PHNOM PENH: Cambodian authorities have arrested nearly 400 Chinese and Taiwanese nationals this month on suspicion of operating a telecoms scam to defraud victims in China, police said on Thursday.
The arrests are part of a regional crackdown as China battles telephone and Internet scams that have cost billions of dollars in financial losses.
Scams have targeted everyone from the elderly, the students and the unemployed to businessmen involved in legal problems. Scammers based overseas often pose as some kind of government official.
Police in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh on Wednesday arrested 225 Chinese nationals, including 25 women, suspected of an extortion scheme using Internet voice call technology, said Thou Saroeun, deputy director of the anti-terrorism police department.
“We are processing the case and we don’t know yet when this will move to deportation,” Thou Saroeun told Reuters, without elaborating.
On Aug. 2, police arrested 151 Chinese and three Taiwanese nationals in the provinces of Siem Reap and Banteay Meanchey, Uk Heisela, the investigations chief of the immigration department, told Reuters.
Authorities in Beijing accuse Taiwan of harboring criminal gangs behind many of the scams that have targeted victims on the mainland.
Cambodia is one of China’s closest allies in Southeast Asia and does not recognize the government of Taiwan, which Beijing considers a wayward province.
In recent years, it has deported more than 600 Chinese and Taiwanese to China after arresting them on suspicion of telecoms scams.
Since 2011, Taiwan and mainland China have cooperated in investigating telecoms fraud in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere. Thousands of suspects, many from Taiwan, have been arrested since.
Last month, police in Indonesia said they had detained more than 150 Chinese nationals accused of a scam that had brought them an estimated $450 million by tricking victims into paying to make legal cases go away.
Some of the suspects arrested in Cambodia will be sent to China this week, Uk Heisela said.
“I don’t know when exactly, that depends on when China sends a plane,” he added.
Last month, Cambodia deported 105 Chinese and Taiwanese suspects to China, prompting a protest from the self-ruled island to Phnom Penh. Authorities in Taiwan have accused Cambodia of acting at China’s behest.
China has defended the deportations of people from Taiwan to China from places like Cambodia by saying the victims were all in China and so the criminals should face justice in China.
Cambodia arrests nearly 400 from China and Taiwan over telecoms fraud
Cambodia arrests nearly 400 from China and Taiwan over telecoms fraud
Russia slams Western peacekeeping plan for Ukraine
- “The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Zakharova
- She called the plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies “dangerous” and “destructive“
MOSCOW: Russia on Thursday slammed a plan for European peacekeepers to be deployed to Ukraine as “dangerous” and dubbed Kyiv and its allies an “axis of war,” dousing hopes the plan could be a step toward ending the almost four-year-war.
US President Donald Trump has been pushing the warring sides to strike a deal to halt the conflict, running shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a bid to get an agreement across the line.
An initial 28-point plan which largely adhered to Moscow’s demands was criticized by Kyiv and Europe, and now Russia has slammed the attempts to beef-up protections for Ukraine should an elusive deal be reached.
Ukraine’s allies said they had agreed key security guarantees for Kyiv at a summit in Paris earlier this week, including a peacekeeping force.
But in its first comments since the summit, Moscow said the statements were far away from anything the Kremlin could accept to end its assault.
“The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
She called the plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies “dangerous” and “destructive.”
The remarks come as Russian strikes plunged hundreds of thousands in Ukraine into darkness, leaving families without heat in below-freezing temperatures — attacks that Zelensky said showed Russia was still set on war.
- ‘Legitimate military targets’ -
European leaders and US envoys announced earlier this week that post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a European multinational force to be deployed when the fighting stops.
But Moscow has repeatedly warned that it would not accept any NATO members sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.
“All such units and facilities will be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian Armed Forces,” Zakharova said Thursday, repeating a threat previously uttered by Putin.
Zelensky also said Thursday that a bilateral agreement between Kyiv and Washington for US security guarantees was “essentially ready for finalization at the highest level with the President of the United States” following talks between envoys in Paris this week.
Kyiv says legally-binding assurances that its allies would come to its defense are essential to convince Russia not to re-attack if a ceasefire is reached.
But specific details on the guarantees, the European force, and how it would engage have not been made public.
Zelensky said earlier this week he was yet to receive an “unequivocal” answer of what they would do if Russia does attack again after a deal.
Zelensky has also said that the most difficult questions in any settlement — territorial control of the eastern Donbas region and the fate of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — were still unresolved.
- Russian strikes cut heating -
Ukraine was meanwhile scrambling to restore heating and water to hundreds of thousands of households after a new barrage targeted energy facilities in its Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
“This is truly a national level emergency,” Borys Filatov, mayor of Dnipropetrovsk’s capital Dnipro, said on Telegram.
He announced power was “gradually returning to the hospitals” after the blackouts forced them to run on generators. The city authorities also extended school holidays for children.
About 600,000 households in the region remained cut off from power in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian energy company DTEK said.
In a post on social media, Zelensky said the attacks “clearly don’t indicate that Moscow is reconsidering its priorities.”
In addition to the unrelenting pummelling of Dnipropetrovsk, Russia pressed on with its ground assault on the region, claiming to have taken another village there.
It is not one of the five Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims to have annexed.
