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Chen Zhi, who has been accused by the US of running one of Asia’s largest criminal cyber scam organisations, has been arrested in Cambodia and sent to China.
Phnom Penh arrested and extradited Chen, 38, who was born in China but also has Cambodian citizenship, following a request from Beijing, its interior ministry said in a statement.
The ministry added that Chen’s Cambodian citizenship had been revoked.
Two other Chinese nationals, Xu Ji Liang and Shao Ji Hui, have also been arrested and deported, the ministry said.
The arrests were “within the scope of co-operation in combating transnational crime” and followed several months of “joint investigative co-operation” between authorities in Cambodia and China, the ministry said in its statement late on Wednesday.
Cambodia, which has become an epicentre of scam operations, has faced increasing pressure in recent months to crack down on the criminal networks that defraud people around the world out of billions of dollars.
The US and UK in October indicted Prince Group, which is chaired by Chen, for running industrial-scale scam centres. The company and its affiliates lured workers into prison-like complexes in Cambodia where they were held against their will and forced to run cyber romance and investment scams, according to the indictment.
The US estimated that Americans lost at least $10bn in 2024 to scam operators based in south-east Asia.
Chen, who was an adviser to former Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen, became a naturalised Cambodian citizen in 2014 and later received the honorific “Neak Oknha”, which required a donation of $500,000 to the government.
In 2015, he founded the Prince Group, which built businesses in real estate and financial services across Cambodia.
US authorities allege Chen and his top executives secretly expanded Prince Group “into one of the largest transnational criminal organizations in Asia”, controlling “illicit financial flows of billions of dollars”.
Under Chen’s direction, Prince Group operated “forced-labour scam compounds across Cambodia that engaged in cryptocurrency investment fraud schemes and other fraudulent schemes and used its vast network of business enterprises to launder its criminal proceeds”, the US indictment said.
Prince Group also ran “pig butchering” scams, where fraudsters cultivate victims’ trust over time with false promises of huge profits before “butchering”, or swindling, them.
South-east Asia has become the centre of such operations, with Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos hosting hundreds of scam compounds.
Researchers and investigators say thousands of people have been trafficked to south-east Asia with the promise of lucrative jobs but are instead forced to work in scams compounds under brutal conditions.
Prince Group and a lawyer for Chen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
