Brazilians trafficked to Cambodia are being forced by a criminal network to run phone scams against targets in Brazil while posing as agents of the country's Federal Police, according to a Folha de S.Paulo investigation published on Monday (24). Reporter Victoria Damasceno traveled to Sihanoukville, on Cambodia's southern coast, and heard victims who described forced labor under the threat of beatings, electric shocks and food deprivation.
One of them is Pedro Alencar, 25, who asked to be identified by the name he was known by inside the scam compounds. A telemarketing worker, he was lured with promises of high pay and decent work. Before landing on the Cambodian coast, he had been taken to Laos and the Philippines, where the forced labor was tied to casino platforms. In Cambodia, he was made to run what he called "the heaviest scam": pretending to be a federal officer and drawing the victim into a story that only ended once a bank transfer went through.
"You have to bear the legal consequences for every crime committed using your identity. Do you understand?" reads one line of the script Alencar had to follow. According to Folha, besides the Federal Police, the network also impersonates Brazil's civil and military police forces, federal prosecutors, the Central Bank, the federal audit court, the National Justice Secretariat and even private companies such as Meta. The scammers cite the names of active-duty officers and go as far as summoning victims to fake online meetings.
Another story in the same series, titled Carga Humana (Human Cargo), showed that compounds in Poipet, on the border with Thailand, recruited Brazilians with offers of US$ 4,000 a month (about R$ 20,000), 12-hour shifts and one-year contracts. Crimes of this kind have made Cambodia one of the main destinations for trafficked Brazilians, the newspaper reports.
A three-stage script
The pattern described by Folha matches earlier accounts of the scheme. In October 2025, a Brazilian woman trafficked to Southeast Asia told Profissão Repórter, a TV Globo documentary program, that the scam run from Cambodia had three stages. First, the criminals posed as civil police officers and said someone had been arrested carrying a credit card in the victim's name. The call was then transferred to a fake Federal Police agent, who pressed for banking details under the threat of having the victim's accounts frozen. Finally, the victim was persuaded to transfer money to a supposed Federal Police account, with a promise it would be returned once the investigation ended. The scammers worked overnight to match Brazil's time zone and had access to the victims' personal data, such as names, addresses and CPF numbers, Brazil's individual taxpayer ID.
The woman, who asked not to be identified, said she ran the scams under threat of torture. "They stood behind you with a taser, a stun gun," she said, according to G1.
Fake police station found on the border
In March, a tour organized by the Thai Army for the AFP news agency found in O'Smach, Cambodia, a room set up to mimic a Brazilian Federal Police station, alongside sets reproducing police offices from Australia, Canada and India. The site, abandoned in haste during border clashes in December 2025, still held call scripts and lists of phone numbers of targets in several countries. According to the Thai military, about 20,000 suspects fled before the area was attacked.
Southeast Asia has become the hub of a billion-dollar online scam industry that draws in hundreds of thousands of people, some of them trafficking victims, according to AFP. Cambodia's government has promised to dismantle the scam operations on its soil, but Thai officials say the country needs to acknowledge the scale of the problem and seek international support to fight it.