21st September 2026
For years, much of the advice about scams has concentrated on the victim.
Don't click the link. Don't give anyone your bank details. Don't trust an unexpected phone call. Check before you pay.
All of that remains important, but the British Government is increasingly taking a different approach as well: trying to disrupt the criminals before the scam reaches the victim.
That means going after the international organisations behind the scams, the people running them, the technology they use and, importantly, the money they make.
Cambodia has become one of the most visible examples.
In March, the UK imposed further sanctions on organisations and individuals linked to scam centres in Southeast Asia. One target was #8 Park, described by the UK Government as a major Cambodian scam compound with capacity for up to 20,000 trafficked workers.
Another target was Xinbi, a cryptocurrency-based marketplace which the Government says provides services to scam centres, including the sale of stolen personal data and cryptocurrency services.
The action followed sanctions against the Prince Group network in October 2025. The UK and United States acted together against a network operating scam centres across Southeast Asia, including Cambodia.
The UK Government says those earlier sanctions were followed by asset freezes and seizures worth more than £1 billion across the region, while Cambodia subsequently launched a major crackdown of its own. Cambodian authorities reported thousands of sites being raided, hundreds of scam centres closed and tens of thousands of foreign nationals released from compounds.
There is another disturbing side to these operations. Some of the people actually carrying out the scams are themselves victims.
Workers are recruited through apparently legitimate overseas job advertisements and then taken to compounds where they can be forced to conduct online fraud. The UK Government says some have been subjected to violence and threats if they refuse.
That helps explain why this is no longer being treated simply as a matter of consumer protection.
Cooperation is spreading
Cambodia is not an isolated case.
In Vietnam, the UK signed a five-year Memorandum of Understanding in October 2025 to strengthen cooperation against international fraud.
It provides for information and intelligence sharing, cooperation between law-enforcement agencies, investigations, possible joint operations, asset recovery, training and public awareness campaigns.
Nigeria is another important part of the developing network.
In March 2026, Britain and Nigeria signed a statement of intent covering cooperation against cyber-enabled fraud and scams. It includes British support for a Nigerian Joint Fusion Cell on Fraud and is intended to strengthen the two countries' ability to tackle organised transnational fraud.
These arrangements are not all the same thing. Some are formal memorandums or statements of intent, while other action involves police cooperation, sanctions or broader international agreements. It would therefore be misleading to describe them all as treaties.
But collectively they point towards a significant change in the way Britain is approaching fraud.
The international approach
In March the UK also helped establish an INTERPOL Global Taskforce, known as Operation Shadow Storm.
The taskforce brings together the intelligence capabilities of INTERPOL's 196 member countries, initially concentrating on dismantling scam compounds in Southeast Asia.
The UK Government says more than two-thirds of scams targeting the British public originate overseas.
That makes international cooperation rather more than a diplomatic exercise. If the people running the operation are thousands of miles away, British police have obvious limits to what they can do on their own.
The Government's new Fraud Strategy also includes a £250 million programme and an Online Crime Centre intended to bring together police, intelligence agencies, banks, technology companies and others.
At the international level, governments, banks, telecommunications companies and technology firms have also agreed a global public-private partnership based on information sharing, prevention, victim support and cooperation.
What does this mean for people in Scotland?
For the individual receiving a suspicious text or phone call, the basic advice has not changed.
But there is a bigger issue behind the familiar warnings.
Modern scams can be highly organised businesses. They can involve people in several countries, fake websites and social media accounts, stolen personal information, cryptocurrency and complicated methods of moving money.
That makes it much harder to deal with the problem simply by telling people to be more careful.
The UK's approach is increasingly to attack the infrastructure behind the scams as well as trying to protect potential victims.
For Scotland, including rural areas such as Caithness, there is no reason to assume that distance provides protection. A scammer does not need to be anywhere near Wick or Thurso to target somebody there.
A telephone, email, social media account or apparently genuine investment opportunity can cross the world in seconds.
The more interesting development, therefore, is not simply Britain's latest action against Cambodia.
It is the emergence of an international effort to treat fraud as organised cross-border crime.
Whether that eventually makes a noticeable difference to the number of scam messages reaching people's phones and computers remains to be seen. But the direction of travel is clear: Britain is increasingly trying to take the fight to the people running the scams, rather than leaving the public to defend itself one suspicious text message at a time.