Tokyo police say suspects were allegedly running phone scams from Cambodia and targeting people in Japan.

The group boarded a chartered flight organised by the Japanese government on Tuesday at Phnom Penh International Airport, Cambodian National Police spokesperson General Chhay Kim Khouen said.

The Immigration Police, part of Cambodia’s Ministry of Interior, said in a statement that the men were deported because they violated immigration law by living and working in Cambodia illegally. They will not be allowed to re-enter the country for three years, it said.

Tokyo police have obtained arrest warrants for the 19 men on suspicion of running phone scams from Cambodia that targeted people in Japan, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported.

NHK said Cambodian authorities searched the men’s hotel rooms and “discovered a list of Japanese citizens believed to be targets in a fraud scheme”.

The suspects were taken into custody in the southern city of Sihanoukville on January 24 and sent to the capital, Phnom Penh, where they were held after being investigated by the interior ministry.

A Cambodian official at Phnom Penh International Airport who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media said the men were taking a chartered Malaysia Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur, where they would transfer to a waiting Japanese plane.

He said a group of Japanese policemen came from Japan to escort the 19 men home.

At Phnom Penh’s airport, a convoy of several vehicles with heavy protection from Cambodian and Japanese police quickly drove directly to the waiting plane on the tarmac.

Widespread scams

Police in Sihanoukville, which in the past few years has become notorious for crimes such as online and phone scams, said in January that they opened the case after being informed on a crime-fighting hotline that about 20 Japanese men were being held there and extorted for money.

They found a group of 19 Japanese men staying in a hotel in Sihanoukville, but the men denied they were being held against their will or extorted. They said they were visiting Cambodia and had been seeking work but were not involved in any crimes or wrongdoing.

Sihanoukville police, however, sent them to Phnom Penh for further investigation.

Cybercrime scams became a major issue in Cambodia last year when there were numerous reports of people from various Asian countries and farther afield being lured into taking jobs in Cambodia. However, they often found themselves trapped in virtual slavery and forced to participate in scams targeting people over the internet.

The scam networks, which often have links to transnational organised crime, are set up in countries with weak law enforcement and attract educated young workers with promises of high earnings. The workers are then subject to isolation and the threat of violence unless they succeed in cheating victims reached by phone into transferring payments into overseas bank accounts.