Cyber fraud, human trafficking and weak states have fused into a criminal ecosystem that even China’s heavy hand struggles to dismantle Chinese acor Wang Xing with Thai police authorities In January of this year, eleven members of the mafia family Ming were executed in China. Their crimes included homicide, illegal detention, and the operating of cyber scam centres across the border in Myanmar. Five members of the family Bai were sentenced to death back in November, and there are more trials expected of the families Wei and Liu. All are accused of involvement in scam centres in Myanmar. Other scam centres have spread across the entire Mekong region and inflicted annual losses of up to US$37 billion in East and South-East Asia. With 258,00 cases cracked domestically last year, and with 58,000 suspects repatriated from abroad, is China now winning the war against cybercrime? Cybercrime, or Telecommunications Network Fraud as it is more properly known in China, has a long history in East Asia. It is believed it first originated in Taiwan in the 1990s with the distribution of fake lottery tickets where the ‘winning recipients’ were told to call a telephone number and were subsequently defrauded. When the Taiwanese authorities cracked down on these scams, the criminal gangs switched their operations to coastal mainland China, primarily Fujian Province, where they began to prey on people in China as well as in Taiwan. When the Chinese authorities then took action, the criminal gangs transferred their scam operations to the war-torn and lawless regions of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. As a result, China has been left with a geopolitical headache. Clear and Present Dangers The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never been shy of using criminal organisations to further its own interests, most recently in 2019 where it utilised the local triads to help crush dissent in Hong Kong. However, with the incredible scale of the targeting of Chinese nationals by these extraterritorially-located criminal gangs, especially with the infamous ‘pig butchering schemes’ and with all the bad publicity this has generated both domestically and internationally, China no option but to view these criminal gangs as a very real threat to its national security. China executes 11 from Myanmar’s ‘scam mafia’ The Mekong Region has historically been a hotspot for drug production, human trafficking, illegal mining, and arms dealing. Such criminality flourishes where state oversight is almost non-existent and where the local elites are complicit. The relocation of cybercrime scam centres from China to the lawless zones of the Mekong Region has made matters far worse. Hundreds of thousands of people from nearly 80 countries have been trafficked to work in these scam centres in the most appalling conditions. Much as the term narco-state is applied to Mexico these days, where the drug cartels have infiltrated and undermined state institutions, the scam centres have become not only a threat to the sovereignty of all the Mekong Region countries but their presence has also led to the geopolitical destabilisation of the entire region. The situation in the Mekong Region was further worsened by the closure of the borders by China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gambling dens and brothels in Myanmar which normally relied on clientele from China were forced to diversify into also becoming scam centres. And then came the military coup in Myanmar in February 2021 which in turn led to armed uprisings. In need of funds, these uprisings against the ruling military junta further fostered the spread of all manner of criminal enterprises in Myanmar, including even more scam centres. China’s response to the domestic threat it faces from these extraterritorial scam centres has so far been unfocused and uneven. Even so, the expansion of China’s security footprint to deal with these scam centres has made all the Mekong Region countries very nervous, fearing China’s undermining of their national integrity. With the Laotian elite siding with Chinese strategic interests, Laos has come under less pressure to deal with its scam centres than say Cambodia or Thailand. And in Myanmar, in attempting to wipe out the scam centres, China at first allied itself with forces opposed to the military junta. This alliance became so successful that China suddenly feared the military junta might collapse and all of Myanmar fall in chaos and so very quickly brokered a ceasefire. In gratitude (or feeling it had no option), the military junta handed over to Chinese police a militia group nominally under its command who had been heavily involved in running scam centres. Public Outcry In November 2024, China announced that all the scam centres along the Myanmar border had been wiped out. In reality, those scam centres had transferred their operations deeper into Myanmar, to the Myanmar-Thailand border, and into Cambodia. On the 3rd January 2025, there was a public outcry in China when an actor named Wang Xing disappeared in Thailand, having being lured there with a promise of a fake acting job. Forced by the bad publicity to act, the Thais rescued Wang Xing from a scam centre on the Thai-Myanmar border and afterward agreed to more law enforcement co-operation with China. Nevertheless, many in Thailand remain convinced that China is only using the problem of scam centres to increase its influence within the country and that any such security cooperation only works one-way and always in China’s favour. There has been some suggestion that the recent conflict between Thailand and Cambodia over border sovereignty might have been exacerbated by Thailand’s plans to legalise gambling and to combat the scam centres in Cambodia. Needless to say, there are powerful political forces within Cambodia who profit from such criminality and who are violently opposed to Thailand’s plans. With the scam centres showing no signs of disappearing, and with China believing it has no option but to continue to expand its extraterritorial security footprint and even to run roughshod over local concerns, the Mekong Region remains violent, fragile, and unstable – and a place to watch. The Tycoon of Deceit Chen Zhi The international nature of the scam operations located in the Mekong Region can be evidenced through shining a light on the activities of just one man: Chinese-Cambodian businessman Chen Zhi, Chairman of the Prince Group, one of the largest conglomerates in Cambodia. After growing up in Fujian Province in China, Chen Zhi travelled to Cambodia in 2011 where he invested in real estate. He founded the Prince Group in 2015 and located it in Sihanoukville – a city that very quickly became a gambling boomtown. Its online and physical casinos especially targeted Chinese customers, gambling being heavily restricted in China. Chen Zhi also developed deep links to a number of highly-placed Cambodia politicians such as Sar Kheng and Heng Samrin, as well as becoming a personal advisor to the Prime Minster of Cambodia, Hun Manet, and his father, the former premier Hun Sen. Chen Zhi made a name for himself as a philanthropist and became a Cambodian citizen, notwithstanding his alleged murky links to China’s intelligence services. Then gambling was outlawed in Cambodia in 2019. After that, the COVID-19 restrictions prevented much cross-border travel. And yet the Chen Zhi and the Prince Group continued to amass a fortune. At the time, it was unclear how. With generated wealth believed to be in excess of US$60 billion, Chen Zhi and the Prince Group looked for ways of investing it. Denied a visa into the United States, Chen Zhi looked instead toward the UK and its Tier 1 investor programme. Already having a poor reputation for the handling of dirty money, the UK welcomed Chen Zhi and the senior officers of the Prince Group with open arms. Chen Zhi made London his second home. Here he took advantage of the lax scrutiny of the UK’s Crown Dependencies and offshore financial centres to move money around the world and even amassed a property portfolio in the UK worth about US$240 million. No one in the UK appeared to have noted that by 2020 the media in East Asia had become very interested in Chen Zhi’s activities and that the police in China had already commenced an investigation into him and the Prince Group. The UK Tier 1 investor programme was eventually shut down in 2022 due to its acknowledged susceptibility to money laundering. In 2020, Imperial Brands plc (formerly Imperial Tobacco) decided to sell off its 50 percent stake in Habanos S.A., the Cuban-Spanish monopoly company which holds exclusive rights for the distribution of premium cigars around the world – the premium cigar trade worth US$827 million in 2024. Through of series of shell companies the names of which changed so rapidly that it made it impossible to discover who was behind the acquisition, Chen Zhi acquired this 50 percent stake from Imperial Brands – his ownership only confirmed by the publication of a Gothenburg police report by the Swedish media outlet Cigarrvärlden ( The Cigar World) in 2025. By 2024, the United States was taking a much greater interest in the scam centres located in the Mekong Region. The pig butchering scammers had now begun to target American citizens, resulting in an estimated US$10 billion lost to fraud in that year alone. In October 2025, the United States finally indicted Chen Zhi on wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy and for directing the Prince Group scam centres in Cambodia and seized Bitcon currency worth US$15 billion. This was a joint operation with the UK authorities who also sanctioned Chen Zhi and the Prince Group and froze assets worth many millions, effectively locking him out of the UK financial system. Whether it was pressure from the United States or whether China had finally had enough of Chen Zhi’s activities and had a quiet word with the Cambodian elite themselves, Chen Zhi was finally arrested in Cambodia on the 6 th January and his Cambodian nationality revoked. He was extradited to China the following day to face trial. The Chinese are also now looking to detain many of his senior executives. Denying any knowledge of Chen Zhi’s activities, on March 5, the Cambodian authorities suddenly announced a new law to suppress the scam centres once and for all. However, with endemic corruption in Cambodia and with the alleged many connections the Cambodian elite have to the scam centres, no one is expecting any great change in the situation anytime soon. Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice is still expending a lot of effort in trying to track down all of Chen Zhi’s assets and the international cigar trade has been left in some disarray. The Butchery of Trust The term ‘pig butchering scam’ is a direct translation of the colloquial Chinese sha zhu pan and has become infamous since 2019 when it became a social media buzzword. It refers to a romance-investment scam where the relationship between the scammer and the victim is likened to that of a butcher and a pig. Indeed, the scammers refer to online social platforms as ‘pig pens,’ the scripts they use to scam their victims as ‘pig feed’ and their victims as ‘pigs.’ There are four stages to the scam: ‘pig hunting,’ the finding of a victim; ‘pig raising’, the grooming of the victim; ‘pig killing,’ defrauding the victim of money; and finally, ‘pig eating’, the disposal or laundering of the stolen funds. Chinese victims are considered more susceptible to the pig butchering scam than people in many other countries in that their romantic ideal is closely associated with material wealth. Moreover, in recent years the Chinese people have more potential financial resources to plunder than others in the Mekong Region. Even so, the scammers are now looking to target countries further afield such as the United States. During the ‘pig hunting’ phase of the scam, scammers will surf the many dating platforms as well as other social media sites in China, concealing their identity behind images of successful men or women. This is the subtle difference between straightforward romance scams where scammers might portray themselves as vulnerable, or in need of help, or just looking for love, hoping to be sent gifts or money. In pig butchering scams, the scammers portray themselves as very successful and ultimately worth taking investment advice from. In the ‘pig raising’ phase, the scammers chat frequently to their victims, building up a rapport, gaining their trust, and offering them emotional support. Scammers will tell fictitious life-stories about themselves, such as the loss of their parents or the betrayal of a husband or wife – anything that will help them build the trust they need from the victim. The pig killing phase is all about defrauding the victim. Once trust has been built sufficiently, the scammer will reveal that apart from their actual (fictitious) career they also make money very successfully on the side through various investment schemes. It is now that the scammer persuades the victim to download investment apps but instructs them to invest only small amounts at first. The victim will actually make a profit on those initial small investments. This makes it easier for the scammer to persuade them then to invest much larger sums, even convincing them to actually borrow money to do so. Once this larger investment has been made, the victim will suddenly discover that they cannot access their account or that very high transaction fees will be charged to withdraw their money. It is only then that victims realise they have been deceived. During the ‘pig eating’ phase the scammer disposes of the money they have stolen after they have covered their trail by closing down the investment app and blacklisting the victim on social media sites. The stolen money will be moved around in various ways but will eventually be transferred to foreign countries, often by the purchase of digital currencies.
Comments