NEW YORK TIMES
Every few weeks, fireworks light up the night sky in Cambodia, set off by scammers to salute their biggest swindles.
By the time the shells pop and crackle, somebody’s life savings are probably gone. Maybe the victim fell for an online romance scam or bought into a fake cryptocurrency exchange. Whatever the scheme, the money has vanished, sucked into a complex money-laundering network that moves billions of dollars at a dizzying speed.
The F.B.I., China’s Ministry of Public Security, Interpol and others have tried to combat scammers, who often lurk on social media and dating apps, luring people into bogus financial schemes or other ruses. Telecom companies have blocked numbers. Banks have issued repeated warnings.
Yet the industry persists because its money-laundering operation is so efficient. Unsuspecting victims worldwide lose tens of billions of dollars each year, money that must be scrubbed of its criminal origins and deposited into the legitimate economy. The money-laundering system is so hydra-headed that when governments strike it in one place, it pops up in another.
This underworld peeks out in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, home to a global clearinghouse for money launderers. It can be glimpsed, too, in the coastal city of Sihanoukville, a notorious refuge for fraudsters. Scammers ply their trade from call centers, operating in fortified compounds or on the upper floors of unfinished high-rises. Seaside restaurants are packed with money launderers and other criminals doing business over spicy Chinese food.
We obtained a cache of documents, a kind of money-laundering handbook, and spoke to nearly a half-dozen scammers and their launderers. The documents are not linked to any one scam or victim but reveal a method for moving illicit money that has proved all but impossible to stop.
The money launderers are as vital to criminals as getaway drivers are to bank robbers. Without them, there would be no loot.
Once scammers persuade strangers to part with their savings, they need to quickly move money from one account to another, and one country to another, before their targets discover the ruse and alert their banks or the police.
In the end, the money arrives “clean” — with virtually no trace to the original scam.
So how does it get done?
Following the trail led us, surprisingly, to an established financial conglomerate in Cambodia called Huione Group.
This is not a back-alley shop with a side hustle in cleaning dirty money. Huione is an established firm that does brisk and legitimate business in Southeast Asia and has satellite companies in other parts of the world. Its QR codes are everywhere in Cambodia — customers use them to pay their bills in hotels, restaurants and supermarkets. Huione ads are plastered along major highways. Its suite of financial services include banking and insurance.
But Huione (pronounced Hu-WAY-wahn) is a constellation of affiliates, and not all of them are legitimate. One arm offers bespoke money laundering services, according to the documents, which come from the company, and interviews with two people who are directly familiar with the operation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Another affiliate openly runs an online bazaar for criminals to find money launderers. The precise size of this marketplace is practically impossible to measure, but the analytics firm Elliptic has linked it to $26.8 billion in cryptocurrency transactions since 2021. The industry is so opaque that it is difficult to separate legitimate transactions from illegal ones, but Elliptic says the bazaar is the world’s largest illicit internet market…