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Comment by yhager | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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

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"

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

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.

Or Ireland with the nominally headquartered multinationals there.

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.

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