By Martin Petty and Devjyot Ghoshal
Jan 14 (Reuters) – Cambodia’s arrest of alleged scam centre kingpin Chen Zhi and his extradition to China was “not the end” of the Southeast 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 Southeast 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, 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.
Cambodia has always been determined to crack down on transnational crimes, especially crimes employing new technology, such as online scam organisations, he told Reuters.
“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 gave no details of the investigation into Chen but said 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 U.S. 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, U.S. prosecutors seized about $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, which set up a special task force in 2020 to investigate Prince Group, Chinese 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.
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.
“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 … we have decided to extradite him to China.”
(Reporting by Martin Petty and Devjyot Ghoshal in Bangkok; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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