Cambodia Will Inspect Casinos in 16 Provinces to Police Its Online Gambling Ban

Task forces of regulators, police, immigration and labour officials and prosecutors will start inspecting licensed casinos this month, Cambodia's state news agency reports. The government now calls unlicensed online gambling a form of scam, and says it will prosecute it as one.

• Cambodia will send joint inter-agency task forces to inspect licensed casinos nationwide from October, after a 5 October meeting between the Commercial Gambling Management Commission of Cambodia (CGMC) and the secretariat of the Commission for Combating Online Scams (CCOS) covering the 16 provinces that host licensed casinos, according to the state news agency Agence Kampuchea Presse (AKP)
• CGMC secretary-general Yeth Vinel said the inspections will check that casinos operate strictly within their licence conditions, and that any casino found running unauthorised online gambling faces administrative sanctions and referral for criminal prosecution
• Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, head of the CCOS secretariat, said unregulated online gambling "is itself a form of tech scamming" and will be prosecuted under the online scams law and the anti-money laundering law
• The sweep follows the government's confirmation that 24 casinos in three provinces shut down their online gambling by the 30 September deadline; AKP did not give a start date, a list of provinces or a count of casinos to be inspected
• Nothing was said about the licence review Prime Minister Hun Manet ordered in September, and the CGMC has still not published the criteria casinos must meet to renew

Regulators, Police and Prosecutors Will Inspect Casinos Together

The CCOS secretariat held a joint meeting with the CGMC on the afternoon of Monday 5 October to set out a coordinated crackdown across the 16 provinces that host licensed casinos, AKP reported on 7 October. Asia Gaming Brief, which first reported the plan in English, describes them as 16 capital and provincial jurisdictions with casino operations. Representatives of the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training, the General Commissariat of National Police, the General Department of Immigration, the provincial unified command units and the provincial prosecution offices attended.

According to AKP, officials set two objectives: enforcing the explicit ban on any online gambling inside casino premises, and deploying joint inter-agency task forces to inspect casinos from October 2026 to prevent illegal online betting. Yeth Vinel, speaking on behalf of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy and Finance Aun Pornmoniroth, said the nationwide joint inspections will ensure that physical casinos operate strictly within their licence conditions. "If any casino is found engaging in unauthorised online gambling, the CGMC will apply statutory administrative sanctions and extend full cooperation to law enforcement to pursue maximum criminal charges under current laws," he said, according to AKP.

Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, standing vice chairman of the CCOS and head of its secretariat, said the government "will not stop here and will continue to take tough measures against all locations linked to online scams". He went further on gambling itself: "Unregulated online gambling is itself a form of tech scamming," he said, adding that it will be prosecuted under the online scams law, the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Financing of Terrorism Law and other applicable legislation.

What the Announcement Leaves Out

AKP's report does not say when in October the inspections begin, which provinces they cover, how many casinos will be visited, what the "statutory administrative sanctions" are, or whether the results will be published. Interior Minister Sar Sokha said in September that casinos breaching the order faced licence revocation. Cambodia's licensed casino count is itself uncertain: Hun Manet put it at more than 100 when he ordered a licence review to cut the number, while state media has reported that 195 licensed casinos were audited over the past year.

The plan was signalled at the anti-scam conference Cambodia hosted on 23 and 24 September. "Our next move is that we must take action on the casinos, because some are suspected of involvement in online scams and gambling," Chhay Sinarith told Bloomberg in an interview on 23 September, reported by The Japan Times. As licensed entities, he said, "they can still hide behind this legal shell", which is why inspection at casino sites had to be stronger. He also said investigators were examining around 30 subsidiaries of Prince Group, the conglomerate sanctioned by the US and UK, along with offshore assets.

Enforcement on the ground has continued in the meantime. Police in Poipet, the Banteay Meanchey border town, detained 587 people, 518 of them Indonesian, at a 30-storey building on Sunday 4 October, and military police in Sihanoukville detained 47 suspected scam workers in raids on three sites, the Khmer Times reported. Interior Ministry spokesman Touch Sokhak said the Poipet case was not connected to online scam activity and that the campaign to eradicate illegal online betting was continuing, according to the same report.

Unlicensed Online Gambling Is Now Being Prosecuted as Fraud

The most consequential line is Chhay Sinarith's. Cambodia has banned online gambling since 2019, and the 2020 Law on the Management of Commercial Gambling treats it as a matter for the casino regulator. Calling unregulated online gambling a form of scamming, and naming the online scams law and the anti-money laundering law as the instruments, moves it into the criminal regime built for scam compounds, with asset freezing and prosecution. For a licensee that means the cost of a leftover livestream studio is no longer only its licence. The counterweight is that the regulator now has to show it can tell a casino's lawful floor operations from an online business run behind it, which is a forensic exercise, not a box-ticking one.

The Make-Up of the Teams Tells Operators What Inspectors Will Check

The CGMC could inspect gaming floors on its own. Putting labour, immigration and police officials and prosecutors in the same teams suggests the visits will look at who is working on the premises and under what papers, not only at equipment, though AKP does not say so. That matches the minister's description of casinos as a "legal shell". It also means an inspection that finds a problem can become a criminal case on the spot, rather than a file sent back to the regulator.

The Inspections Are Doing the Licence Review's Work in Advance

Hun Manet wants fewer casinos, the IMF has said the vetting of casino owners is deficient, and the CGMC's renewal suitability framework remains unpublished. Until it is, these inspections are the closest thing to a renewal test casinos face, and the September statements tied the two together: a casino caught with online operations will not be renewed. What the sweep cannot reach is demand. A ban that takes the online product out of inspected buildings leaves its players to unlicensed sites hosted elsewhere, which no task force will visit.

Cambodia has moved from ordering casinos to stop online gambling to sending police and prosecutors through the door. The measure of the sweep will be whether it publishes what it finds.