The U.S. government on Tuesday announced a new tranche of sanctions against individuals and entities connected to Cambodia’s Prince Holding Group, which it has previously accused of running a region-spanning “cyberfraud empire.”
In a statement, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that it was listing nine people and 26 entities linked to Prince, including “leadership, investors in scam compounds, and front companies.”
“Scam centers in Southeast Asia steal billions of dollars from American victims each year,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the statement. “Treasury will continue using its tools to disrupt the networks behind this egregious fraud and protect Americans.”
The action builds on the efforts that OFAC announced in conjunction with the U.K. last October, when it imposed sanctions on 146 individuals and entities connected to Prince, including its chairman, Chen Zhi. At that time, Treasury designated Prince as a “transnational criminal network,” detailing its involvement in cyberfraud, human trafficking, and money laundering on a grand scale.
In parallel, federal prosecutors also unsealed an indictment charging Chen, a Chinese-Cambodian tycoon who has served as advisor to both former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and his son and successor Hun Manet, with wire fraud and money laundering. This involved the seizure of around $15 billion in bitcoin, which the Justice Department described as its “largest ever forfeiture action.”
Treasury described these efforts as its largest ever aimed at disrupting Southeast Asia-based scamming operations, which are run predominantly by Chinese criminal syndicates and rely on a huge corps of trafficked workers from across the globe. According to U.S. government estimates cited by Treasury, such scams cost U.S. citizens at least $10 billion in 2024, a 66 percent increase on the previous year.
Among the individuals targeted in yesterday’s sanctions was Hu Xiaowei, who has been described as Prince’s “second-in-command” and as a “big brother” to Chen, who was arrested and extradited to China in January. Treasury alleged that Hu, who was arrested in Japan earlier this month, helped establish a network of shell companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the British Virgin Islands that were used to launder money from Prince-linked scam compounds.
In particular, it said that Hu controls three companies in the British Virgin Islands: Eagle Fortitude Limited, Leisure Focus Limited, and Future King Inc. Through the latter, he “owns a large network of companies that he uses to manage funds and properties,” Treasury stated. In particular, one Hong Kong-based subsidiary of Future King had “received millions of dollars of funds that have been assessed to have been derived from cryptocurrency investment scam victims.”
The sanctions also targeted a number of subordinates of Hu, investors in Prince-linked scam compounds, and other prominent figures within the organization.
Also Tuesday, Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) proposed amending its rule on the Cambodia-based financial services conglomerate Huione Group to include H-Pay Service PLC, a successor entity. As part of last October’s actions, FinCEN cut off Huione Group from the U.S. financial system, alleging that it has “laundered proceeds of virtual currency scams and heists on behalf of malicious cyber actors,” including Prince Group and its network.
This would effectively “guard against Huione Group’s attempts to circumvent being cut off from the U.S. financial system,” Treasury stated.
In a parallel action, the U.S. Justice Department said that it has seized a cloud computing account used by Huione’s subsidiaries, which also helped transfer proceeds from cyber scams into the legitimate banking sector.
“The Huione Group used this cloud computing account as part of a technological backbone that allowed billions in fraud proceeds to be transferred, moved, and concealed – much of it stolen through Southeast Asian scam centers,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said in a statement.
The latest actions testify to the astonishing complexity of the networks that were established by Prince Group and its various subsidiaries in order to channel and clean the billions of dollars generated by its industrial-scale scam operations. For this reason, this is unlikely to be the last action that the U.S. government announces against the group and its leaders.
