Cambodia to keep up crackdown on scam centres after arrest of alleged mastermind
These scams operate from compounds that involve tens of thousands of workers, among them human trafficking victims
[PHNOM PENH] Cambodia’s arrest of alleged scam centre kingpin Chen Zhi and his extradition to China was “not the end” of the South-east Asian nation’s battle to stamp out transborder crimes, its foreign minister said.
Last week’s surprise arrest of China-born Chen is a key step in an until now fragmented international campaign, targeting sophisticated scam networks in South-east Asia run by criminal gangs, who are swindling victims worldwide out of billions of dollars.
The extradition of Chen, sanctioned by several countries and indicted by the US for wire fraud and money laundering, followed a joint investigation by China and Cambodia, the details of which have not been made public.
“It’s a continued combat, and we have set measures and steps in order to eradicate this crime,” Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn said in a rare interview from Phnom Penh, the capital.
He said that Cambodia has always been determined to crack down on transnational crimes, especially crimes employing new technology, such as online scam organisations.
“The fact that Chen Xi was arrested and extradited to China is just reflecting this firm commitment of Cambodia to combat the crime. And it’s not the end of the combat,” he added.
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He gave no details of the investigation into Chen, but said that full cooperation with Beijing had started months ago.
Billionaire conglomerate head
Chen, an enigmatic billionaire in his late 30s, heads the Prince Group conglomerate, based out of Cambodia with scores of ostensibly legitimate businesses worldwide.
But US authorities have said those were fronts for “one of the largest investment fraud operations in history”.
Last year, Prince Group rejected the accusations against Chen as baseless.
Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in assets linked to Prince Group, while Britain and South Korea have imposed sanctions.
Last year, US prosecutors seized about US$15 billion in Bitcoin linked to Chen, and Cambodia has liquidated the Prince Bank he founded.
It is not clear what Chen will be charged with in China, indicated Chinese court documents dating to 2022. The country had set up a special task force in 2020 to investigate Prince Group.
Last week, China’s state broadcaster showed a video of Chen arriving in Beijing, handcuffed and hooded.
It said that Chen was wanted for fraud and running illegal casinos, and described him as the “leader of a major transnational gambling and fraud crime syndicate”.
The scams, operated from vast compounds in countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos, involve tens of thousands of workers.
Among them are human trafficking victims, lured by the promises of jobs in industries such as technology and hospitality, and forced to cheat strangers online or face brutal punishment.
Cambodia has “very close cooperation” on transnational crime with countries such as the United States, China, South Korea and neighbours Vietnam and Thailand, the Cambodian minister said.
“This is the result of a long investigation,” Prak Sokhonn added, referring to the events that led to Chen’s extradition.
He noted: “Chen Zhi had Cambodian nationality, but when we made those investigations and found that his nationality was not legally obtained, and he is also a Chinese national ... (thus) we have decided to extradite him to China.” REUTERS
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