By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
October 18, 2025
Sixty-four South Korean nationals — who had allegedly been involved in cyberscam operations in Cambodia — were repatriated to South Korea on a chartered Korean Air flight today [Saturday, October 18]. According to Korea’s National Office of Investigation, 190 South Korean police officers also were on board to place the Korean nationals under arrest.
Under South Korean law, an airline with a definitive tie to its home country is considered part of South Korea’s territory. Hence, the arrests are legal. (Had the Koreans flown on an American carrier like Delta, the Korean police wouldn’t have been able to arrest the accused until they landed on Korean soil.)
These arrests come after the highly publicized torture and killing of Park Min-ho, a 22-year-old university student who had allegedly been tricked by a friend into accepting a lucrative job (that didn’t exist) in Cambodia. Park was forced to defraud victims of their savings and income. According to a 2023 report by the United Nations, victims like Park were among the 100,000 foreigners trafficked to Cambodia. But South Korean security adviser Wi Sung-lac states that Cambodia’s scam industry today has doubled in the number of victims trafficked from various Asian countries.
Acording to the U.S. State Department’s report on human trafficking, the number of Cambodian judges and police colluding with traffickers make it difficult to shut the operations down. And it’s not just Cambodia. About 120,000 victims are in captivity in Mynmar and forced to work in squalid conditions. And tens of thousands of victims are working in similar conditions in the Philippines, Thailand and Laos, forced into pig butchering schemes, where a scammer gains the victim’s confidence by pretending to be a romantic interest or a financial expert who can make them a lot of money. Either way, the goal is to earn their trust (fatten them up) before stealing their money (butchering them).
Currently, the Incheon International Airport police department has stationed four officers at the boarding gates for Cambodia-bound flights. On Oct. 16, they prevented two Korean nationals from heading to Cambodia. Under South Korea’s Immigration Act, authorities can detain Koreans who are thought to be participating in criminal activity from leaving the country. (South Korea currently has a travel ban to parts of Cambodia.)
In early 2023, the K-drama “Taxi Driver” kicked off its second season with two prescient episodes that depicted desperate young Korean engineers who had been enticed to move to Vietnam with the promise of high-income jobs. They were targeted because they hadn’t attended prestigious universities, which indicated that they didn’t have a network of powerful alumni who’d wonder about their whereabouts. More importantly though, they had poor parents who didn’t have enough clout to force the police to look into their disappearance. When a struggling father begs the police for help, they treat him as a nuisance whose child has run away from home. This is not how they would treat a chaebol’s missing son.
On Friday, a spokesman for the Cambodian Ministry of Interior said the repatriation agreement was the result of “good cooperation in the suppression of scams” between South Korea and Cambodia.
Autopsy results showed that Park, the Korean college student who died in August, had been severely tortured before his body was dumped in Cambodia’s Kampot province. May the perpetrators of the crime be caught and punished. And may this young man rest in eternal peace.
* If I have any facts incorrect, please do reach out and I will fix them (and attribute the correction to you, unless you don’t want to be mentioned). However, if you simply disagree with what I’ve written, I can live with that and hope that you can, too. Cheers!
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