Officers arrested the individuals on board a chartered flight sent to collect them from Cambodia, a South Korean police official told the AFP news agency.

 “A total of 64 nationals just arrived at the Incheon international airport on a chartered flight,” the official said on Saturday, adding that all of the individuals have been taken into custody as criminal suspects. South Korea sent a team to Cambodia  this week to investigate dozens of its nationals who were kidnapped into the Southeast Asian nation’s online scam industry.

 South Korean National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac previously said the detained individuals included both “voluntary and involuntary participants” in scam operations. On Friday, Cambodian Ministry of Interior spokesman Touch Sokhak said the repatriation agreement with South Korea was the “result of good cooperation in suppression of scams between the two countries”. Online scam operations have proliferated in Cambodia since the COVID-19 pandemic, when the global shutdown saw many Chinese-owned casinos and hotels in the country pivot to illicit operations.

 Operating from industrial-scale scam centres, tens of thousands of workers perpetrate online romance scams known as “pig-butchering”, often targeting people in the West in a vastly lucrative industry responsible for the theft of tens of billions of dollars each year. Pig-butchering – a euphemism for fattening up a victim before they are slaughtered – often involves fraudulent cryptocurrency investment schemes that build trust over time before funds are stolen. (Aljazeera)