A new set of legal actions by the U.S. and U.K. claim that Cambodian citizen and tycoon Chen Zhi is directly involved in money laundering, bribery, forced labor and fraud – and imply he controls a vast network of crime beyond Cambodia.
They make striking new allegations of Prince Group’s involvement in the scam industry, suggesting that Chen directly oversaw operation of scam compounds in Cambodia and offered bribes and a $3-million yacht to unnamed officials in order to ensure the protection of scam-linked buildings. Scammers controlled thousands of phones and tens of thousands of social media accounts in schemes that allegedly netted the group as much as $30 million a day.
The U.S. government on Tuesday indicted the chair of Prince Group – a naturalized Cambodian citizen with oknha status – and confiscated $15 billion in bitcoin as part of a crackdown on alleged investment scams, forced labor and money laundering.
The U.S. and U.K. governments also sanctioned 146 entities – 18 people and more than 100 companies – associated with what they’re calling the “Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization,” including Cambodian citizens with multiple passports and dozens of businesses registered in Cambodia. The full list is on the U.S. Treasury website.
The indictment against Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi alleges the conglomerate conducted a sweeping network of crimes to detain workers, scam victims across the globe, launder proceeds and protect its assets with bribery and violence – all underneath its public presence in financial services, insurance and real estate sectors in Cambodia. Chen is charged with one count of wire fraud conspiracy and one count of money laundering conspiracy, in the case filed by U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr. in the Eastern District of New York.
Victims of forced labor and human trafficking have reported detention and torture within Prince-linked buildings, while RFA reported extensively on the conglomerate’s murky Cambodian and overseas businesses in a 2024 investigation. The U.S. said this joint action was the largest targeting cybercriminal networks in Southeast Asia.
“Under Chen’s direction, Prince Group made enormous profits for Chen and his associates by operating forced-labor scam compounds across Cambodia that engaged in cryptocurrency investment fraud schemes and other fraudulent schemes and used its vast network of business enterprises to launder its criminal proceeds. The schemes resulted in billions of dollars in losses incurred by victims in the United States and around the world.”
Prince Group has consistently denied its links to scams and human trafficking.
In September, the U.S. also sanctioned nine targets in Myanmar and 10 in Cambodia over alleged links to cyberscam networks.
Global Network
The U.S. indictment paints Prince Group as running a full-scale online scamming operation, managing everything from finding fraud victims to hiding illegal income. According to the case, Prince Group’s entire network spanned more than 100 businesses in more than 30 countries. It further suggests that Prince Group’s illicit activities began as early as January 2014 and run through the filing of the indictment.
The case alleges that Prince operates more than 10 scam compounds, but it names only three of them, all in Cambodia: the Sihanoukville-based Jinbei Casino and Hotel, Golden Fortune Science and Technology Park in Kandal province’s Chrey Thom city, and the so-called “Mango Park” in Kampong Speu province also known as Jinhong compound.
The U.S. alleges that Chen and a handful of unnamed co-conspirators operated so-called “pig butchering” scams, where workers developed personal relationships with potential victims via falsified social media accounts, and then encouraged them to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes. These charges match several reports from workers who escaped from the Kampong Speu compound.
But the allegations add more details, saying that Chen was directly responsible for maintaining “phone farms” of cell phones sending out cold calls to potential scam victims, while a co-conspirator was named directly responsible for purchasing phone numbers and social media passwords, which can be used to find and deceive victims.
The indictment claims that Chen was also aware of the level of brutality reported in these scam compounds, and that he possessed photos of people beaten or tortured in Prince-linked properties.
The case also describes several methods that Prince Group moved the money it scammed from victims. One of the major sources for laundering money were Prince’s crypto-linked businesses, including online gambling websites and cryptocurrency mining companies in Laos, the U.S. state of Texas, and China. The indictment suggests that company members were tasked with moving money around cryptocurrency, and for a period between 2020 and 2022, Chen led a group of New York city-based money mules who moved and cashed out scam business proceeds. The indictment cites a co-conspirator as saying that pig-butchering scams and related illicit activities netted Prince Group as much as $30 million a day in 2018.
$3-million yacht and a Picasso painting
Through this alleged criminal organization, the U.S. government says Chen and Prince Group gained incredible wealth, and were willing to share it via reportedly bribing officials in exchange for business favors.
The indictment states that Prince Group obtained a range of luxury items: “watches, yachts, private jets, vacation homes, high-end collectables and rare artwork, including a Picasso painting purchased through an auction house in New York City,” according to the document.
Chen also reportedly gave “luxury watches worth millions of dollars” to an unnamed senior government official who helped him obtain a diplomatic passport. Chen has citizenship in China, Cambodia, Vanuatu, St. Lucia and Cyprus, but it was not immediately clear which of these is his diplomatic passport. Last week, Vanuatu canceled all diplomatic passports of “Vanuatu Trade Commissioners.”
The indictment further claims that Chen paid local government officials near physical scam compounds in order to ensure Prince’s business wasn’t hit by periodic government raids on similar businesses. This allegation echoes the accounts of forced workers, who alleged corruption between companies and local law enforcement.
Civilians living and working around Mango Park, Prince Group’s alleged compound in Kampong Speu province, have said they witnessed foreign workers running and hiding just before police raided the building in July.
When reporters visited Mango Park in August, they saw the park empty and surrounding businesses closed, with only Cambodians traveling in and out with supplies. Through the compound’s border wall, reports saw condominium windows and villa doors left open to the heat and monsoon rains.
An elderly man working around the Mango Park scam compound told Mekong Independent reporters in August that there used to be thousands of workers in the complex – Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese and other nationalities.
Those thousands of workers fled the compound and flooded the streets on the night of July 17, hours before police raided Mango Park – according to the man, as well as various social media videos.
The elderly man, who declined to be named due to safety concerns, said this was not the first time this had happened, as he had witnessed another raid in 2024 after a Korean news outlet reported on Korean nationals trapped, overworked and beaten in Mango Park. South Korea this week renewed pressure after a university student was allegedly tortured to death in Cambodia after being lured to work there by a scam ring. The South Korean foreign ministry reported 330 kidnappings involving Koreans in Cambodia in the year to August, up from 220 last year and 17 in 2023.
Another resident said that during the July raid, he saw workers running in both directions on the national road where Mango Park was situated. Dozens were captured by police, but based on his observations he thought the majority were able to get away.
He said it was chaos, with foreigners begging locals for a place to hide and sleep, while others just laid on the ground and slept.
“They wandered everywhere. … They did not know where to go and they did not have a clear destination so they walked around,” he said. He said he didn’t know much about what the workers did, but most Cambodians in the area felt helping the fleeing foreign workers would only create problems: “[Police] would have arrested us too.”
The elderly resident wasn’t familiar with the nuance of the work inside the compound, but based on his observations and local rumors, he was aware that the workers inside were involved in online gambling or fraud, and that they were regularly beaten and tortured for disobeying the rules.
“This online compound has big connections,” he said. “If you do not have big connections, you will not last long. There must be very powerful people behind these compounds.”