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This January, Chinese state media treated viewers to a gripping spectacle the arrest and public humiliation of a tycoon and suspected master criminal Chan Ju.
If you watch the footage, you see that the gods in the swat Gea have changed him into the prison garb and they're placing the black bag over his head. His arms are in shackles.
David Ramley is a Bloomberg investing reporter based in Singapore. He watched the footage of Chun's extradition from Cambodia. A team armed with automatic weapons leads Chun onto the plane, and.
Then it's later when he comes off the plane, they take the bag off and his eyes are just staring at the ground and clearly he realizes this is a very different scenario to what he had expected.
Chen allegedly ran a criminal network in Cambodia for more than a decade. His businesses were believed of used forced labor and were said to have defrauded people all over the world of billions of dollars. A lot of countries had their eyes on him, including the US's Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Different governments have different accusations regarding Chen and his organization. Most of it revolves around money laundering. Some of the accusations say what he was laundering with proceeds of crime, and a lot of that crime relates to a mix of online gambling scam centers.
Chun's arrest and extradition was a dramatic reversal of fortune. He had spent years living a billionaire's life in Singapore, London, Taipei and Hong Kong. He cruised with politicians on his super yacht and were chauffeured around in luxury cars. So what change that led to this abrupt and sudden downfall.
I think it was a mix of various factors. On the one hand, you had rising pressure from the Americans. They clearly sanctioned it, huge number and a huge array of his organization. Chinese authorities also had been ramping up pressure, and Cambodia basically had to act. All the things that Chen had used to maintain his support for so long within the Cambodian regime. All the things that had kept him operating now coalesced into unstoppable pressure.
Welcome to the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News I'm Wanha. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons, and businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today in the show The Rise and Fall of Chen Chu, the tycoon who allegedly built an empire on scams, trafficking and political protection. How he suspected criminal network earning tens of millions of dollars a day suddenly crumbled and what led to a
swift downfall. By any account, the Rise of Chinju was meteoric born in nineteen eighty seven in Fujin, a southern coastal province of China. He got a start in business running an internet cafe and gaming center.
When he started in Fujin, to the best of our knowledge and according to his own family offices now deleted biography, he was just another kid worked with his father in the family business before eventually getting into internet cafes, and at a very young age I think circa twenty four he went off to Cambodia to seek a new fortune.
In twenty fourteen, Chen appears to found a way to acquire Cambodian citizenship under foreign Investor program. Soon after, he founded Prince real estate.
Well. At first his empire in Cambodia was probably relatively modest. He was doing property development, he was doing certain buildings, business parks, et cetera. But quickly he managed to flip these into much larger enterprises. There was a downturn around the early time that he was there, and a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs and investors actually left Cambodia because they found it a little bit too risky. He doubled down, and in doing so he really established himself as a key player.
Prince real Estate quickly became a household name across Cambodia. As Chen's wealth grew, it expanded into a full blown conglomerate.
He started building casinos, he scited building hotels, restaurants, He even got into a wide variety of services. By the end of his time, he had Prince Bank, which actually had about a billion dollars in deposits from various clients.
And then at some point he's alleged to ventured into a lot of illicit operations as well.
Right, so, a lot of the accusations from both the NGOs as well as from researchers, journalists, the US agencies such as the FBI Center on the dual use aspect of his empire, and inside of those office buildings were his operations, allegedly for running scams targeting citizens all over
the world out of billions and billions of dollars. That money would often be funneled into the purchase of crypto mining equipment, and then the crypto mining equipment was harvesting huge amounts of crypto which was then ostensibly clean, and that's one of the key ways that he allegedly launded money.
During those years, Prince Group built business campuses and poured money into transforming a Cambodian port city called Seannoukville into a gambling hotspot with numerous casinos and hotels. Investigators alleged some of these sites became notorious scam hubs. One of them was a place called Mingo Park.
Once upon a time, it was a farm of mangoes, and then they turned it into a processing center for mangoes, and then they basically built over it a series of office buildings. There are many facilities filled with thousands of workers who are actively scammed people all over the world, according to various indictments and accusations.
The allegations against Chen say, workers from across the world worked in shifts around the clock in these complexes to scam overseas victims out of money. The scheme is known as pig butchering. That's a reference to fattening pigs before slaughter.
These range the gamut from your average love interest scam, where somebody claims to be a potential wife or a potential husband for someone who's perhaps a little bit lonely, to the classic Nigerian prince scam, where someone claims that they have a huge fortune awaiting you if only you
jump through a series of hoops. And in other cases there are investment scams where they claim to be very successful in investment brokers who take your money and can triple or could ruple your funds if you use their platform to do so. And in all of these cases allegedly it's simply a way of extracting money from people's bank accounts.
And David, what was life like for these workers, many of whom, as as you said, were likely trafficked. What kind of conditions were they living and working under.
Well, it's not quite black and white. It's actually quite fascinating. Many of the workers really were paid They were salaried employees who knew what they were doing, but many others were not. They had come under false pretenses. Some had thought they were working normal it jobs. They were brought in, they were taken to the room, and if they performed well, they actually got paid. Sometimes they got bonuses. In other cases, if they did not perform well, if they constantly or
even occasionally made mistakes, they were often punished. And the indictment details some of these alleged punishments, beatings being meted out, people being hunted down.
And how lucrative david were these scam centers well.
According to the indictment, one of the key lieutenants boasted in text messages that the operation was generating in excess of thirty US million dollars per day. That's only in twenty eighteen.
And obviously you can't build a business empower like Chens of this scale without connections. How well connected politically was he in Cambodia.
Chen was incredibly well connected to the highest levels of politics and power in Cambodia. There are a variety of ways to illustrate this, but I'll give you one. Twenty twenty two, on a state visit to Cuba. Chen's right there in videos that you can look up right now on former Prime Minister Hunsen's personal official, verified Facebook page.
Chen used his growing wealth to build political influence and styled himself as a philanthropist. He donated trucks to Cambodia's National Police, handed out scholarships, and gave about two million dollars to the Cambodian Red Cross, which is overseen by Boon Rannie, the wife of longtime leader Hunsen. And when Chun got wind of then Prime Minister Hunsen's fondness for luxury watches, he leveraged that too and set up a specialty watch making school.
Prince Horology was the watch school that he set up and produced the watches that hun Sen handed out to world leaders during the Asian Meeting. If you go to the government collections of the US government, the Canadian government, and the Australian government, you will find risk watches with Prince Horology and his personal logo etched into the equipment. There.
By twenty twenty, Chen had reached the absolute pinnacle of Cambodian society, and thanks to his high powered political connections, Chen and his businesses were shielded and they flourished for more than a decade.
Well, according to people we've spoken to, it was definitely a fact that if you moved against Chen, it was seen as you moving against Cambodia. And you have to remember the geopolitics of the time. Everyone wanted Cambodia to be on its side in this new Cold War scenario, and none wanted to offend hun Sen, Hunmanette or the senior politicians of Cambodia protected.
Chen allegedly built one of the biggest scam syndicates in the world. The combination of money from princes, legitimate and illicit businesses made Chen extremely rich, and he moved money offshore and began spending it.
He led the life of a global billionaire in cities all over the planet. He had properties in Hong Kong, he had properties in Tokyo, he had properties in Singapore, London, you name it. He had a fifty four meter super yacht, and that was only one of several yachts that he owned or controlled. And on those yachts he would host highly elaborate parties. We're not talking normal parties that you
and I might attend. We're talking parties with free flowing whiskey aged for many, many decades, costing thousands of dollars per dram Cuban cigars of every vintage you can imagine.
I mean, the fact that there was so much money flowing from Prince Group did that raise any alarm at any of the banks.
Certainly? What I found fascinating was that several banks actually filed suspicious transaction reports against him, and they filed that with various regulators, not just in Singapore, Bitalsho, in Taiwan, etc. The fact that they themselves found him triggering so many red flags that they shuttered his accounts shows that many
banks knew something was up. But because there was no way for the banks to warn each other for quite fair privacy reasons, and because the state was not empowered in some ways to warn other banks when a separate bank can close someone's accounts, he was simply able to spin up new bank accounts at other institutions and continue transferring money all over the world.
Chen could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for the Prince Companies, who asked to be unnamed for safety reasons, denied the allegations from the US and UK against Chen, and said the US Department of Justices, legal filings contained inconsistencies, falsehoods, and egregious overreach. After the break, how international pressure from across the globe triggered Chen's sudden downfall. Countries have ways of recognizing those who've made exceptional contributions. In the US,
the president gives out Presidential Medals of Freedom. In the UK, there's knighthoods. In Cambodia, one of the greatest honors that a civilian can receive is the title of nik ogna, equivalent to a lord, and in July twenty twenty, the King bestowed that title on Chen Ju. It was a remarkable achievement, but at the very point that Chen had reached these dizzying heights, events were in play to bring him down. Chen's alleged criminal enterprises benefited from the COVID
nineteen penceandemic. People spent more time online and the pool of potential scam victims widened, and according to experts, Chen and the Prince Group were just one part of a broader network of scam operations across Cambodia and the region, but as a number of victims likely millions worldwide, from the US to China, began to grow, so did scrutiny.
Law enforcement agencies had already caught a scent of what Chen was up to, and in twenty twenty Chinese authorities set up a task force to investigate the Prince group in Cambodia, but real international pressure didn't come until the end of last year.
In October, the US and UK governments finally decided to take action against him, and comprehensive action, I should say. They sanctioned over one hundred different entities all over the world, and many of these were controlling entities used to run companies in other parts of the world. It was a real shock to the system, especially for the Asian law
enforcement organizations. They actually had not been made aware that these sanctions were about to hit, so it was only after the sanctions were announced that governments in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and elsewhere started to take some serious action and seized assets ranging from cause to jewelry to gold and property.
US federal prosecutors also revealed that they had seized nearly one hundred and thirty thousand bitcoins Chun once controlled. That's a record hall then worth fifteen billion dollars. This week, lawyers for Chen filed emotion in a New York court to dismiss the US government seizure of a hall of bitcoin it's linked to him. The lawyers argued that many of the allegations against Chen are provably and obviously false, and that accusations he oversaw scam compounds were non specific
statements and background commentary about conditions in Cambodia. They raised questions about the timeline if the cryptocurrency seizure, and said the bitcoin couldn't possibly have been the proceeds of fraud or money laundering. Last year, tensions between Thailand and Cambodia escalated to deadly violence along the border, and in the lead up to Thailand's elections, scam centers around the region became a hot button issue in the campaigns.
The Thai government had turned it into a war on the scams. They had actually actively bombarded scam centers on the border with Thailand. They were illustrating to the international public the extent of the scam activity targeting citizens around the world.
At this point, Chun's operations had become too big and his victims too numerous to ignore. President Trump himself even got involved, forcing Cambodia to crack down on scam centers that target Americans. He explicitly made it a part of a deal for lower tariffs.
This was just a series of unfortunate for him events that came together. It's hard for him to predict that the Americans would suddenly do such a thing. It's hard for him to predict that the Ties would use scam activities as a key tent pole for justifying their invasion of Cambodian alleged territory.
And while the Americans were honing in on Chen and his suspected scam centers, China was also making progress on its investigation. For weeks, some of Chen's staff were expecting Cambodia to reach a deal with China that would result in just a slap on the wrist for Chen. But the end when it came, was sudden. In a late night statement on January seventh, Cambodia announced that Chen and
two others had been arrested and immediately extradited. Since his arrest and extradition, what do we know of the operations of Prince Group now with him out of the picture.
Well, we understand that the operations of Prince Group are much depleted. Several organizations that were in full swinging operation before he was arrested, such as Prince Bank, Prince Real Estate, Prince Horology, the Watchmaking School, were all curtailed or shut down.
Now, these kinds of scam centers which are prevalent in parts of Asia, they often depend on trafficed workers. Cambodia shut down a number of these centers. What happens to these workers now.
Well, what's happened since Chen's arrest has been remarkable. We've seen a lot of scam centers throughout Cambodia emptying out streams of people from all over the world India, Indonesia, China, other parts, queueing out in front of their country's embassies, trying to get home, saying that they had escaped and wanting to get a ticket back to their place of birth. But what we've also heard is that a lot of centers are allegedly still in operation. They've simply quietened down.
According to one of the senior minute we've spoken to, scam activity is down fifty percent in Cambodia. Now we don't know exactly what that refers to, is that the number of scammers in countries the number of scam operations or the revenue lost. But it shows that even by the Cambodian government's own admission, there's still a substantial amount of scam activity happening today right now.
At the end of the day, David says, scamming is just too lucrative for criminals to resist, and these scammer networks are like hydras. You cut off one head, but others are ready to emerge and replace them.
I think the main thing standing in the way of shutting down all of these scam centers is greed. The huge amount of money that they are able to generate is liable to create corruption in any market, let alone emerging markets in frontier markets. Basically, the only way this gets shut down is if you have clean government willing to take drastic action against some of the most senior members of your own country, both in business, politics, and
perhaps other spheres of influence. And that's a hard task. I think one unanimous thing we've heard from every expert is that this is not the end of scams either in Southeast Asia of all the world. This industry will continue and they will continue to be victims. Now how successful those efforts are in shutting down these centers that remains to be seen and coordinated action can make a real impact on that.
This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm wanh To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast Offer. If you liked the episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take Asia wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time.