Lindsey Kennedy

Celtic proudly promotes itself as a football club with a social consciousness. For nine years the club’s main sponsor has been a betting company breaking laws, defrauding customers and wrecking lives.

Highly organized cyber fraud in South East Asia is widely run from scam compounds: purpose-built or modified buildings that meet the precise operational requirements of this criminal industry. These compounds provide the infrastructure for online scams, fraud and other forms of cybercrime, These reports provide comprehensive analysis of red flags of criminal exposure for potential partners and suppliers who may unwittingly form part of illicit financial flows.
Part One: A GUIDE FOR REAL ESTATE INVESTORS, DEVELOPERS AND CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTORS
Part Two: A GUIDE FOR SUPPLIERS AND PARTNERS

Designating cyber scam networks helps protect those exposing them against legal challenges

A marketing executive central to Manchester City’s sponsorship agreement with 8XBet was, just months earlier, working with a politically-connected Chinese businessman accused in the International Criminal Court of running Filipino meth labs.

CAMBODIA—By July 28, O’Smach, on Cambodia’s northern border, had become a ghost town. Five days of intense fighting with Thailand, erupting after months of tensions over contested territory, saw more than 260,000 people driven from their homes on both sides of the border.

How airports and airlines could be vital partners in combating the cyber scam industry

It’s December 2024 and a convoy of vehicles is approaching a cyber scam compound on the Cambodia-Vietnam border. It’s shaping up to be a tense meeting: the compound’s boss, a Chinese national, hasn’t settled his bill for nearly 40 Pakistani people that he bought from a trafficking ring, and the middlemen are on their way to demand the balance.

On 12 February 2025, North Korea reopened to visitors, five years after closing its borders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite political isolation, few trading partners, crippling food insecurity, record drops in exports and the largest contraction of its economy since the 1990s, this embattled, impoverished nation had persisted.

When the sea mist rolls across Bokor Mountain in Kampot, Cambodia, it shrouds the forested peak in an eerie cloud, reducing visibility to meters in minutes. At the summit stands a French colonial-era hotel, a crumbling chapel riddled with bullet holes from the civil war, and a modern casino encircled by half-finished condos.

Transnational organized cybercrime is now the world’s fastest growing and “most dangerous illegal industry.” Rivaled only by Myanmar, Cambodia is likely the absolute global epicenter of next-gen transnational fraud in 2025 and is certainly the country most primed for explosive growth going forward. [Contributed photographs to this report]

The casino town of Bavet, nestled on Cambodia’s southeast border with Vietnam, may be the grimmest-looking gangster playground on the planet. Its main casino strip, which stretches a few kilometres in a straight line from the border gate, is no glitzy Las Vegas or Macau.

Close to the Independence Monument in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a cluster of dormitory buildings that once belonged to a university has been repurposed as a forced criminality compound.Where students once lived are now teams of cyber slaves, tricked into traveling from abroad, sold to the criminal groups leasing space inside and forced under threat of torture to defraud strangers groomed online.

It’s 1 a.m. in Poipet, a Cambodian town on the Thai border where the economy runs on casinos, illegal online gambling, and the now-notorious “pig-butchering” scams that use forced and trafficked labor to reel in victims worldwide. The town’s clubs and karaoke bars are awash with cocky Chinese gangsters splashing their cash on expensive liquor and bags of meth, which is sold openly by bartenders hovering by the bathrooms.

Six weeks after a ceasefire, Cambodia and Thailand remain on edge. Borders closed, propaganda campaigns launched and far-right media meddling leave the fragile truce hanging by a thread in this volatile dispute.

GOMA, Congo — In a makeshift nightclub in the hull of the overnight ferry from Goma to Bukavu, a handful of teenage boys are trying out some new moves. Some land, some don’t. When they don’t, the elderly man on the bench next to us nudges us and rolls his eyes, amused.