Scam Compounds and Scam Hub Towns

Where scam compounds are concentrated: the border towns and zones

If you have read about scam compounds in Asia, the reporting almost always points to the same handful of places. They sit on borders, usually next to a casino town, and they share a pattern: a cluster of hotels, casinos and anonymous office buildings where people are held and made to run online fraud, often under the cover of a gambling business. For the full picture of how these operations work and how people end up in them, see our page on gambling scams and safety in Asia.

Here is the map in one table:

Cambodia is the center of gravity. Its casino industry grew from the late 1990s, when the country began building casinos in border towns and resorts like Sihanoukville to attract foreign tourists, while Cambodian citizens themselves are banned from gambling⁶. Today casinos operate in Phnom Penh, Banteay Meanchey, Svay Rieng, Kampot, Pailin and Preah Sihanouk provinces⁷. Most casinos sit in the border towns of Poipet and Bavet, with others in Koh Kong and Sihanoukville¹.

The scam side follows the same map. Many scam gambling and betting sites, most of them linked to fraud and human trafficking, operate in the Vietnam-Cambodia border area². Reporting on the wider region points to the Myawaddy area of eastern Myanmar, just across the border from Thailand, and to the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos, where a casino town doubles as a hub for online fraud⁸. In the Philippines, the story has centered on the online gambling compounds known as POGO hubs, which the government has been shutting down.

A simple way to picture it: the compounds sit where three things meet.

• A border crossing, so workers and customers can be moved easily.
• A casino or special economic zone, which supplies the buildings, the licenses and the cash flow.
• A neighboring country with strict gambling laws, so the customers come from the other side of the line.

If you want the country-by-country picture of what gambling is allowed where, see Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and the Philippines.

Poipet: the casino town closest to Bangkok

Poipet is the gambling town closest to Bangkok. It is the most popular gambling destination for travelers heading to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat, because it is easier to reach from Bangkok than the alternatives⁹, and its casinos cater to Thais, thousands of whom cross the border at weekends, along with visitors from China, South Korea and Malaysia⁶. The town's casino strip has included venues such as Holiday, Ho Wah Genting, Grand Diamond, Tropicana, Star Vegas and Golden Crown¹⁰, and it still draws poker players to rooms like the Sands Poker Club¹¹ and table games like Pok Deng, which is more common in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and some Chinese territories than elsewhere¹².

Poipet's rise as a gambling town is tied to geography rather than any single crackdown. It is the most popular gambling destination for travelers heading to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat, because it is easier to reach from Bangkok than other border casino towns⁴. That position on the Bangkok-to-Angkor route explains why so many casino complexes have grown up on the Cambodian side of the border.

The town's visitors and routes tell the story:

• Poipet's casino strip draws most of its visitors from the Bangkok side, as the most popular gambling stop for travelers continuing on to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat⁴.
• Further south, Sihanoukville, Cambodia's largest coastal city, lies about 150km from Ha Tien Vegas, roughly 3 hours by car⁴.
• In Laos, the Golden Triangle SEZ operates largely in Mandarin, and few shops there accept the Laotian kip⁴.

The casinos themselves are the reason most visitors come. Poipet is the most popular gambling destination for travelers to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat because it is easier to reach from Bangkok⁴. On the coast, Sihanoukville is Cambodia's largest seaside city, about 150km and 3 hours by car from Ha Tien Vegas⁴. In Laos, the Golden Triangle SEZ runs on Mandarin as its lingua franca, and few shops accept the Laotian kip⁴.

For a visitor, none of this makes Poipet closed. The border checkpoint has reopened before after political trouble, and the town went back to business¹. But it does mean the town's casino strip and its scam economy are physically intertwined, and that a casino's license today is no guarantee it will hold one next month.

O'Smach: the compound journalists were taken to see

O'Smach is a border crossing in Cambodia's Oddar Meanchey province, opposite the Thai checkpoint of Chong Chom. Since mid-2026 it has become the most-reported scam location in the region, for an unusual reason: journalists have actually been taken inside.

• In June 2026, ABC News reported from a suspected scam compound in O'Smach, gaining rare access and documenting evidence of scam operations while escorted by Thai military personnel.
• In July, Thai soldiers took reporters from Reuters, AP and ABC News to alleged scam compounds in the Thai-occupied O'Smach border area.
• In September, a Thai Joint Information Centre led ASEAN observers and journalists on an inspection tour of the O'Smach-Chong Chom area, presented as independent fact-checking of an alleged scam center.

Cambodia's response has been as much about the border as the scams. The information ministry stated that Thailand's act of bringing foreign journalists into O'Smach could not confer authority or sovereignty over the area, and publicly told Thailand to verify where O'Smach is before fact-checking scams there.

What the visits established, though, is that the compounds are real and operating: buildings full of workers, phones and scripts, close enough to the border that Thai forces can walk to them. Anyone offered a job in this border area is facing the same recruitment pipeline as any scam town; how it works is covered in our page on fake gambling job offers.

Sihanoukville: open for travel, but check before you book

Sihanoukville is Cambodia's biggest coastal city and its second casino hub. If you are visiting, the destination remains open, and the city and its casino hotels are not closing⁵. The Queenco Hotel and Casino sits on the white sands of Victory Beach¹³, and the Ha Tien Vegas resort is about 150 kilometers away, roughly three hours by car¹⁴. The city also has venues like the Golden Sand Hotel and Casino¹⁵.

The context matters, though. After Cambodia banned online gambling, half the casinos in Sihanoukville closed down, some 8,000 Cambodian workers were laid off, and around 200,000 Chinese nationals left the country⁵. The buildings did not all disappear. Many of the closed casino hotels and unfinished towers are the same buildings that reporting has linked to scam operations, and the city's transformation from a backpacker beach town into a Chinese casino city and then a half-empty one happened in barely a decade.

Practically, this means two things for anyone booking a trip:

• The specific property can change fast: a hotel that was a casino last year may be closed, half-finished or something else entirely this year.
• The tourist parts of town, the beaches and islands, are separate from the casino district, and ordinary travel to Sihanoukville is not the same as walking into a compound.

For what happens inside those buildings, see what life is like inside a scam compound, and for help options, see our page for people trapped in scam compounds.

Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone: a zone that runs on Beijing time

The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone sits in Laos, at the point where the Mekong separates Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. It is a casino town built inside a special zone, and it behaves like a piece of China dropped on the border. Clocks run on Beijing time, all business is done in Chinese currency, and the businesses are Chinese-owned³. Chinese yuan is the preferred currency, Mandarin is the lingua franca, and few shops accept the Laotian kip¹⁶.

The zone's orientation toward Chinese visitors shows in the small details. A Chinese national can check in at the Kapok Garden Hotel opposite the casino with a Chinese identity card rather than a passport³, something that is not possible in the rest of Laos. The zone has been described as one of Southeast Asia's most conspicuous criminal enclaves, with reporting linking its casino economy to wildlife trafficking, drug flows and online fraud⁸.

If you visit as a tourist, you will find a casino, hotels, shops and a riverside setting that is genuinely striking. Chinese yuan in cash is the working currency, Mandarin is more useful than Lao or English, and clocks run on Beijing time. The zone does not operate like the rest of Laos: it functions as its own enclave, and the ordinary protections and services of a Lao town do not necessarily apply inside it.

The Philippines and Myanmar: what reporting covers

Two other places dominate the reporting on scam compounds, though the facts on the ground differ.

In the Philippines, the story has centered on POGOs, the Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators licensed to run online gambling for customers abroad. These operations ran large compounds, often attached to casinos, and a series of police raids found scam operations, including fraud targeting Chinese customers, running inside licensed gaming facilities. The government has moved to shut the POGO industry down, and the compounds around Manila and in places like the Clark Freeport Zone have been the focus. The licensed casino side of the Philippines is separate: casinos operate under PAGCOR, and the rules are explicit that only persons with foreign passports, or certificates of identity for Hong Kong patrons, may play in the foreign exchange gaming pit¹⁷. For the country picture, see gambling in the Philippines.

In Myanmar, the reporting centers on the Myawaddy area, across the border from the Thai town of Mae Sot. This is the part of eastern Myanmar run by armed groups rather than the central government, and it holds some of the largest compounds in the region, sometimes called "scam city" in coverage of Myawaddy and the Shwe Kokko development. Access is through Thailand, and the area is not somewhere an ordinary traveler can simply go. Myanmar's cooperation has been the question: during a visit to Phnom Penh on September 11 and 12, 2026, Myanmar's leader Min Aung Hlaing signed four agreements with Cambodia on investment, taxation, culture and information, and confirmed Myanmar will attend the international conference on combating technology-facilitated fraud in Phnom Penh on September 23 and 24, 2026.

Enforcement in practice: crackdowns, arrests and inspections

The pattern of enforcement across all these places is the same: periodic raids, mass detentions, license actions, and then the operations move somewhere else.

What the reporting makes clear is where these places sit and who they cater to. Poipet is the most popular gambling destination for travelers to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat because it is easier to reach from Bangkok⁴. Sihanoukville, Cambodia's largest coastal city, is about 150km from Ha Tien Vegas, around 3 hours by car⁴. In the Golden Triangle SEZ, Mandarin is the lingua franca and few shops accept the Laotian kip, a sign of who the zone actually serves⁴.

What the raids do not cover

Raids free workers and close buildings, but they do not touch the machinery that feeds people into the compounds in the first place.

The recruitment side continues online. Fake job ads, social media approaches and too-good offers still draw people to these towns, which is why the warning signs of recruitment scams matter more than any raid. The fraud side continues too: the scam gambling and betting sites that operate from the Vietnam-Cambodia border area keep running, and many are linked to the same operators behind the compounds². If you have lost money to one of these sites, the practical steps are on our page about what to do after a gambling scam, and the warning signs of a rigged or fake site are covered in how to spot a scam gambling site.

The offshore gambling sites themselves are a separate problem from the compounds. Operators continue to serve the region while excluding some countries from their own terms: one site's restricted list runs to dozens of countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Japan¹⁸, another excludes Myanmar and North Korea among others⁸, and a third excludes the USA, Netherlands, France and the Dutch West Indies¹⁶. These lists tell you the sites are watching legal risk, but they say nothing about whether a site is honest, which is the difference we cover in licensed versus unlicensed casinos.

The last gap is the simplest one: the raids happen after the fact. A compound can operate for years before a raid, and the people inside are victims before they are ever detainees. In every documented case, the people inside arrived believing a job offer, which is why the recruitment warning signs matter more than any enforcement timeline.