Cambodia’s $19B Crypto Nightmare: Officials Linked to Forced-Labor Fueled Scam Network
Beneath the glossy veneer of crypto’s promise lies a darker reality—one where Cambodian officials allegedly greased the wheels of a $19 billion scam operation. Human cost? Forced labor. Financial cost? A black eye for an industry already fighting regulatory wolves.
How’d they pull it off? Classic playbook: exploit desperation, dodge oversight, and let greed run the show. Meanwhile, Wall Street still can’t decide if crypto is ‘digital gold’ or a high-risk casino chip. Some things never change.
Source: The Report
Cambodia’s Government Linked to Crypto Scam Economy Worth 60% of GDP
HRC identifies the Huione Group as central infrastructure in what it calls a “vertically integrated” scam industry that now accounts for nearly 60% of Cambodia’s GDP.
The group includes platforms used to move billions in illicit funds, many of which rely on trafficked workers and cryptocurrency rails designed to bypass financial oversight.
“Cambodia is likely the absolute global epicenter of next-gen transnational fraud in 2025,” wrote Jacob Sims, the report’s author and a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center.
He accused the Cambodian state of providing support “systematically and insidiously” to these operations.
At the center of the allegations is Huione Guarantee, a Telegram-based escrow platform through which over $4 billion has flowed since 2021, according to the U.S. Treasury. Hun To, a cousin of the current Prime Minister Hun Manet, sits on the board of the Huione Group.
The report also names Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Sar Sokha as a co-investor in one of the country’s largest scam compounds. Requests for comment from government offices have not yet received a response.
The report’s findings echo last month’s report, which warned about Southeast Asia’s scam operations expanding globally.
According to HRC, criminal networks are moving out of Sihanoukville and Phnom Penh and into rural provinces like Koh Kong and Pursat, where new scam compounds have emerged since 2022.
The report also indicates the role of crypto in the growth of these scams. Citing blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, it notes that Huione has launched its own stablecoin to process illicit payments outside traditional banking systems.
These tools, the report claims, have driven the global spread of scams such as crypto investment fraud and “pig butchering.”
HRC’s report presents a stark picture of how crypto technology, political power, and organized crime are becoming deeply entangled in Cambodia’s economy, raising international alarm about the unchecked growth of scam compounds and digital financial crime.
Criminal Syndicates Build Custom Crypto Ecosystems to Launder Billions, UN Report Warns
The crypto scam network allegedly tied to Cambodian officials is part of a much larger, rapidly evolving operation spanning Southeast Asia and beyond, according to a new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Criminal syndicates are no longer exploiting existing crypto platforms; they’re now creating their own.
UN warns of global crypto crime surge: Militias exploit stablecoins, illicit mining, and encrypted markets to launder billions and evade regulators.#UN #Stablecoinshttps://t.co/9cCaNaT4fE
The report shows how groups launch exchanges, stablecoins, gambling apps, and even entire blockchain networks to launder funds and dodge detection.
One prominent example is the Cambodia-based Huione Guarantee, recently rebranded as Haowang.
The platform has processed over $24 billion in crypto since 2020 and serves nearly a million users, the UNODC found. It now operates a proprietary blockchain (Xone Chain), exchange, stablecoin, and even a branded Visa card, introduced in February 2025.
These operations are often backed by forced labor and industrial-scale scam centers in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, where AI and blockchain tools fuel phishing, investment fraud, and pig butchering schemes.
As enforcement tightens, these underground networks are expanding into Africa and Latin America.
Meanwhile, in the first three months of 2025, the crypto market lost $1,635,933,800 across 39 incidents, according to the blockchain security platform Immunefi, indicating the scale and reach of this growing cybercrime ecosystem.
