Phnom Penh military police arrested a 33-year-old man yesterday for allegedly deceiving a student to pay more than US$1,000 to secure a job with the Cambodian Red Cross.

Chan Heng, chief of the intelligence bureau for the municipal military police, said Hout Ly Heang, who is a construction worker in Phnom Penh, had pretended to be a CRC staffer in charge of recruiting new employees.

Prum Sotheary, a 24-year-old student at the Royal University of Law and Economics, paid Hout Ly Heng a total of $1,170 over 10 separate occasions before catching wind of the scam, Chan Heng said.

Hout Ly Heang reportedly told the fourth-year student that the CRC required “fees” to cover her application, work attire, a health check, a form for the Ministry of Interior and CRC accounting.

“The last time, the suspect told her that the International CRC needs $500 more, so she started to doubt him and thought he was deceiving her and she filed a complaint to the military police,” Chan Heng said.

Men Neary Sopheak, deputy secretary general of the CRC, said the humanitarian organisation requires no such fees.

“It is completely a case of deception,” she said, adding that such incidents could make residents “lose confidence” in the organisation’s work.