AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Southeast Asian scam networks are booming. The U.S. says ordinary Americans lost some $10 billion to cyber scammers last year. Last week, the U.S. Justice Department, in coordination with the U.K., did something about it, seizing about $15 billion in bitcoin from and announcing a slew of sanctions against one of the biggest alleged scam networks in Cambodia. And as Michael Sullivan reports, other countries are piling on.
MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: These indictments and sanctions - they're a big deal.
JACOB SIMS: This is the top form of financial crime impacting Americans now and maybe ever in history. It's probably one of, if not the top, forms of financial crime impacting people all over the world, which is already rivaling the global drug trade in terms of gross profits.
SULLIVAN: Jacob Sims is a visiting fellow at Harvard's Asia Center, focusing on transnational crime in Southeast Asia. He says there are thousands of people working in scam compounds in Cambodia, many trafficked into centers like those run by the Prince Holding Group, the target of last week's action by the U.S. and U.K. Jeremy Douglas is the chief of staff at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
JEREMY DOUGLAS: The Prince Group was massive - there's no doubt about it - within Cambodia, obviously, where the sanctions are very targeted. But also, it's a global entity, so they're sprawling. I mean, they've got bits of their architecture dotted around different jurisdictions in the world and essentially an underground bank.
SULLIVAN: And a connected one too. Prince's Chinese-born chairman, Chen Zhi, was an official adviser to Cambodia's prime minister, Hun Manet, and before that, his father, Hun Sen, who ruled the country for decades. Chen Zhi was the highest-profile person named in the indictment, but Sims says there were more.
SIMS: These are some of the highest-ranking members of Cambodia's elite patronage system that runs the country. This is a material shock. But the real question is, how much is the world willing to keep going after these state-abetted criminal conglomerates that are propping up this regime?
SULLIVAN: Regionally, the answer seems to be very willing, starting in neighboring Thailand, a country with a porous border and complicated relationship with its neighbor.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Thailand's deputy finance minister has stepped down over allegations linking him to transnational scam operations in Cambodia.
SULLIVAN: Deputy Finance Minister Vorapak Tanyawong had been tasked with investigating Thai links to the scam centers. He resigned after media reports his wife had allegedly received close to $3 million in cryptocurrency from a Cambodian scam group.
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VORAPAK TANYAWONG: (Speaking Thai).
SULLIVAN: Vorapak denied the allegations. And it's not just Cambodia. The next day, Elon Musk's SpaceX announced it had disabled 2,500 Starlink terminals on the Myanmar side of the river that separates Myanmar from Thailand - terminals allegedly used to run cyber scam operations in Myanmar after Thailand cut power and internet to the Myanmar side of the river earlier this year. And there's more.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: We begin with the latest on the job scams that are targeting Korean nationals in Cambodia.
SULLIVAN: South Korea repatriated dozens of its citizens from Cambodia last week after two recent murders tied to scamming operations. And even ordinary citizens in Cambodia have become collateral damage. NPR caught up with Prak Sovannara opposite the Prince Group's main bank in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
PRAK SOVANNARA: (Non-English language spoken).
SULLIVAN: "It took three days before they let me withdraw my meager savings," he says, "and transfer them to another bank."
Cambodian officials are being pretty tight-lipped about all of this, and the Prince Group has now gone silent. Here's Cambodia's interior ministry spokesman, Touch Sokhak.
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TOUCH SOKHAK: (Speaking Khmer).
SULLIVAN: He says he understands why the U.S. and U.K. acted and insists Cambodia firmly upholds the rule of law. Prince Chairman Chen Zhi, indicted in Brooklyn last week, remains in the wind.
For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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