An award-winning Cambodian freelance journalist – known for his reporting on human trafficking in the cyber scam industry – was arrested on Monday, according to the independent Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association (CamboJA).
Last year, the US State Department honoured Mech Dara as a 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report Hero for his work exposing the problem.
The activity involves tricking people into signing up for what they believe are legitimate jobs in Cambodia, only to be confined to compounds where they target people online around the world.
US law enforcement have recently heightened their focus on scam operations in Cambodia due to the high numbers of Americans who have lost millions of dollars.
Authorities made the arrest after stopping a car he was travelling in along with his family, CamboJA said in a statement.
Mr Dara reportedly managed to send a text message to the rights group Licadho saying military police were arresting him before his phone was seized.
A day before his arrest, Dara posted images on social media that were meant to show a revered tourist site demolished to make way for a quarry in the province of Prey Veng. Local authorities labelled the now-deleted images as “fake news”.
On Monday, the Prey Veng provincial administration issued a statement rejecting his post and accused him of “wanting to cause social disorder or confusion,” which can be prosecuted as a criminal offence.
The province also called on the Ministry of Information to take legal action against him.
Mr Dara’s arrest has raised concern among human rights activists – Jacob Sims, a founding partner of Operation Shamrock, a global coalition working to disrupt Southeast Asia’s organised cybercrime epidemic, said: “Dara is one of the country’s last remaining independent journalists and the one who has focused most heavily on alleged state-affiliated transnational crime recently.
“Right now, this is an enforced disappearance case. No one has been able to verify or confirm his whereabouts or safety and until that happens, that is paramount.”
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Mr Dara has used his social media to highlight the spread of “scam farms” which dupe people across the world into parting with huge sums of money and drive human trafficking across the region.
In its latest report, the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders ranked Cambodia 151st out of 180 in its international press freedom index.