Chaotic Scenes in Bavet Amid Apparent Exodus of scam workers

Foreign workers threw rocks at buses as passengers tried to break out of them, according to police, as locals spoke of hundreds daily leaving alleged scam compounds in Svay Rieng’s border city of Bavet. The apparent exodus comes after scam workers appeared to have been transferred to the city’s casino compounds following raids elsewhere in the country.

After many months of foreign workers calling out for help from buildings in Cambodia where they say they were trapped and forced to perpetrate online scams, the country was downgraded in human trafficking rankings. Bavet city police chief Em Sovannarith said that around 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, a crowd had formed near the border gate to Vietnam.

People threw rocks as others tried to break out of buses, he said. But they were gone by the time police arrived. “There were between 50 and 60 people, and we don’t know how the chaos happened or for what reasons,” he said. “They are all Vietnamese and when the border opened, they went to their homeland.”

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