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Comment by Wingman4l7 | Hacker News Reader

Long overdue. At some point, these scam operations are so large that they have to be operating with tacit approval of their host countries, who have been given no incentive to stop the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry that is bringing in millions of dollars into their economy.

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Direct link to the indictment https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/chairman-prince-group-i...

Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos

This one of the other organizations / major bank used for money laundering directly linked to Hun Sen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huione_Group

> The company is linked to Cambodia's ruling Hun family, which includes the current prime minister, Hun Manet.[4] His cousin Hun To is a major shareholder and director of Huione Pay

> Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos

Are you saying that 30-50% of Cambodia's economy can be directly attributed to scamming and casinos? I find that shocking and hard to believe. Do you have a source for that statement?

It's a small / under developed country

the economy is not that big to start with :)

GDP $49.8 Billion (nominal; 2025)

Some examples

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/cambodia...

Formal estimates range from $12.5 to $19 billion dollars per year, equivalent to as much as 60% of the country’s formal GDP

Formal estimates by who? Given that the GDP is around $50B, these (unsourced) numbers don't even make sense.

First off, the amount seized was not necessarily made in a year.

Second, most of the money would not make it to the Cambodian economy. It is likely laundered abroad. The whole operation is likely multinational, with only the workforce located in Cambodia.

Cambodia is also big player in money laundering

(not only for these cambodia originated crimes)

Also keep in mind all the bribes, all the money laundering mentioned in the article by the 100s of affiliated subsidiares of the criminal group all in Cambodia

the big casinos which directly and indirectly support additional laundering

https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/2025-10/Huione-Group-Fin...

https://www.kharon.com/brief/huione-group-cambodia-treasury-...

Every business has revenue / costs

The indictment mentions they were doing 30M/day ~ 10B / year, could be an old message when they were smaller

Guessing that's revenue

They're just one of many organizations in the "industry"

You don't have to launder money when the leader of the country is involved.

My first experience stepping off the plane in Cambodia was being scammed by the official issuing visas. It was $20, I gave him $50, and he didn't want to give any change back. Scams were the defining part of the tourist experience there.

Haha, it reminded me 20+ years back when I was a kid travelling by train in India where the ticket dispenser did not give me 8 Rs back on a 152 Rs ticket when I paid 160, sounds small but is a big deal for poor. Tangential but that is one thing I really thank digital payments and digitization of ticket dispensing for.

My comment is going to be like a tangent to a tangent, but since it's about Bitcoin it sort of comes back to the original topic.

I agree about digital payments, but one of the things that I found disappointingly complex about Bitcoin is needing to receive change when making a payment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unspent_transaction_output).

I only made a few Bitcoin transactions because I found the whole experience did not feel like the future. That was a while ago now, and as other commentors have pointed out, it not seems obvious that the real value in Bitcoin lies elsewhere.

It's not hard to believe that a small country can have a vastly oversized economy due to finance - legal or illegal.

An example of a legal one is the UK

Or Ireland with the nominally headquartered multinationals there.

Unsurprisingly the UK was enabling this guy before he got too much heat. From a BBC article:

"The UK government says it has frozen assets owned by his network, including 19 properties in London - one of which is worth nearly £100m ($133m)."

> the UK was enabling this guy before he got too much heat.

How does this quote indicate that the UK was enabling Zhi?

Presumably GP means enabling by not seizing him or his assets earlier? Which I find to be a bit of a stretch.

The UK may not have been enabling this guy in particular, but he's not exactly the only one who has been stashing ill-gotten gains in London real estate. Apparently crooks still think it's a great deal despite some of them getting it seized once in a while.

This thread is making Cambodia sound like an oversized Cayman Islands.

Cambodia is a small country with no natural resources of any kind. Even to grow rice you need diesel for tractors and fertilizers that are produced from natural gas using energy (which Cambodia lacks).

There's very few opportunities for a small country without resources.

And to grow rice you need to somehow get rid of US bombs that majority of Cambodia soil is very well fertilized with.

Between 1965 and 1973 US dropped 2,756,941 tones of bombs on 113,717 sites in Cambidia. Thats more bombs than all allies together used in all of World War II.

Tens of people still getting killed by them every year.

https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabomb...

Those are democratic bombs bringing freedom. Can't be a bad thing.

It's true. They have daily flights to Cambodia. Go there and look at it. It's all casinos and scams and dust.

The amount of bitcoin siezed here is about 30% of the Cambodia GDP...

Presumably they didn’t accumulate it all in one year?

Still, if it was accumulated over three years it seems significant.

They don't have a source because it's total bullshit.

Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos

This is ridiculously false.

This makes me think of the Barbary Wars where piracy out of the Barbary states was a huge issue. There's also the connection with the slave trade then and the human trafficking for the scam centers now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars

Also North Korea with its state sponsored internet privateering.

Makes me imagine a buddy cop comedy but it's the US and China teaming up to deal with the scammers in Burma.

> the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry

Comparing a scam to war is inaccurate. The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot. Cambodia and America are not going to war over this.

Interestingly enough, China is thought to have leaned on the scales in Myanmar’s civil conflict due to pig-butchering there. (Not only were they scamming Chinese, they were also human trafficking them to operate the scams.)

China only began executing those pig-butcherers when the EAO that was providing protection to Chinese pig-butchering gangs in that region of Myanmar (Kachin Independence Army) re-flipped towards India recently [0] and had begun to ignore China [1] and rerouting rare earths and other goods to India [2]

Meanwhile, China never cracked down against similar scams in Cambodia. Most notably, Prince Group remains unsanctioned in China and it's leadership are Mainland Chinese in origin.

While pig butchering (along with opium and human trafficking and other organized crime activities) are a major reason behind Chinese involvement in Myanmar, ignoring the very real proxy war going on between Chinese and Indian interests in Myanmar fails to contextualize some of the decisions that both countries make within Myanmar.

This also explains why you don't see a similar crackdown in Cambodia, which is solidly within the Chinese sphere at this point.

[0] - https://www.stimson.org/2025/rare-earths-and-realpolitik-fut...

[1] - https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/war-against-the-junta/ignorin...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-explores-rare-eart...

> the EAO that was providing protection to Chinese pig-butchering gangs in that region of Myanmar (Kachin Independence Army)

Kachin is not a relevant location of scam centers. You can find articles that claim otherwise, e.g. https://www.ctol.digital/news/inside-worlds-largest-scam-emp... but from the fact that they mention the Thai border and the city of Myawaddy, which is in Kayin/Karen State, it's clear that they're just confusing Kachin and Kayin.

The Kachin Independence Army seems to finance itself through mining instead.

While it's true that some scammers were recently sentenced to death in China https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78nrx309kzo and this only happened after the Kachin Independence Army disrupted the rare-earth trade with China, that's just a temporal coincidence. The scammers were captured in 2023 in Laukkai in northern Shan State near the Chinese border by the MNDAA (an anti-junta armed group dominated by ethnic Chinese) as part of Operation 1027. China is rumored to have assisted the operation in order to crack down on the scam centers in junta-controlled territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_1027#Cyber-scamming_... The Kachin Independence Army also participated in Operation 1027, but in Kachin, not Shan.

I don't know about Cambodia.

The MNDAA is a close ally of the KIA as both are members of the Northern Alliance, and all the Northern Alliance members saw their relations with China tank after Chinese brokered talks with the Tatmadaw failed [0] last December.

As a result of that failure, all the Northern Alliance members began trying to pivot to other states or in the case of the MNDAA faced the brunt of the Chinese crackdown.

[0] - https://www.bnionline.net/en/news/juntamndaa-peace-talks-doo...

All of that postdates the MNDAA crackdown on scam centers, during which relations with China were excellent. It seems like after Operation 1027, the junta got the message and started handing over their own allies in the scam industry https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/myanmar-junta-transfers... at which point China didn't have much reason to continue supporting anti-junta forces in their offensive and preferred freezing the frontline with a ceasefire instead.

Maybe the reduction of Chinese support encouraged the Kachin Independence Army to seek cooperation with India, but you seemed to be claiming that causality was in the opposite direction (while also misidentifying who was running the scam centers), which I think is clearly contradicted by the timeline of events.

That's interesting - I had seen some news articles reporting that some Chinese pig butchering scammers were encouraging others to target foreigners only, and exclude the mainland Chinese. Like this one: https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/chinas-acquiescence-to...

It's reminiscent of stories about Russian malware doing nothing on machines with Cyrillic keyboard layouts.

Yep, but notice how that article is about Kokang in Myanmar as well.

Cambodia continues to have scam centers targeting Putonghua speakers (including PRC nationals), but there hasn't been a similar crackdown on such activities due to Chinese pressure.

The crackdown in Kokang happened after China flipped to supporting the Tatmadaw against the Northern Alliance [0] and India began peeling historically India-aligned members of the alliance like the KIA and the Arakan Army back into Indian orbit [1].

P.S. Circa 2 years ago, a large portion of Chinese in SF Chinatown became Kokang and Cambodian Chinese. Bamar, Kuki-Zo, and Kachin Myanmarese primarily reside in Daly City, Ingleside/Outer Mission, and Oakland/East Bay.

SF has a lot of Asian and Latiné subcultures and communities - it's kind of insane how underdocumented it is under the guise of "Asian" and "Latino"

[0] - https://www.stimson.org/2025/too-little-too-late-china-steps...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/india-extends-unp...

China does not have a way to deal with crime in Cambodia. It does not have anti-terrorism law to operate in other countries, also it does not want to upset Cambodia or Myanmar government when not necessary. These Chinese operates in Cambodia are mostly on the wanted list anyway, they don't plan to go back to China. In fact, a person leaving China to Cambodia and Myanmar will be checked and make sure their trip is innocent. Personally I hate these scammers, they have ruined so many people's lives. It seems that it will never go away. Too much money involved. I wish we can launch drone attacks on these places.

> It does not have anti-terrorism law to operate in other countries

China literally runs black ops offices in New York [1] and Australia.

> also it does not want to upset Cambodia or Myanmar government when not necessary

There is no government in Myanmar. China (and India) heavily intervene in that conflict.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/new-york-resident-pl...

> The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot

I'm not sure I buy that definition. I think most understand a Cold War to be simply a "war" done without weapons but by other means — via economic means, propaganda, etc.

that stretches the definition of war to mean anything that benefits one state over another, though. that might be a valid definition, but if we're gonna have a real discussion we're gonna have to differentiate between that sort of war and the sort of war where people kill one another with weapons and agree from the start which one we're talking about.

The US is blowing up alleged drug boats and their crews so anything is possible.

that's a pretty naive view of war. we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold.

> we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold

Like whom? We (and let's be honest, every other great power) are at war with many countries all of the time, and while they may be cold for long stretches, they absolutely (a) go hot from time to time and (b) are constantly threatening to go hot.

Maybe we should call it "conflict", and include non-state actors.

Let's go with macro-aggressions and put trigger warnings on them

I this similar concept, differently.

To me "war" is a state of "no rules" hurting. IE nuclear, biological, any weapon goes. Anything less is an exercise in restraint - even if still quite terrible in it's own right.

Which means there are lots of "exercises" of varying lethality, risk profiles, spheres of influence, etc. And yes many countries are jockeying against other countries in varying ways.

Large scale scams against other countries could be seen as an unintended (not a planned government action) exercise that is condoned by the government.

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