Bavet’s border strip has another wild story making the rounds. Out on a sprawling plot of several hectares sits the Golden Galaxy Casino—a massive seven-story complex with over 700 rooms. For months, its front gates stayed shut, with management insisting the place was just undergoing renovations. Locals walking past assumed workers were inside knocking down walls and laying tiles. But as local media eventually revealed, the renovation was just a front. Tucked away inside, nearly 300 people were holed up, quietly running a covert online scam operation.
The hammer actually fell back on April 7, when police raided and sealed off the venue. It was a heavy-handed operation: officers arrested three main ringleaders and sent them to court, while rounding up 275 foreign suspects—including 25 Chinese nationals—and handing them over to the General Department of Immigration for deportation. Then on September 21, ahead of an international conference on combating online fraud, authorities organized a site visit for 78 Cambodian and foreign journalists from 39 media organizations to walk through the cleared-out complex.
In a border town like Bavet, casinos are everywhere. Night-shift workers zip past on motorbikes, leaving behind puffs of exhaust, hardly giving these giant blocks a second look. People renting rooms nearby and grabbing meals at street stalls genuinely thought the Golden Galaxy was just another quiet, unfinished building. Nobody imagined hundreds of workers were tucked inside day and night, running internet cables and pulling off scams. Sitting at local tea stalls now, people just shake their heads—the lengths folks will go to for a fast buck these days never fail to surprise.
