South Korea and Cambodia Expand Joint Crackdown on Transnational Crime
South Korean and Cambodian police have agreed to broaden the mandate of their joint investigation team to tackle drug and online gambling offenses, according to Seoul's National Police Agency (NPA). The decision came during talks between acting NPA chief Yoo Jae-seong and Cambodian national police chief Sar Thet in Seoul on Wednesday.
The expansion builds on the Cambodian-Korean Joint Task Force for Koreans, which was launched late last year to address scam crimes involving South Korean nationals in Cambodia. The task force was established in response to the torture death of a Korean college student who had been lured into the country through an employment scam, a case that sparked widespread public outrage in South Korea.
Since its inception, the joint team has apprehended 166 scam suspects in Cambodia and rescued five South Korean nationals who were detained in scam centers there, the NPA reported.
In parallel, the NPA announced it will launch an official development assistance project worth 18 billion won (US$12 million) with the Korea International Cooperation Agency to enhance the Cambodian police's crime scene investigation capabilities.
Separately, the NPA said Monday that 73 South Koreans suspected of crimes such as voice phishing in Cambodia and the Philippines have been repatriated over the past two months. The operation, which ran from Feb. 26 to April 22, saw 42 suspects returned from Cambodia and 31 from the Philippines. Of those, 69 have been detained in South Korea and transferred to the prosecution.
Among those repatriated from the Philippines was a ringleader accused of hacking a company's website server in 2011, stealing personal information of 1.75 million people and extorting 100 million won (US$68,000) from the company. The group repatriated from Cambodia included 24 members of a criminal organization alleged to have swindled 51.7 billion won from 368 voice phishing victims, as well as 14 members of a "romance scam" organization that extorted 2.3 billion won from 53 victims.
The NPA attributed the successful repatriation operation to cooperative relationships with the police forces of both Southeast Asian countries.