The United States and United Kingdom have announced sweeping sanctions against a Southeast Asia-based multinational crime network for running a chain of “scam centres” in Cambodia, Myanmar and across the region, using trafficked workers to defraud people around the world into bogus crypto investments.
The US Treasury Department on Tuesday said it had taken what it described as the largest action ever in Southeast Asia, targeting 146 people within the Cambodia-based Prince Group network, which it declared a transnational criminal organisation.
The UK also slapped sanctions on six entities and individuals associated with the Prince Group, freezing 19 London properties worth more than 100 million pounds ($134m) linked to the network.
“Today’s action represents one of the most significant strikes ever against the global scourge of human trafficking and cyber-enabled financial fraud,” said US Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Federal prosecutors in the US also unsealed an indictment charging Chinese-Cambodian tycoon Chen Zhi, the Prince Group’s 37-year-old chair, on charges of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Chen, who is known as Vincent and remains at large, faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted on the charges.
The US Justice Department also filed the largest forfeiture action in its history against the group, seizing Bitcoin worth more than $14bn at current prices.
‘Pig-butchering’ scams
Chen was the “mastermind behind a sprawling cyberfraud empire”, Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg said, with US Attorney Joseph Nocella describing the network’s operations as “one of the largest investment fraud operations in history”.
The group is accused of running a network of purpose-built scam centres that functioned as forced labour camps across Cambodia, Myanmar and other countries in the region, where workers – many of them Chinese – were lured through fake job advertisements.
The trafficked workers were then held against their will at the compounds and forced, under threat of torture, to carry out online fraud against victims around the world.
The so-called “pig butchering” scams often involved the trafficked workers luring their targets into fake romantic relationships online, before persuading them to invest large sums into fraudulent cryptocurrency platforms.
Private jets and a Picasso
The defrauded funds were laundered in part through the Prince Group’s own gambling and cryptocurrency mining operations.
The stolen money financed luxury purchases, including yachts, private jets, vacation homes and a Picasso painting bought at a New York auction house, authorities said.
At one point, prosecutors said, Chen bragged that the scam was pulling in $30m a day.
Since about 2015, Prince Group has operated across more than 30 countries under the guise of legitimate real estate, financial services and consumer businesses, prosecutors said, with Chen and fellow executives allegedly using political influence and bribery in multiple countries to protect the operation.
Jacob Daniel Sims, a transnational crime expert and visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, told The Associated Press news agency that Prince Group was “an essential part of the scaffolding that makes global cyber-scamming possible”.
Chen, he said, was a “central pillar” of the criminal economy intertwined with Cambodia’s ruling regime, having served as an adviser to Prime Minister Hun Manet and his father, former Prime Minister Hun Sen.
“While the indictment and sanctions don’t instantly dismantle these networks, they fundamentally change the risk calculus,” Sims said.
They make “every global bank, real estate firm and investor think twice before touching Cambodian elite money”.
Announcing the sanctions, British Foreign Minister Yvette Cooper said the fraud network was enriching itself while destroying lives around the world.
“The masterminds behind these horrific scam centres are ruining the lives of vulnerable people and buying up London homes to store their money,” she said.
In 2023, the United Nations estimated about 100,000 people were being forced to carry out online scams in Cambodia, as well as at least 120,000 in Myanmar and tens of thousands in Thailand, Laos and the Philippines. In September, the UN warned that East Timor was becoming a new hotspot for scams.
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