Cambodia is fully commited to scam centers and Thailand doesn't like that and even reached out to Xi directly for cooperation here. Not even a year later the conflict broke.
Finally, cambodia is not suffering at all and if anything the current dictator has become significantly stronger and the country has been on a huge nationalist rise as the dictators control the scam centers and easily repurpose them for online propaganda.
It's surreal how Cambodians are blindly, even passionately, following the government narrative of evil rapacious Thailand invading innocent peace-loving Cambodia, when there is strong evidence showing it was Cambodia provoking the issue to meddle in Thai politics, but there is such deep-seated pride (on both sides I think) that truth is disregarded.
What is making things worse is rest of the world abandoning Cambodia which justifies scam centers profits as there no other source of income. Cambodia is right next to relatively rich Thailand but has nothing to show - its easy to see how nationalism explodes in such conditions.
Khmer culture is basically an offshoot of the original Hindu, and then Buddhist culture from India. The language is the 'latin' of the region and based off sanskrit, and all the temples in the region are modeled on Hindu temples (representations of mount Meru).
Tai people came from SW China and colonized, if not assumed, this extant culture, and also of course intermingled and whatever.
So both populations share a deep and long history and are closely related.
The bad blood is completely manufactured here and as someone who works in IT the power of information control has never been as apparent as it is today.
Thailand's Thaksin is now in jail and his daughter, basically his avatar, has been removed from government. Mission accomplished.
And to get a sense of how powerful this scam industry is in the country, the latest news is of a young Korean murdered after being kidnapped by a scam gang. Korea has responded forcefully, calling out the danger, yet the Cambodian press is now full of accusations that Korea is defaming Cambodia, that they are just as guilty of human-trafficking Cambodian brides, that some Koreans who were 'rescued' from a scam center don't actually want to go home, that the international press are unfairly treating Cambodia ... you know the story by now.
They don't want to go home because they fear the Chinese criminal gangs would follow them home in South Korea where they were recruited in the first place by Korean-speaking Chinese for debts they accrued while they were held captive. Others also fear they could also be held liable for participating in their fraud -- even if they were forced -- not because they love getting beaten.
Cambodia is claiming they are 'detained' by immigration, and refuse to leave, making it sound like the Koreans themselves are the problem, trying to deflect from the real issue.