Aisha Roscoe opens by grounding new listeners in the story: Shoaib, a Ugandan man, has just walked free from a scam compound in Cambodia after almost a year of forced work. But freedom, it turns out, is not the same as being able to go home. Tens of thousands of similar workers, released in government raids across the country, are now stranded in Phnom Penh with no shelter, no food, and no legal support. Amnesty International has labelled the situation a humanitarian crisis, warning that migrants — many of whom were trafficked — are falling through the cracks of an overwhelmed and indifferent system. Investigative reporter Shibani Mahtani picks up the story from here.

When Shoaib stepped out of the scam compound, he allowed himself to feel optimistic. His year-long contract was complete, and his plan was straightforward: get to the airport and fly home, just like he arrived. His one concern was an 11-month visa overstay, but his boss reassured him he would clear the fines and handle the paperwork. Trusting this promise, Shoaib spent $1,300 on a plane ticket — a significant sum given he had only about $3,600 in savings, the combined total of his earnings from his previous Kampala job and what little he was paid in Cambodia. It was a fragile plan, held together by a promise that would soon be broken.

In a cruel stroke of bad luck, Shoaib booked his flight so quickly that he misread the departure time and missed it entirely. Back at the airport, he booked a second ticket and texted his boss to confirm the visa situation — but received no reply. With time to kill and a city he'd never properly seen, Shoaib allowed himself to explore. He visited the Royal Palace, built for the king of Cambodia in 1867, marvelled at the Night Market along the river, and shared guesthouse rooms with other freed Ugandans. It was a strange interlude: a taste of normal life in the very city that had kept him imprisoned for a year. But the clock was ticking on his limited savings.

Days later, Shoaib's boss finally got back to him: buy a ticket for February 10th — exactly a year to the day since Shoaib had arrived in Cambodia. So Shoaib booked his third ticket, spending the last of his money. At the airport, everything seemed to be going smoothly until immigration scanned his passport and immediately flagged the 11-month overstay. Shoaib called his boss. The call wouldn't connect — he'd been blocked. Officials told him he owed $3,500, charged at $10 per day for every day his visa had been expired. With no money to pay and no boss to rescue him, Shoaib was told: pay or go back. He was handed his passport and sent out of the airport. Aid workers and human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have since criticised the Cambodian government for enforcing these fines against trafficking victims. The government continues to waive fines on a case-by-case basis — a process Shibani Mahtani describes as excruciatingly slow.

With his third ticket spent and his savings nearly gone, Shoaib found himself locked out of the city's guesthouses. The Cambodian government had announced that landlords housing foreigners without valid visas could face fines or criminal charges — so locals, frightened by that warning, turned him away. The immigration office offered no help; one official even directed him to a nearby temple. So Shoaib did the only thing he could: he found a local Buddhist temple called a Prasat and slept there for three nights with no running water among crumbling statues and the sounds of chanting. He tried everything — calling Ugandan officials, contacting the UN's IOM, and even showing up at the immigration department day after day, begging to be deported. Each time, he was told the same thing: pay the fine first. His savings were evaporating, his stomach ulcers were flaring up, and he started skipping meals.

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Few people know Cambodia's scam industry as deeply as Mek Darah. Where other journalists would stop at interviewing escapees, Darah always pushed further, mapping out ownership chains that led directly to tycoons close to the ruling Hun family. Independent reporting, including from The New York Times, confirmed that these powerful figures directly profited from the scam industry — and that even the prime minister's cousin had a stake in a scam-linked entity. In 2023, the Cambodian government began repressing civil society voices, eventually forcing Darah's outlet, the Voice of Democracy, to shut down. Then, weeks after Shibani Mahtani met him on her 2024 Cambodia trip, Darah was arrested — three or four military police cars, a charge of inciting social disorder — and spent a month in prison without even a spoon to eat his food. When he was released, he told people his spirit had been broken. For a while, he disappeared from bylines. But as Cambodia's crackdown on scam compounds created a new, overwhelming humanitarian need in front of him, Darah found he simply could not look away.

The moment Mek Darah met Shoaib outside the immigration office changed the trajectory of Shoaib's ordeal. Darah, who was there looking for stranded migrants to speak with, bought the group lunch without hesitation — a small act with an outsized impact on men who had been turned away everywhere else. Over the following weeks, Darah became the one constant in Shoaib's fragile existence in Phnom Penh. He drove Shoaib around in his tuk-tuk for free, helped him print documents, and when Shoaib told him he had no money for food, Darah would show up the next morning at his door with provisions. For Shoaib, who had spent a year watching people extract things from him, this was almost incomprehensible — someone who gave without taking, at grave personal risk. Darah is still required to check in with police every month; the case against him has never been formally dropped.

The scale of the failure is staggering. The only human trafficking shelter in Cambodia — previously funded by USAID, which the Trump administration shut down in July 2025 — can hold just 120 people and has been turning away hundreds each week. The Indonesian government rented a warehouse in Phnom Penh for its citizens, but when Mahtani visited in March, it was overcrowded and reeking of cigarettes, with many Indonesians preferring the street. Inside detention facilities, Cambodian authorities have made no distinction between bosses and workers — video footage shows them brawling over food. UN agencies have a mandate to help but have offered only piecemeal support. And reports show that people on the streets are being re-recruited into the very industry they just escaped. Mek Darah, surveying all of this, is furious: the NGOs failed, the embassies failed, the journalists parachuted in and left. He keeps coming back because he can hear people shouting for help, and he is not the kind of person who walks away.

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Shoaib eventually found a guesthouse — $10 a night, split with a fellow Ugandan named Oscar — in an industrial part of Phnom Penh. He filled the weeks scrolling his phone, playing Call of Duty, watching YouTube, and waiting. Then, in the first week of March, good news arrived: the Ugandan ambassador had negotiated his fine waiver, and Shoaib was on the list. But ticket prices had spiked in the wake of US attacks on Iran, and cheap routes through the Middle East were no longer viable. So Shoaib called home and asked his family to sell his possessions: his motorbike and his brown-and-white cow, which he'd owned since 2021 and which he noted with quiet pride had a price that never goes down. The proceeds funded his fourth plane ticket — booked for mid-March, six weeks after leaving the scam centre.

On the morning of March 24th, Shibani Mahtani and Mek Darah met Shoaib at the shelter. He was beaming, wearing the same acid-washed jeans and faded t-shirt she'd first seen him in — but now he'd added a pleather jacket and a spray of cologne. Looking around the departure hall, Mahtani noticed all the other stranded Ugandans had dressed up too, some in new shoes and clothes. They wanted to go home looking like they'd succeeded, even though the reality was far from it. Shoaib posed for selfies at the entrance of Phnom Penh's striking new airport with its golden arches and giant Buddha. Then came the waiting — six long hours as immigration officials processed documentation for the entire group, alongside large groups from Nepal and China. Shoaib listened to music through knockoff Apple AirPod Maxes from his perch on a baggage trolley. Around them, Cambodian villagers streamed in to watch the comings and goings in their shiny new national airport. For them, the building was a symbol of modernity. For Shoaib, it was an obstacle between him and home.

When officials finally called his group forward, Shoaib leapt off the baggage trolley. The Bangkok Airways attendant printed his boarding pass, loaded his bags, and he walked toward the immigration checkpoint — the same one where he'd been turned away weeks earlier. This time, the officer scanned his passport and the gates opened. Shoaib turned around and waved at Shibani Mahtani and Mek Darah. He appeared to be through. But in the taxi back to her hotel, Mahtani received a video from Shoaib: he was in the waiting area, good to go — but among the stamps officials had placed in his passport was a deportation stamp, banning him from Cambodia for three years. The system had reached its verdict: Shoaib was a criminal, not a victim. Despite everything he had survived, the paperwork said otherwise.

When Shoaib's plane touched down in Kampala, there was no one waiting for him. He hadn't told his family he was coming — too ashamed to face them with nothing to show for a year abroad. His savings were gone, his cow and motorbike sold, his dreams deferred. He described himself to Shibani Mahtani, through a crackling phone line, as bankrupt — 'on zero.' But even in that stripped-down state, he refused to frame it as defeat. His dreams hadn't changed, he said. They were just delayed. And he had to keep going, because he had to survive — because he had to become something good. It is a quiet, determined grace note at the end of a year that took almost everything from him.

Aisha Roscoe wraps up the episode, crediting investigative journalist Shibani Mahtani and producer Justine Yan for the reporting. Editors Jenny Schmidt and Jimmy Keeley are acknowledged, along with the full Sunday Story team. The episode closes with a final slate of sponsor messages: Angie promotes its home-project pro network; Rosetta Stone launches Rosetta Stone Sapphire with a 20% NPR discount at rosettastone.com/NPR; and BetterHelp highlights the gap between attitudes and action on mental health — with 85% of Americans believing in getting support, but 74% saying society discourages it.