According to new research published Tuesday by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, a shadowy Cambodian holding company with ties to the highest levels of the country’s party-state has become the largest online criminal marketplace in history. Huione Group – widely regarded as the connective tissue of Cambodia’s massive elite-driven scam industry – boasts a flourishing digital forum dedicated to criminal activities and a suite of related money laundering services for industry practitioners. With more than $24 billion in funds traced through Huione Guarantee over the last three-and-a-half years, it now significantly eclipses Hydra – the largest ever darknet market, which generated over $5 billion in its six years of criminal operations.
Huione as a portrait of next-gen criminal dominance underscores both the relative profitability of cybercrime vis-a-vis the drug trade (from where most of Hydra’s revenues originated) and, equally important, the magnificent scale of operations that can be achieved when elite criminals enjoy reliable state backing.
Hun To, one of Elliptic’s directors, is the cousin of sitting Prime Minister Hun Manet. Huione is also by no means an outlier in terms of Cambodian scam-invested elites and corporations with ties to the state. Deputy Prime Minister Sar Sokha, ruling party senators Ly Yong Phat and Kok An, Prime Ministerial Bodyguard Chief Hing Bin Hieng, stalwart party tycoon Try Pheap, and Chen Zhi, a minister-level advisor to the prime minister are among the small number of ruling party elites with evidenced ties to Cambodia’s scam compounds.
Lest such ties seem incidental, it is important to remember that the Cambodian government has quickly mobilized to denounce and deflect any criticism directed at the above-listed oligarchs. Moreover, in the seven months since Huione initially burst into mainstream attention (and evidence of its wide-ranging crimes was handed over to the Cambodian government), it has faced zero local scrutiny. In the meantime, its revenues have expanded by a healthy 44 percent, according to Elliptic’s updated findings.
In many ways, this exemplar of state-protected organized crime is not a novel development for the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which has ruled the country since 1979. Elite monopolization of lucrative criminal industries has always been a core funding strategy of the ruling coalition. From gun running and tobacco smuggling to land grabbing and illegal logging, the CPP’s economic elite has consistently found its most reliable success (and thereby its most significant utility to the party-state) in its criminal business ventures. Scam-lording is simply the latest and most lucrative evolution in a 40-year resume of CPP elite economic predation and extraction.
However, what is unfolding today does represent a material shift due to one key characteristic. With its natural resources now over-extracted and its population with little capital left to expropriate, the criminal economic engine of the regime is urgently churning toward greener fields abroad.
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Beyond its successful and sustained investments in ecological and transnational crime, the other most convincing explanation for the CPP’s durability has been its “politics of coercion.” Neil Loughlin’s recent eponymous monograph charts the varying low and high intensity coercive strategies that Hun Sen’s (and now Hun Manet’s) CPP have deployed to retain their grip on power despite protracted domestic unpopularity. This too is now, increasingly, an international affair.
By way of a shocking and recent example, last week, Lim Kimya, a former Cambodian opposition politician and dual French national was killed in Bangkok in what bears all the markings of a contracted political assassination ordered by the highest levels of the CPP. The hatchet man (name Ekalak Phanoi, former Thai military) admitted in court this week to having acted out of “gratitude” for a “private benefactor.” Sources within the Thai government suggested privately that the hit was ordered by Phnom Penh though this has not been formally confirmed by Thai government spokespeople.
What is confirmed is that Thai CCTV footage clearly showed a Cambodian man who has now fled to Thailand (identified as Pich Kimsrin) acting as a “spotter,” gesturing to Ekalak at Kimya just prior to the shooting.
Kimsrin’s last known employer was Kieng Chak, now deputy governor of Meanchey district in the Cambodian capital and a former advisor to Hun Sen. Chak himself has circumstantial but convincing links to several other acts of domestic and transnational repression in recent years. Additionally, Kimsrin’s brother Pich Sros is the president of the Cambodian Youth Party (CYP). The CYP is a Potemkin client-party of the CPP, run by pro-government loyalists and trotted out at elections to bolster Cambodia’s thin veneer of multiparty democracy. Pich Sros is best known as the politician who issued the complaint that led to the dissolution in 2017 of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, where Lim Kimya served as an MP.
In short, the CPP did only the bare minimum to hide its ties to this brazen act of extraterritorial political violence which appears explicitly designed to intimidate regime critics living in Thailand and further afield. Regardless of the precise linkages, Kimya’s slaying is a major escalation in a worsening regional climate of transnational repression and sets a chilling precedent.
The combination of this week’s Cambodia-relevant news may appear to observers as a shocking display of strength and boldness from what is generally considered a small player on the regional and global stage. Yet, leveraging its apparent weakness via savvy manipulation of the international community has long been one of the CPP’s most important strengths.
Over the years, Phnom Penh has been able to act with increasing confidence – both in its globally reaching criminal enterprises and its acts of domestic and transnational repression – in direct measure with the impunity it has enjoyed throughout its continued slide into outright criminal autocracy.
The calculations this week were easy for the party. We kill a French-Cambodian national in Thailand in a way that stokes maximum fear in our adversaries across the region? We’ll probably get away with a muted French embassy statement and a meaningless Thai warrant for our accomplice. Nobody will do anything further. We build the world’s largest criminal marketplace with profits from our globally damaging organized cybercrime industry? We can probably leverage that into calls for increased “partnership”/aid funding and maybe even a supportive-sounding U.S. Embassy press release in a state-owned propaganda mouthpiece outlet.
Such miscues and ambivalence from concerned governments were understandable, if still morally indefensible, back when the primary victims of the regime were domestically situated. But now this is the world’s problem.
Thailand’s reputation as a relatively bright spot for human rights in the region, not to mention its tourism industry, is on the line here. French citizens are being murdered with impunity. U.S. citizens are losing billions. Nationals from over 60 countries are being trafficked into the bottom of Cambodia’s biggest industry.
The world’s licit private sector too is taking on untold exposure at the hands of unchecked predatory Cambodian capital. CPP lobbying in 2022 pulled the Kingdom off FATF’s grey list and the anti-money laundering safeguarding it offers to global financial institutions. Prince Group’s skillful leveraging of its state-buttressed legitimacy has exposed Starbucks, Radisson Hotels, NASDAQ, and the entire U.S.-Cambodia Chamber of Commerce to a conspicuous partnership with an established abettor of industrial-scale human trafficking. Lack of safeguarding from regulatory bodies (not to mention failures of corporate due diligence) has led Google and Apple to list products from “the largest online criminal marketplace in history” in their app stores (Google recently removed the app upon media scrutiny).
This present self-defeating reality is avoidable but shifting the status quo will require the world to step back from its decades-long suspended disbelief about the nature of the Cambodian regime.
This moment demands a collective unwillingness to tolerate the worst CPP abuses for the sake of theoretical geopolitical wins or the purposes of a decontextualized myth of reform. Instead, it requires key regional and global stakeholders to urgently mobilize a coordinated, global posture of harm minimization towards the regime. A failure to effectively meet this moment directly endangers regional and global security as well as the lives of countless victims of the regime’s predation.