Vietnamese man surrenders after smuggling 50 to Cambodia

Cao Sy Huy, 40, is now under detention in Dong Nai Province which borders Ho Chi Minh City.

Police said Huy crossed the Vietnam-Cambodia border illegally to work at a casino in Cambodia late last year before moving to work for a company owned by a Chinese man in Cambodia.

The Chinese man asked Huy to reach out to jobless people in Vietnam on social media and talk them into traveling to Cambodia to work. Huy then advertised jobs in Cambodia with guaranteed average incomes of $850 per month.

In May and June, Huy returned to Vietnam and worked with some accomplices in Dong Nai to take around 50 Vietnamese to Cambodia via illegal trails.

In July, some of the accomplices were arrested by Dong Nai police, following which Huy returned to Vietnam and turned himself in.

Several cases of Vietnamese citizens being tricked and smuggled to Cambodia have made headlines recently in both local and international media.

Earlier this month, a group of 42 Vietnamese escaped from a Cambodian casino in Kandal Province mid-August and tried to swim across a river to get back to Vietnam. While 40 succeeded, a teenager drowned and another man was recaptured by the casino. The escapees said they had been forced to work under harsh conditions and were beaten frequently.

At an August 22 press meet in Hanoi, Colonel Khong Ngoc Oanh of the Ministry of Public Security said thousands of people could have been smuggled to Cambodia to be exploited, and rescuing them would be difficult.

Most trafficked workers were promised “easy jobs with high wages” only to be taken to casinos and production facilities where they virtually held prisoners, he said.

In the first half of this year, Vietnamese police acting in cooperation with Cambodian authorities managed to rescue over 250 citizens.