A Croydon mum is facing 20 years in a Cambodian prison after she was caught trying to leave the country with 34kg of cannabis in her luggage.
Tamara Martins, 31, claims she was set up by a man who approached her at a bar asking her to transport a suitcase of electronics to the UK for a fee.
She said she only discovered the drugs when she was stopped by authorities at Techo Airport.
Her brother, Trey, told the Daily Mail: “She's never been arrested for anything to do with drugs and she's never been involved in that sort of stuff.”
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Cambodia’s zero-tolerance drug policy includes life sentences for drug trafficking.
In a letter to her brother, Tamara wrote: “It's hell in here. I haven't been able to sleep, eat or anything.
'I have to try and not think so much about life at home otherwise I'll die from a broken heart... It's really difficult and hard to to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
She said she shares a cell with 60 others and is forced to sleep on the hard floor.
Tamara is mum to a 10-year-old daughter.
Trey said: “She doesn't know that her mum has been arrested. She's calm.
“I've told her, ‘your mum is all right. She's good. Don't worry about it. She's doing the best she can’.”
On a now-deleted GoFundMe page, Trey wrote: Everything has happened incredibly quickly.
"As a family, we are doing everything we possibly can from here, contacting the British authorities, trying to arrange welfare support and desperately trying to secure proper legal representation for her in Cambodia.
"The reality is that we cannot do this alone.
"Legal representation and the costs involved in supporting Tamara from another country are more than our family can manage by ourselves.
"We are raising money so that she can have a lawyer there to protect her rights, understand exactly what is happening to her and make sure she is not facing this situation completely alone."
Drug-smuggling arrests involving Britons abroad has more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, according to the Foreign Office.
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