth is actually riddled with seams, for those still paying attention.
Autocrats around the world thrive on distraction and delay, but their growing dependence on polycrime can also be a weakness. These networks touch too many lives, across too many sectors, for impunity to last forever – if observers can match pace. IJM’s new research tying Cambodian scam compounds to child sextortion should make this clear.
Perhaps that is the bigger lesson Cambodia offers: accountability becomes possible when – and only if – evidence catalyzes coalition. At a moment when malign regimes appear to be winning everywhere, they can still be challenged if their opponents stay disciplined, data-driven, united across sectors, and willing to press forward despite the risks, until impunity is no longer an option.
1 comment:
When an 8th grader became the leader of the country, it would be strange if that country does not collapse.
Hun Sen has just executed Yuon's orders at the expense of Khmer people and Cambodia.
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