Cambodia urges a fair process as US and UK pursue Prince Group's Chen Zhi in a global scam case

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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Cambodia's government said Wednesday it hopes the U.S. and Britain have sufficient evidence in their pursuit of Prince Holding Group and its Chairman Chen Zhi, after both governments imposed coordinated sanctions accusing the Cambodian conglomerate of running massive online scams and using forced labor.

Cambodia’s Interior Ministry spokesman Touch Sokhak said Prince Holding Group has met all legal requirements to operate in Cambodia and has been treated no differently than other major companies investing in the country. He also said the Cambodian citizenship given to China native Chen was in accordance with the law.

Touch Sokhak said Cambodia will cooperate if there is a formal request backed by evidence. “We do not protect individuals who violate the law,” he said, but stressed that Cambodia’s government itself does not accuse Prince Holding Group or Chen Zhi of wrongdoing.

“I don’t have much to say about the American and British authorities’ seeking to arrest him, but first, we just hope that there will be arguments and sufficient proof to put against him," Touch Sokhak told The Associated Press.

The U.S. Treasury Department and U.K. Foreign Office on Tuesday announced joint sanctions against Chen and his conglomerate, accused of being a transnational criminal network that has defrauded victims worldwide and exploited trafficked workers across Southeast Asia.

It came after U.S. authorities seized more than $14 billion in bitcoin and charged Chen, 38, with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies. Chen was accused of sanctioning violence against workers, authorizing bribes to foreign officials and using his other businesses, such as online gambling and cryptocurrency mining, to launder illicit profits. U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella called it “one of the largest investment fraud operations in history.”

In London, British authorities froze Chen’s British businesses and assets, including a 12 million euro ($13.9 million) mansion in North London, a 100 million euro ($116 million) office building in the City of London, and multiple luxury flats across the capital.

John Wojcik, a senior threat researcher for Infoblox, who previously tracked cybercrime in Southeast Asia for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said the joint U.S.-British action marked a major strike against one of the largest cybercriminal and money laundering enterprises in Southeast Asia, but that more must be done.

"Unless law enforcement and industry partners can trace and dismantle their online infrastructure — the domains, hosting and payment rails that sustain them — these networks will rebrand, retool, and continue to scale,” Wojcik said.

Chen remains at large. If convicted in the U.S., he faces up to 40 years in prison. Prince Holding Group has previously denied involvement in scam operations and has not publicly responded to the latest allegations.

The two governments allege that Chen’s network operated scam compounds in Cambodia that used trafficked foreign nationals to run online “romance” and cryptocurrency investment scams. Victims were tricked into investing life savings in fake trading platforms, while trafficked workers were forced to carry out the frauds under threat of torture.

Mark Taylor, who formerly worked on human trafficking issues in Cambodia for the non-profit Winrock International, said that Chen was embedded in the Cambodian elite and “well protected” by the government, showing “the larger role that Cambodia has played as a safe center for this online scamming to prosper.” Chen was formerly a personal advisor to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet.

“Cambodia is the physical location where a lot of it operates, but it’s also the money laundering center for the entire region,” Taylor said

Independent research group Cyber Scam Monitor has documented more than 200 online scamming centers and casinos in Cambodia alone, based on first-hand accounts from former scam workers, field surveys and media reports.

“For Cambodia, we will cooperate in every way possible with other countries where there is sufficient evidence,” Touch Sokhak said.

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Writers Anton L. Delgado and Huizhong Wu in Bangkok contributed to this report.