Promised a Customer Service Job, an Indonesian Woman Says She Was Trapped in a Cambodian Scam Compound

PHNOM PENH — When 24-year-old Indonesian migrant worker Petri (name protected) boarded a flight on 17 July 2025, she believed she was traveling to Cambodia for a customer service job.

The opportunity had been advertised on Facebook by an Indonesian-run agency. Petri said she met the local Indonesian recruiter in person, and the agency arranged and paid for her flight to Cambodia. The job promised between US$800 and US$1,200 a month and involved making phone calls.

Instead, she says, her passport was confiscated shortly after arrival and she was transported to a scam compound in western Cambodia, where she was held against her will for months.

Petri told responders she only realized the true nature of the work after reaching the compound in Pailin province near the Thai border. The facility is located at coordinates 12°54'43.2"N 102°30'14.6"E, an area that has increasingly surfaced in reporting on cross-border scam operations.

Inside the compound, Petri said she was assigned to Group 4 of a company known as Mingcheng Group, where she was forced to meet daily scam quotas and punished when she failed.

Within her first month, she alleges the situation escalated beyond forced labour. Petri said several Chinese nationals overseeing the operation repeatedly sexually assaulted her over the following months. According to her account, men would enter her dormitory at varying hours, and the assaults occurred almost every other day until mid-February.

She also reported being slapped by supervisors and having food withheld as punishment when she did not meet performance targets. In the weeks before her release, Petri said she had eaten very little for approximately two weeks and began suffering severe stomach pain and acute vaginal pain.

By February, her condition had visibly deteriorated.

On the night of 18 February, she was picked up and transported to a hospital in Phnom Penh for urgent treatment after her symptoms worsened. She later reported being diagnosed with a womb infection consistent with her allegations of repeated abuse.

According to Petri, the compound released her late on 19 February 2026 after determining she was too weak to continue working. She believes she was expelled because supervisors feared she might die if she remained.

When she left the compound, she said she had only US$40 in her pocket.

Responders have since transferred Petri to both medical care and a protection center. Her condition remains critical, and her recovery remains uncertain.

Her account reflects patterns documented by investigators and anti-trafficking groups across Cambodia’s scam economy, where workers recruited through social media job offers report having their passports seized, being forced into online fraud work, and facing punishment when they fail to meet quotas. In some cases, survivors describe being abandoned once their health deteriorates.

The compound where Petri said she was held sits within Cambodia’s western border belt, a region analysts say has become strategically useful for scam syndicates because of its proximity to Thailand and historically uneven enforcement conditions.