Authorities said they had conducted crackdowns at 624 suspected sites. They said 169 more had been abandoned before officers arrived. The two counts add to 793, and both stop at 20 August.
On 27 August, Chhay Sinarith told a Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing that no scam centres remained in Cambodia. Agence Kampuchea Presse, Cambodia’s state news agency, reported the remarks on 28 August.
The report says the figures covered suspected sites found from July 2025 through 20 August 2026. Its Khmer version gives the same dates. Neither report says the 793 was every possible scam site in Cambodia. Neither gives a way to count all sites across the country. The sum closes the identified set, not a national census.
State reporting recorded another suspected site after the cutoff. The agency reported on 25 August that military police in Preah Sihanouk had raided a hotel in a suspected scam case late on 23 August.
That raid came before Sinarith made the zero claim. It shows that suspected sites were still appearing in state reporting of enforcement after 20 August. It does not show that a qualifying centre remained when he spoke.
In the same report, Sinarith said crime groups had moved into small sites hidden in guesthouses, flats, rented homes, cars and coffee shops. The report says investigations and crackdowns continued. Small sites do not become scam centres just because scams took place there.
An unofficial English translation of the law published by Open Development Cambodia gives another test. Article 6 says organizing or directing separate places can constitute the offence of organizing or directing an online scams centre when they are connected or coordinated as a network, even without a centralized centre. The two state news reports do not say whether the small sites Sinarith named had those links. The law gives a test. It does not prove that the state contradicted itself.
The government’s two statements fit a narrower use of “centre”: the crackdown eliminated large, concentrated compounds while scam networks broke into smaller units and the state kept acting against them. The briefing does not say this was the rule Sinarith used.
A Radio National of Cambodia report says 47 representatives from 35 diplomatic missions and international organisations attended the briefing. They heard a national zero claim beside a site count that stopped one week earlier. For Sinarith and the Commission for Combating Online Scams, substantiating that zero as a national condition now requires a current nationwide basis for the claim and a stated rule for what counts as a centre.