#846: Exposing Cambodia’s Scam Industry & Is S’pore’s Money Behind It? | Shibani Mahtani

**Terence** (0:00)
Alright, fans, I'll tell you first, we have good news. We are back for Season 3, and this time, the topics are juicier than before. Like, are sarong party girls still a thing? What happened to Singapore's most infamous adult star? And remember when we tried to engineer smarter babies? All this and more, alongside new guests like Xiaxue, Ben King and Sonya Chu. New apps drop every Tuesday on Spotify, MeListen and Apple Podcasts. And watch video episodes on the MediaCorp Entertainment YouTube channel and Neewatch. And now, on to the podcast.

**Unknown** (0:36)
What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Yah Lah But. Your Thrice Weekly Podcast, where we talk about the hottest news with a touch of what, Terence?

**Terence** (0:44)
Good old humor.

**Unknown** (0:45)
Good old humor. Today is a special episode. We have a returning guest, always nice to have returning guests, who is doing some very interesting work.

**Terence** (0:55)
Yeah, I mean, it's quite close to the hearts of a lot of Singaporeans now, because we all know someone who's been affected by the topics that she's talking about now, right?

**Unknown** (1:04)
Yeah. So we'd like to welcome back Shibani Mahtani, who is an investigative journalist, formerly with the Washington Post. Now, I mean, author before you came on the podcast the first time, now, podcaster since we last met you, because you recently had a two-parter go live with NPR.
And yeah, basically, keeping watch on Southeast Asia. Right, welcome back, Shibani.

**Shibani Mahtani** (1:27)
Thank you, thank you. Always good to be here.

**Terence** (1:29)
Welcome. But I mean, just for people who listening, who might not know all these institutions like NPR in the US, like what is NPR and what podcast did you do with them? Yeah.

**Shibani Mahtani** (1:40)
So I guess NPR is sort of like America's BBC. It's their public radio and they syndicate their content out to a lot of smaller radio stations. So their reach is quite big.
And they're quite US centric and been affected by all sorts of cuts in America thanks to this current administration. So I think it's quite rare for them to have Southeast Asia featured on a podcast like that. So that was a really cool opportunity.

**Unknown** (2:09)
And the Southeast Asian voicing a podcast, are you like the first Singaporean to voice a NPR podcast? Probably, right?

**Shibani Mahtani** (2:16)
I think so, but I need to fact check. I mean, there might be Singaporean squirrels somewhere there. I have no idea. But in recent times, yeah, it was a cool opportunity for sure. Yeah, which I pitched them on. And yeah, I was really lucky that they were keen on it.

**Terence** (2:32)
And it's about a topic that a lot of people are discussing, not just in the US, but in Singapore as well, right? About Cambodia's scam centers.

**Shibani Mahtani** (2:39)
Yes, the never-ending story of scams, which I think we are all very familiar with, but probably don't realize how close it is in our backyard. And that the epicenter of all of this stuff is literally right here in our region.

**Terence** (2:54)
So is that the main thrust of what the show is like? What is the log line that you went to NPR with that made it, you know, that is now a two-part series that is heard around the world?

**Shibani Mahtani** (3:05)
Basically, you know, a few big things happened in recent months in Cambodia that moved them to finally crack down on this industry that's been thriving there for the past few years, really since the pandemic, which is scams. I mean, a lot of the scam calls that you get today on your phone, or maybe we get them less now, but you know, WhatsApp messages or whatever, originate from someone stuck in a scam compound somewhere in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar. These three countries have basically been the epicenter of this industry. But you know, of the three, Cambodia is the one that is sort of most accessible, because it's not like Myanmar is like, you know, going through like civil war, it's like war torn everything. And they're in parts of the country that are very inaccessible. And Laos too, right? It's very secretive communist government.
Cambodia is like, you know, somewhere that's like pretty open, pretty stable.

**Unknown** (3:57)
Go for holiday, stuff like that.

**Shibani Mahtani** (3:59)
Angkor Wat, hang out. Phnom Penh is very nice, like there's a lot of good food there and so on. And I think it's really surprised people, you know, the extent to which they've been host, right, to this industry for so many years. So what happened was, through a bunch of foreign pressures, Cambodia finally cracked down. And what that did was release something like 200,000 people on the streets who were either lured or trafficked or willingly came to work in the scam industry. And it created a huge sort of migration crisis. And basically one of the largest kind of exoduses of migrant labor stuck anywhere out onto the streets. And so that was what I pitched NPR. Like I wanted to go and interview those people, understand what it was like working in the scam compounds, understand, you know, the workings of this industry through them.