Golden Fortune, a Prince Group casino that spawned a whole new city of alleged scam compounds in Cambodia’s Kandal province, finally had its license fully revoked on Thursday.
It had been sanctioned by the U.S. and U.K. in October, and had its casino license temporarily suspended soon after. Prince Group’s chairman, Chen Zhi, was then arrested and deported in January, sparking a huge exodus of often trafficked and trapped foreign workers out of scam compounds all over Cambodia.
Over the weekend, with Golden Fortune’s license finally gone, Sampov Poun compounds were locked, empty, and watched over by police — but local residents still wondered whether it was truly the end for the infamous scam city.
Cambodia’s commercial gambling regulator announced on Thursday that it had fully revoked Golden Fortune’s casino license, along with those of the G.C. Casino, Jin Bei Group casinos and Jin Bei 4, all in Sihanoukville.
The same announcement also suspended the license of “My Casino,” also known as “Casino Khniom” or “Wo Casino” in Kampot province, which was owned by recently arrested tycoon Ly Kuong.
The gates of the Golden Fortune complex facing National Road 21 were locked on Friday. A reporter saw a man on an electric scooter try to open the gates and fail to get through the lock. Trash lined the road around the compound’s brick-red concrete gates.
A 60-year-old resident living near the compound said he was aware of the raids and witnessed an increase in escape attempts from Golden Fortune through December and January, but he wasn’t sure if all the scam businesses in Sampov Poun city would be closed off like Golden Fortune.
“Whether all scam compounds are empty or not, it is very difficult to say because it has been too quiet and the information about this has been silenced,” he said. “We have seen police doing their work during those nights … when we tried to ask, they did not say anything, and they tried to hide information and walked away from me.”
Multiple Prince-linked compounds?
Following the rise of Golden Fortune, construction boomed at new alleged scam sites in Sampov Poun.
The border city was also the site of an infamous incident where 42 Vietnamese workers jumped into a river to escape forced labor from another gated casino compound.
In 2022, Sampov Poun was designated a city by the national government, and shortly after workers broke ground on a half-dozen new multi-building compound constructions. As of February, one of those sites appeared to cover more than 1 square kilometer, according to satellite imagery.
Cambodian residents call some new constructions “Prince 2,” “Prince 3”, “Prince 4” and “Prince 5”, while Chinese netizens have called different Sampov Poun parks also as “Jin Yun Phase 3.”
Regional fraud watchdog Cyberscam Monitor found two of the compounds in Sampov Poun to have similar names to Golden Fortune based on their research, though it was not clear if this indicated a real ownership link. Only the Golden Fortune compound on National Road 21 has been confirmed as linked to Prince Group via its recently-revoked casino license and now-deleted information on Prince websites.
The “Prince 3” compound has also had a sign advertising a company called “Jin Wan Property Developer”, but further information about this company could not be verified. Reporters found a company called “Jin Wan Industrial Park” in the Commerce Ministry’s website, which according to the listing has an office in Prince International Plaza in Phnom Penh.
The other massive complexes in the town don’t appear to have licenses, so they are only rumored to be Prince-connected as real ownership remains opaque.
Regardless of their ownership, local residents say these compounds have been quiet for about a month, and almost all construction projects — aside from one borey construction — appeared to be on pause, a reporter found on Friday.
Two police officers stood in front of a nearby compound that residents call “Prince 2,” surrounded by trash that appeared newly discarded: mattresses, mosquito nets, plastic chairs and even motorbikes were lumped among the piles.
“There have been no security guards because all of the guards left,” one of the officers told Mekong Independent, without specifying when they were stationed there. “We were assigned to guard the building recently. We are guarding all the compounds.”
About a month ago, foreign workers had spilled out of one of the biggest constructions in Sampov Poun, called Prince 3 by a 60-year-old man who sells ice cream from his motorbike’s cart. He said he saw them leave in groups of dozens, including Chinese, Indonesians and Africans.
“We do not know where they go and we know that they’re all heading to the north.”
Residents said that there had been a raid in mid-January and they believed some people were arrested, but no one could confirm this information nor was there any documented news about arrests in Sampov Poun city.
A woman who was collecting recyclables said she saw police raid the compound called Prince 3, as she searched the area for plastic bottles to resell. She heard foreigners were arrested for lacking passports, sending others to scatter and hide throughout the city.
“We do not dare to check [the situation] out because we are worried that they would arrest us as well.”
A former security guard at Prince 4 said that he just made it out of the compound as police arrived last month. He believed authorities were looking for Chinese nationals and claimed they arrested 8 people, but he wasn’t sure of their nationality, adding some Cambodians seemed to get in trouble too.
“I do not dare to go back inside because I worry that they would arrest me too,” he said. “When I saw three military police walking out of the building, my legs started shaking and I was so scared.”
A city shaken
The foreign workers had appeared to be in distress, even if they were not captured in raids. The 60-year-old man who lived near the registered Golden Fortune casino told Mekong Independent that residents tried to stop an Indonesian man from committing suicide almost two weeks ago, after the foreigner apparently escape the raids.
“The Cambodian translator said that he had lost everything including his passport, and he had no work and no money to buy food,” he recalled. “He is so desperate and has reached a dead end situation, [so] he wanted to jump [off a building], but our Cambodian people tried to stop him from jumping.”
The ice cream vendor said he saw a group of 10 police arrive to patrol and inspect the massive 0.5-square-kilometer area of Prince 3 shortly after the string of escapes. It seemed like a relaxed operation, he said.
“They are sheltering under the shade and will not walk to check [the compound] under the scorching sun,” he recalled. “They just came to comply with their boss’s order.”
Sampov Poun commune police chief Khun Bunthorn said the raids had been carried out “100 percent successfully,” as the compounds in the area had been emptied and police remained on guard.
“We also check from house to house, building to building, to arrest [foreign workers] and make sure they’re complying with the law,” he said, seeming to imply the new rule banning property managers from housing improperly-documented foreigners.
When asked how many people were arrested, he did not respond to the question, instead adding that foreign workers fled the compounds, “scattered across the roads in chaotic ways, and when they all had gone, we had only learned the information [about this incident].”
Bunthorn added that he had not heard about the attempted suicide case but if he gets more detailed information, he would send it to the Indonesian Embassy.
The ice cream seller worried that his and other residents’ businesses would be impacted by the sudden shock to Sampov Poun’s economy that the raids and escapes created. At the same time, he wondered how a corporation that could build a building like “Prince 3” — which has also been labeled Jinwan Park — could just be gone.
“The company has lost massive money, and how can they stop doing this business, because it is a million-dollar business?” he wondered. “How much money they have spent on each building, like this building, it can cost a million dollars.”
