A one-year progress report on Cambodia’s campaign against technology-based fraud, endorsed on 24 July by the Council of Ministers plenary meeting, the full cabinet that signs off government policy, was reported in three published accounts, each attributed to a government document of that day. They differ on what the review of the country’s licensed casinos found and on what period the counts cover. Inside those counts are 21,102 people deported and 2,200 held before trial.
The Khmer statement issued that day by the Press and Quick Reaction Unit, the office that publishes cabinet statements, says that as of 30 June 2026 Cambodia had deported 21,102 foreign nationals of 38 nationalities. Deportation is an immigration act carrying no finding of guilt. It says 268 case files went to the first-instance courts of 21 capital and provincial jurisdictions, the trial courts where a case is first heard, covering 2,773 suspects, of whom 2,200 are in detention before any verdict, including 353 women and 313 Cambodian nationals.
The statement is the cabinet’s four-page account of the meeting’s outcomes, published as scanned images rather than text. The progress report itself was not among the material this desk found published on 26 July. Read in Khmer on that date, it says administrative measures were carried out at 28,512 locations to check foreign nationals’ residence, and 665 locations it describes as sites of fraud offences were investigated and suppressed. Of the 195 licensed casinos, gambling venues holding a government operating licence, it says 123 showed no evidence of technology-based fraud and 72 are, in this desk’s translation, casinos that had suspended activity through inactivity. The statement names the Commission for Combating Online Scams, the government body running the campaign, as conducting the year’s work. Agence Kampuchea Presse, Cambodia’s state news agency, renders that casino clause in English as casinos that “had already suspended operations”.
Xinhua, China’s state news agency, carried the same figures on 24 July, attributing them to a government press release issued that Friday. It said inspections across the 195 licensed casinos “exposed 72 facilities involved in online fraud”. The Khmer statement this desk read on 26 July attaches no fraud finding to those 72. Xinhua also opened by reporting that Cambodia raided 737 online scam centres nationwide between June 2025 and June 2026. The figure 737 does not appear in that four-page statement, in Arabic or Khmer numerals, on that reading.
The Phnom Penh Post, an English-language daily, published a third account on 25 July. It reported that Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who chairs that commission, submitted the report to the meeting. On the same 195-casino review the Post reported 19 licences revoked and 30 suspended “over alleged links to online scam activities”, and 23 casinos found to have already ceased operations after their licences expired. It put 582 of the 665 locations as active scam compounds, 83 as safe houses.
Neither the cabinet statement nor the AKP account, both read on 26 July, dates the period counted. Both give the results as those of the past year. The Post put the period at July 2025 to 30 June 2026. Xinhua put it at June 2025 to June 2026.
The three accounts describe one casino review three ways. The cabinet statement gives the 72 an inactivity status and no fraud finding. Xinhua gives them a fraud finding. The Post gives licence actions taken over alleged links for 19 and 30, and expiry for 23. Dormancy, a fraud finding and a revocation for cause are three different findings.
Because none of the accounts states what its categories count, the public record does not say what the people inside them were found to have done. That is the position of the 21,102 deported, whose place among the enforcement categories no account states, and of the 2,200 held before trial, whom all three number and none describes. None of them says whether a deported person was an operator, a worker or a trafficking victim.
The body that could state what the categories count is the Commission for Combating Online Scams, whose chairman submitted the report. Its publication in text, or a statement of definitions from that commission, would settle what the accounts describe.