The nation’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 trans-border crimes, its foreign minister said.
Last week’s surprise arrest of Chinese-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, swindling victims worldwide out of billions of dollars.
The extradition of Chen, sanctioned by several countries and indicted by the United States for wire fraud and money laundering, followed a joint investigation by China and Cambodia.
“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.
Cambodia has always been determined to crack down on transnational crimes, especially crimes employing new technology, such as online scam organisations, he added.
“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.”
Chen, an enigmatic billionaire, 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 as baseless the accusations against Chen.
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$15bil (RM60.8bil) 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, which set up a special task force in 2020 to investigate Prince Group, court documents dating to 2022 showed.
Last week, China’s state broadcaster showed video of Chen arriving in Beijing handcuffed and hooded.
It said 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 promises of jobs in industries such as technology and hospitality, forced to cheat strangers online or face brutal punishment. — Reuters
