Ben Forsberg
Across the United States, headlines have emerged about retirees losing savings to crypto investment scams[1] and CEOs tricked into wiring company funds to offshore wallets.[2] Most of the attention has focused on financial victims, but far less attention has been paid to the other side of the scam networks—the trafficked workers who are forced to perpetrate the crimes. How should states treat these coerced “scammers,” and what obligations do government have to recognize them as victims rather than criminals?
In late January, Cambodian police arrested several ringleaders of the country’s sprawling online scam networks.[3] Within days, the gates of several compounds opened and thousands of people poured out holding plastic bags and suitcases.[4] These were the foot soldiers of “pig-butchering” schemes.[5] They had spent months inside compounds ringed with razor wire and patrolled by armed guards, pretending to be crypto advisors or would-be romantic partners, following scripts designed to drain savings of strangers into offshore wallets—schemes that together are estimated to generate around $19 billion a year, roughly one‑third of Cambodia’s GDP.[6] Many were recruited through legitimate-looking job advertisements, flown in, and then stripped of their passports and phones upon arrival.[7] Once inside, they describe beatings, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, and threats of being “sold” to harsher compounds if they missed quotas.[8] Recent investigations by Amnesty International and others describe more than 50 scamming compounds across Cambodia.[9]
For many of those released, however, escape from the compounds has not meant freedom.[10] In some cases, like in Indonesia, returnees have faced criminal fraud charges once home.[11] This reality brings into focus the non‑punishment principle, which holds that victims of trafficking should not be arrested, charged, or punished for unlawful acts that are a direct consequence of their exploitation.[12]
In a recent law review article, Professor Rachel Wechsler notes that current approaches often require “proof of a definitive nexus between the crime and trafficking victimization,” which means many victims are excluded and subjected to criminal liability.[13] A narrow interpretation of non‑punishment thus risks excluding trafficked scam workers whose exploitation is difficult to prove, leaving them exposed to prosecution for conduct that is in fact a consequence of their trafficking victimization.[14] Yet a broad interpretation raises a different concern that marginally coerced participants will recast themselves as victims at the point of arrest, which could provide immunity for serious wrongdoing and erode confidence in protections for genuinely trafficked persons.[15]
The current exodus of workers from scam compounds presents a new challenge for anti‑trafficking law. As states decide whether to approach these returnees as offenders or as survivors, the non‑punishment principle supplies the clearest starting point, directing that trafficked persons “should not be subject to arrest, charge, detention, prosecution, or be penalized or otherwise punished for illegal conduct that they committed as a direct consequence of being trafficked,” while still permitting governments to distinguish genuinely compelled acts from independent criminality.[16]
[1] See Francesca Regalado, Americans Have Lost Billions to Online Scams. How Is That Possible?, N.Y. Times (Jan. 30, 2026, 11:00 PM ET) https://www.nytimes.com/article/scam-centers-myanmar-cambodia.html (“The Treasury Department says Americans have lost more than $16.6 billion to an online scam industry largely based in Southeast Asia”).
[2] See, e.g., David Yaffe-Bellany, The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself, N.Y. Times Mag., https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/magazine/cryptocurrency-scam-kansas-heartland-bank.html (last updated Feb. 28, 2025) (discussing the collapse of a rural Kansas community bank after its president secretly funneled over $47 million into a bogus cryptocurrency scheme).
[3] Gabriele Steinhauser, High-Profile Arrests Spark Exodus of Scam Workers in Cambodia, Wall St. J. (Jan. 30, 2026, 11:00 PM ET), https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/high-profile-arrests-spark-exodus-of-scam-workers-in-cambodia-ad045325?mod=world_feat6_china_pos5#comments_sector.
[4] See id.
[5] See id. “Pig butchering is an investment scam where fraudsters gain the trust of victims over time and then deceive them into investing in fake crypto assets or another fraudulent investment opportunity. The term refers to the agricultural practice of fattening pigs before slaughter, symbolizing how scammers ‘fatten’ their victims with false attention before exploiting them financially.” Pig Butchering – How to Spot and Report the Scam, Dep’t Financial Protection & Innovation, https://dfpi.ca.gov/news/insights/pig-butchering-how-to-spot-and-report-the-scam/.
[6] See Steinhauser, supra note 3.
[7] See id.
[8] See id.
[9] Amnesty International, Slavery, Human Trafficking and Torture in Cambodia’s Scamming Compounds, ASA 23/9447/2025 at 237 (2025) https://www.amnesty.or.th/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/I-was-someone-elses-property.pdf.
[10] See Steinhauser, supra note 3.
[11] See id.
[12] See Rachel J. Wechsler, The Non-Punishment Principle and Restorative Justice, 174 U. Pa. L. Rev. 363, 368 (2026); see also The Inter-Agency Coordination Group Against Trafficking in Persons, Non-Punishment of Victims of Trafficking 1 (2020), https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/ICAT/19-10800_ICAT_Issue_Brief_8_Ebook.pdf (“Trafficked persons should not be subject to arrest, charge, detention, prosecution, or be penalized or otherwise punished for illegal conduct that they committed as a direct consequence of being trafficked.”)
[13] Wechsler, supra note 12, at 364.
[14] See, e.g., id. at 377–78 (discussing how international bodies increasingly endorse a broad standard that applies any offense committed as long as it is sufficiently linked to trafficking victimization, whereas the United States has a narrower standard, limited to cases where victims of “severe forms of trafficking” are not “inappropriately . . . penalized solely for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked.”)
[15] See ASEAN Secretariat, ASEAN Guideline on the Implementation of the Non-Punishment Principle for Protection of Victims of Trafficking in Persons 24 (2025), https://asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ASEAN-Guideline-on-the-Implementation-of-the-Non-Punishement-Principle-for-Protection-of-Victims-of-Trafficking-in-Persons-adopted-ad-referendum-on-27-May-2025.pdf (“Some criminal justice practitioners and policymakers . . . express concerns that the non-punishment principle can be misused to protect victims from prosecution for offences wholly unrelated to their trafficking, or be misapplied to protect people who are not victims of trafficking.”).
[16] See Non-Punishment of Victims of Trafficking, supra note 12, at 1.