Re: Digest for vietnam-old-hacks@googlegroups.com - 5 updates in 5 topics
Dawson
Carl Robinson <robinso...@gmail.com>: Jan 12 09:34PM +1100
I must admit that I've only followed the headlines on this and need to do a
lot more reading. Importantly, the leader's been deported back to China.
What a story.
https://open.substack.com/pub/huangyan/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-chen-zhi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&shareImageVariant=overlay&r=cgbc8
To paraphrase Brooks and Dunn
You can take the boy out of the Khmer Rouge, but you can't take the Khmer Rouge out of the boy.
Vincent Chen Zhi ran the Phnom Penh-based Prince Group, a private bank with assorted subsidiaries.
The main one was the 'pig butchers' fraud farms which completely took over Sihanoukville.
They were essentially networked, three-nation boiler rooms, using enslaved Cambodians and other kidnap victims to call lists of people and talk them into "investing" in stocks, bonds, crypto or even the Prince Bank.
Profits were enormous. Recently, the CIA got into Chen's accounts and liften 14 billion dollars.
Prince didn't even complain, just wrote it off like a drug lord as the cost of doing business.
Business was good until Peking heat was turned up, first on the Myanmar generals and then on Hun Sen and his heir-apparent son Manet (USMA 1999) who obviously missed all West Point classes on honour.
Anyway, as China turned up the pressure Hun & Son decided to do to Chen and Prince exactly what Pol Pot had tried to do to Hun Sen in 1978 -- turn on him with a vengeance and, well, kill him.
Hun Sen stripped Chen Zhi's Cambodian naturalization and passport, and told China what Prince had done. Hun & Son "arrested" Vincent Chen Zhi and held him.
China sent two extremely large security policemen to take Chen to Beijing and even perp-walked him for the state press and a few foreign reporters.
a.d.
David DeVoss
"Poverty and corruption beget crime and the cavalier attitude of Cambodian government officials concerning the steady influx of Chinese workers and visitors has led to an increase in vice and other criminal activities. Police raids on bars, hotels, and casinos have exposed sex-trafficking and prostitution rings, as well as trade in illegal drugs and elephant ivory from endangered wildlife. Chinese nationals are overwhelmingly the perpetrators by a 2 to 1 margin over all other foreigners and locals combined.
Large cybercrime compounds are legion in Sihanoukville. They also persist (in lesser numbers) in the capital city of Phnom Penh in the border towns of Bavet next to Vietnam, and Poipet near Thailand in booming Koh Kong and in a couple of provincial outposts. As reported by Wired and it magazine there are similar complexes in Laos and Myanmar, and The Wall Street Journal recently described a huge scam operation in the Philippines.
Although they may hide behind “front” businesses, including real estate and technology, these compounds thrive on human trafficking and forced labor — as operations centers for online gambling, cyber currency trade, identity theft, telecom fraud, child pornography and the theft of intellectual property. This is known to Chinese as shazhupan, or “pig butchering game.” Scammers typically gain a victim’s trust, romantic or otherwise, before suggesting a cryptocurrency investment that leads to a financial loss.
‘Oh, We All Know’
We have a pretty good view into what’s going on there, Cindy Dyer the US Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons told me last year. Individuals are fraudulently forced into labor. They were offered something that was a really good opportunity but it wasn’t what was promised. Once they are on the compounds the traffickers use force and coercion, so they are not able to leave. They are threatened with harm and may be tortured subjected to electrical shock or sold for sex.
When Dyer challenged Cambodian government officials in November 2023, her reception more often than not was greeted with denial and/or deflection."
David DeVoss
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