October 21, 2025
SEOUL – When 64 young South Koreans arrived at Incheon Airport in handcuffs on Saturday, the scene looked less like a crime roundup than a mirror held up to the nation’s quiet tragedy.
They were not hardened criminals, but victims of a cruel equation: despair multiplied by debt, driven by the promise of “10 million won ($7,030) a month.” Their return from Cambodia, where they were detained for online scams, exposed not only the brutality of foreign criminal networks, but structural neglect that has left an entire generation cornered.
The immediate cause of their ordeal is clear enough. Criminal rings in Cambodia, Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia have built sprawling cyber scam operations, preying on young people lured by fantastical job ads, who are then trapped, beaten and forced to defraud others.
The death of a South Korean university student in August, tortured after being lured by such a job offer, galvanized public outrage and forced the government’s hand. But the moral reckoning should not end with the victims’ repatriation. What drove so many young people to seek fortune in places they barely knew?
Behind the sensational headlines lies an unspoken domestic failure. South Korea’s youth employment rate has fallen for 17 consecutive months to 45.1 percent, its lowest in years. Stable, high-quality jobs in manufacturing and construction, a traditional springboard for upward mobility, are shrinking, replaced by short-term contracts and internships that pay little and offer even less security. The country’s job market, once an engine of aspiration, now feels like a rigged lottery.
Debt compounds the despair.
The delinquency rate for borrowers in their 20s at major banks stands at 0.41 percent, the highest among all age groups. More than 60,000 young people have already fallen into the status of “credit defaulters,” locking them out of finance and driving some toward predatory lenders. The online promise of quick wealth or even debt cancellation through “overseas jobs” can feel like deliverance. In reality, it often leads to another form of bondage.
The Korean government was not blindsided. The UN Human Rights Office issued a formal warning five months ago, describing the situation in Cambodian scam compounds as a humanitarian crisis. Victims were beaten, electrocuted, assaulted and sold to other groups. Yet Seoul’s response was slow and perfunctory.
Officials are right to prosecute those who knowingly joined scam operations. But punishing individuals while ignoring the ecosystem that produces them is policy theater, not governance. The real question is why so many young people have become susceptible to criminal recruitment in the first place. This is not a story of greed — it is the endgame of a pathology where high living costs, scarce jobs and rising debt have made survival a moral hazard.
A credible response demands more than diplomatic coordination with Phnom Penh. It requires a two-pronged strategy: dismantling transnational scam networks while addressing the domestic despair that fuels them. That means flexible labor reforms, regulatory easing to spur private investment and targeted support for the debt-ridden. Above all, the government must create an environment where failure is not fatal and youth can rebuild without fear.
The stakes extend beyond Cambodia. A generation losing faith in work, credit and the future will not merely emigrate — it will disengage. South Korea’s demographic crisis is already deepening as young people postpone or abandon marriage and childbirth.
The return of the handcuffed 64 is a symptom of a country that has failed to give its young the means to live decently. South Korea cannot arrest its way out of this problem. To dismantle the Cambodia trap, it must first dismantle the domestic one. If the nation loses its youth, it loses its future.