Hong Kong
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He is a baby-faced tycoon who rose to the very best echelons of energy in his adopted house of Cambodia, the place he bestows scholarships and runs philanthropy applications whereas overseeing one of the nation’s largest and best-connected conglomerates.
But behind this façade, Chen Zhi, 37, runs one of the biggest transnational legal organizations in Asia, US authorities say, an empire fueled by pressured labor and cryptocurrency scams that at one level had been allegedly incomes Chen and his associates $30 million every single day.
The cash went on shopping for Picasso art work, personal jets and properties in upscale neighborhoods of London, in addition to supplying bribes to public officers, in keeping with prosecutors in New York, who final week announced that they had seized $15 billion in cryptocurrency from Chen following a years-long investigation.
That motion has thrown a uncommon mild on an alleged kingpin of Southeast Asia’s murky and legal world of on-line scams, which US authorities say function below the safety of highly effective politicians, and conned victims within the US alone out of at the very least $10 billion {dollars} final yr.
Chen’s Prince Group employs 1000’s of individuals and payments itself as one of the most important conglomerates in Cambodia, with investments in luxurious actual property, banking companies, lodges, main building developments, grocery shops and even luxurious watches.
But final week, the corporate was declared a transnational legal group by United States authorities, and Chen was charged in absentia in New York with cash laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy, together with a number of associates.
He remains to be at massive, and at the moment faces no authorized menace in Cambodia, which has no extradition treaty with the US.
Prince Group, American and British authorities allege, was the umbrella for greater than 100 shell corporations and entities allegedly used to funnel laundered money throughout 12 nations and territories from Singapore to St Kitts and Nevis.
“Chen Zhi isn’t a mob boss as we traditionally conceive of them – he is (or rather was) the polished face of a state-protected criminal economy,” mentioned Jacob Sims, visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center and a transnational crime professional.
NCS has reached out to Prince Group for remark. NCS has additionally reached out to the Cambodian authorities and inside ministry for remark.
Prince Group has beforehand denied allegations of wrongdoing as “false and defamatory” in statements printed on its web site. Those statements have since been taken down.
Little was identified about Chen, often known as Vincent, till he arrived in Cambodia and started splashing monumental quantities of money.
He was born in China’s southeastern province of Fujian on December 16, 1987, in keeping with the US Treasury Department.
His first enterprise ventures had been reportedly an web café and gaming facilities within the provincial capital Fuzhou. In 2011, he plunged into the “uncharted waters of real estate investment in Cambodia,” in keeping with a profile on the web site of DW Capital Holdings, a Singapore-based fund supervisor that lists Chen as its founder and chairman, and which is among the many corporations sanctioned by the US.
In these “uncharted waters,” a rush of primarily Chinese builders began constructing casinos within the western Cambodian metropolis of Sihanoukville within the 2010s, turning the quiet seaside city and backpacker haven into a roaring gambling mecca, inspired by lax regulation and the straightforward availability of on line casino licenses.
With the casinos and on-line playing got here organized crime, cash laundering, prostitution, drug trafficking and on-line scamming. The city was described as a “wild west” the place a prolific business-crime nexus emerged.
Shortly after his arrival in Cambodia, Chen turned a naturalized Cambodian citizen – an choice out there to candidates who donate $250,000 to the state. Analysts say he acquired venerable titles and quickly gained affect with the Cambodian elite.
He was elevated to be a senior adviser to the federal government on the rank of minister, was private adviser to former Prime Minister Hun Sen, after which his son and successor Hun Manet, and bestowed with the honorific “neak oknha,” a title awarded to outstanding businesspeople.
Video posted by the previous Cambodian chief reveals Chen standing alongside Hun Sen in 2022 throughout a assembly of traders. Chen was additionally half of a delegation that traveled with Hun Sen to Cuba in 2022, throughout which he met Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and was listed as an “adviser” to Hun Sen.
According to the US indictment, Chen additionally traveled to the US in April 2023 utilizing a diplomatic passport – a doc it alleges Chen obtained after buying luxurious watches for a senior international authorities official.
Browse the web site of Chen’s Prince Group, and the corporate’s public picture is one of charitable endeavors, enterprise accolades and awards for company social duty initiatives, massive donations to anti-Covid efforts, and teaching programs.
The group’s charitable belief claims to have donated funds price $14 million to assist Cambodians in a vary of initiatives. The firm even opened a Prince Horology Vocational Training Center, billed because the nation’s first impartial watch college.
And it instructions a seen presence within the nation, with skyscrapers dotting the skylines of Cambodia’s cities. Through its subsidiary Canopy Sands Development, Prince Group has launched into a $16 billion mission close to Sihanoukville to develop a 934-hectare “eco city” known as the Bay of Lights.
But federal prosectors allege that empire prolonged to at the very least 10 pressured labor camps in Cambodia, the place staff had been coerced into finishing up scams “at high volumes” below the menace of violence. The indictment described huge dormitories surrounded by excessive partitions and barbed wire the place incidences of violence and coercion had been “frequent.”
From alleged organized crime investments in Palau to shell corporations within the British Virgin Islands, Hong Kong and Singapore, investigators implicated 146 entities and people linked to Chen, his Prince Group and associates.
“It’s really remarkable in terms of both the state, the scale and size of what they’ve seized, but also the extent to which they’ve been able to identify and target so many of the different nodes of this particular criminal network,” mentioned Jason Tower, a senior professional on the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).
As nicely as Cambodian citizenship, Chen is listed by the US Treasury Department as having passports from Cyprus and the small Pacific island of Vanuatu.
Several of the addresses listed to Chen are in Hong Kong. Construction and engineering companies agency Geotech Holdings – which has seven subsidiaries, every sanctioned by the US authorities – has headquarters in Kwai Chung, house to town’s container port. The firm didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark.
Authorities additionally allege Chen and his co-conspirators bribed public officers in China and elsewhere to remain forward of investigations and raids on the pressured labor compound. Chen stored ledgers of bribes, in keeping with the indictment, and in 2019 a $3 million yacht was purchased for a senior official in an unnamed international authorities.
By roughly 2020, Chen had allegedly amassed a staggering sum of laundered proceeds that included roughly 127,271 bitcoin price $15 billion throughout unhosted cryptocurrency wallets whose personal keys he personally held.
Chen mastered a mixture of elite entry, patronage and philanthropy “that opened doors across real estate, finance, and politics, ultimately providing him the resources and protection needed to grow his scam empire,” mentioned Sims.
Cambodia has been described by analysts as a de facto rip-off state that dangers changing into a world pariah if it fails to behave towards the legal networks inside its borders.
The world rip-off trade, estimated to be price between $50 billion and $70 billion, is evolving at an unprecedented scale, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime said earlier this year, regardless of extensively publicized crackdowns on rip-off compounds in Myanmar.
Cambodia, which has emerged as an epicenter of this rip-off financial system, is estimated to make $12.5 billion to $19 billion a yr from cybercrime – equal to about 60% of the nation’s GDP, in keeping with a report printed by the Humanity Research Consultancy in May.
In June, an Amnesty International report accused the Cambodian authorities of “deliberately ignoring a litany of human rights abuses including slavery, human trafficking, child labour and torture” carried out by legal gangs in scamming compounds throughout the nation.
And the US State Department named Cambodia a state sponsor of human trafficking in its 2025 Trafficking in Persons report, which famous that senior Cambodian officers owned properties utilized by on-line rip-off operators to use victims.
Analysts estimate there are about 300 scamming compounds within the nation with a workforce of as much as 200,000 individuals. Cambodia’s garment and textile trade, lengthy a mainstay of its financial system, employs about 1 million individuals, in keeping with the UN.
The Humanity Research Consultancy report, authored by Sims, goes additional, detailing how the Cambodian management and Cambodian state establishments are “deeply and directly implicated in the growth, durability, and flourishing” of the nation’s rip-off trade.
“The charges focus on Chen and Prince, not the state per se, but the pattern is unmistakable: you don’t build ten forced-labor scam compounds, move billions, and buy impunity without political protection,” Sims mentioned. “It is impossible to imagine that such vast wealth would be moving through the system without the explicit knowledge and participation of its strongman and his immediate circle.”
The legal operations have gone largely unchallenged in Cambodia because of the full dismantling in recent times of the nation’s civil society and impartial media.
In October 2024, the arrest of outstanding Cambodian journalist Mech Dara, who helped expose the human trafficking fueling online scam centers, prompted widespread international concern.
“Civil society in Cambodia has been decimated,” mentioned GI-TOC’s Tower. “And anyone who goes and reports on this issue now they’re silenced. So there’s no space to report on the scam economy, or to raise these issues in the media, civil society can’t touch it.”
The Cambodian authorities has repeatedly denied any hyperlink to the cybercrime trade, and said this month that it’s “committed to preventing and suppressing all forms of cross-border crimes, particularly online scams.”
Earlier this yr, Prime Minister Hun Manet established a fee to focus on the scammers. The authorities says it has led to the arrest of 3,455 suspects, of 20 nationalities, accused of cybercrime. Authorities additionally say they’ve damaged up a number of organized crime and trafficking networks, rescuing human trafficking victims within the course of.
“We do not protect individuals who violate the law,” Cambodia’s Interior Ministry spokesman Touch Sokhak advised the Associated Press information company concerning Chen. He burdened that Cambodia’s authorities itself doesn’t accuse Prince Group or Chen of wrongdoing.
The ministry has additionally rejected reviews that Interior Minister Sar Sokha is a co-investor within the Jin Bei Casino Company – which the US Treasury mentioned runs “among the most notorious” of Prince Group’s rip-off compounds. Meanwhile, the National Bank of Cambodia said it was “taking careful monitoring and investigation measures” to make sure Prince Group’s monetary companies arm Prince Bank “complies with Cambodian laws.”
Cambodia is “at a crossroads,” mentioned Tower.
The UK-US motion “sends a very strong signal to both the criminal networks, as well as to those elites in Cambodia that are protecting them, and sponsoring them… that this type of impunity is not going to continue, that your assets are no longer safe. And so, I think it is potentially a game changer,” Tower mentioned.
Regional nations have begun to behave towards the crime flourishing inside Cambodia’s borders that has ensnared their residents.
South Korea final week issued a journey ban for elements of Cambodia after the dying of a South Korean scholar lured to work within the rip-off compounds, in keeping with police. More than 60 South Korean nationals had been deported from Cambodia and police are looking for to detain most of them over allegations they had been concerned in on-line scams.
Chen is at massive, with a web price someplace within the tens of billions, analysts imagine. And the rip-off compounds in Cambodia proceed to function, stealing cash from victims together with US residents.
“It’s not like there’s an off button that you can push to stop all of these scam centers,” mentioned Tower.
The query now turns as to if the US, UK and their allies can use the leverage from their joint operation successfully to dismantle the extremely profitable trade.
“This is the first time Washington and London have hit the architecture – the elite ownership, the laundering conduits, and the money itself – at the very top,” Sims mentioned.
“Blunting (Cambodia’s) ability to operate as a de facto scam state will not only materially disrupt the crime today, it will also serve as an effective deterrent model as this crime continues to spread globally,” he added.
“Now is the time to keep the pedal down.”