News
Cambodian company linked to cryptocurrency scams and money laundering
Crypto scams have become a hugely profitable illegal industry, as most people around the world probably know, but the big news this month was the exposure of a Cambodian-Chinese platform allegedly used by multiple scammers in Asia.
Ellipticala cryptocurrency tracking company, said last week that its researchers had discovered that Huione Guarantee is a “multi-billion dollar marketplace used by online scammers” and that one of the companies in the group “is actively involved in laundering the proceeds of scams around the world.”
Huione Guarantee (“汇旺担保”) is part of the Huione Group, a Cambodian conglomerate with ties to Cambodia’s ruling family, he says, and the scale of the sums involved is enormous: merchants reportedly made $11 billion in transactions in the three years since its inception, during the Covid-19 pandemic. That includes $3.4 billion this year.
ALSO SEE: Thai economy rocked by factory closures, cheap Chinese imports
Huione Guarantee has been described as “a deposit and escrow service for peer-to-peer transactions that allows users to buy and sell via the Telegram messaging service with the cryptocurrency Tether” – USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin, which can be traced via the blockchain, to ensure they don’t defraud each other.
Elliptic could have traced the flow of funds, but said payment apps and bank transfers were also used. Huione Guarantee claims to be a neutral platform, with no responsibility for what is sold.
“However, the majority of goods and services offered today appear to be aimed directly at cyber scam operators.”
The Golden Sand Hotel and Casino is located in the Cambodian resort of Sihanoukville, a city where Chinese gangsters have reportedly set up scam centers during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are believed to be linked to local authorities, who are believed to be linked to powerful politicians. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
“A market for scammers”
The numbers involved are huge, but not surprising, given a report released in Bangkok last month by Jason Tower of United States Institute of Peace and other experts, who estimated that global scam revenues totaled about $64 billion last year.
Elliptic’s report highlighted a platform where third-party merchants allegedly offer not only money laundering, but also other services for this illegal ecosystem, such as producing deepfakes, developing websites for “pig butchering” scams, and items that can be used to track and restrain people held in forced labor sites.
“I don’t know if Huione Guarantee was initially created with this in mind, but it has certainly become primarily a marketplace for online scammers,” said Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s co-founder and chief scientist. Cable.
Robinson said Elliptic knew of about 10 platforms like Huione Guarantee that are used by cryptocurrency scammers, but none as large as it. “It’s the largest public guarantee platform for illicit crypto transactions that we know of,” he said.
The darker side of this industry is the complexes that have been set up in semi-lawless places like Shwe Kokko on the Thai-Myanmar border, Sihanoukville in southern Cambodia or the Golden Triangle SEZ in northern Laos, where thousands of job seekers from dozens of countries have been trafficked or lured, then tortured and forced to engage in online scams.
Elliptic said its researchers found “GPS tracking chains and electric batons for sale” on the Huione Guarantee platform, used in the scam centers where enslaved victims are forced to work.
ALSO SEE:
Fraudulent companies in Southeast Asia stole $64 billion in 2023: report
High-tech crime wave in Asia: Computer scams and casinos steal billions
Tech giants ‘doing little’ to combat rampant social media scams
Macau junket king Alvin Chau sentenced to 18 years in prison for casino crimes
Criminal gangs control some economic zones in Myanmar and Laos, UN says
Jim Pollard
Jim Pollard is an Australian journalist based in Thailand since 1999. He worked for News Ltd newspapers in Sydney, Perth, London and Melbourne before travelling to South East Asia in the late 1990s. He was editor of The Nation for over 17 years.