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On the edge of this once sleepy
coastal town in Cambodia,
a concrete fortress looms.
Tainted by allegations of fraud and exploitation.
We’re in the car right now because
it’s not especially safe to be out.
This isn’t just a getaway.
This is a key gateway to global crime.
A number of grim reports have surfaced of
the proliferation of scam compounds in the region.
These are places where trafficked people
are forced to scam people out of money
in different jurisdictions around the world.
What hadn’t been explored
was what infrastructure existed to allow for it.
And I increasingly found that fingers
were being pointed basically in one direction.
You’ll see a Huione Pay shop there.
It’s called Huione.
And government authorities
say it’s a one-stop shop for criminals.
The Treasury Department has moved to classify
Huione as engaged in money laundering.
Huione is facilitating by far
largest dark marketplace that’s ever existed.
It’s really the Amazon for criminals.
It just blow my mind.
Wow, this is another world.
The most brutal aspects of cybercrime are
no longer just the work of disparate individuals.
They’re now connected by a streamlined,
industrial system using apps available to anyone.
And according to authorities,
one company sits at the center of it all.
So when I came here last,
there was a big Huione sign.
That has been taken down.
There’s no clear markings of what it even is now.
This is one of the headquarters for the Huione Group.
A large Cambodian conglomerate
offering financial services that,
at least on the surface, appear clean.
Under the Huione Group umbrella,
the first is Huione Pay,
which is a payment services arm of the conglomerate.
And in many ways,
this is a very legitimate business.
When you go to a Cambodian restaurant
or a hotel or a convenience store,
you’ll find a QR code, often with the Huione logo.
You can use your phone
and an app to pay for a product with that QR code.
And that is the public front of that subsidiary.
But the US government alleges that
behind the scenes of Huione Pay,
is a cell called Huione International Pay,
which they claim is involved
in money laundering.
The script is somewhat familiar
for how this all plays out.
Let’s say you’re sitting in the US,
you receive a random WhatsApp message from someone
claiming that they want to get to know
you — a fake romance.
Once that scammer has taken funds
from that victim,
according to those that we’ve spoken
to within Huione Pay,
a scammer and a money mule
will be matched together
by somebody actually referred
to as a “matchmaker.”
So that money is then moved by
a money mule into another account
and then offshore and then into cryptocurrency.
And once that entire chain has been completed,
Huione will come in
and take a commission
for bringing the scammer and money mule together.
The second arm of the Huione Group
that’s implicated with
illicit activity is called Huione Guarantee.
It is an online marketplace hosted on Telegram,
the instant messaging app,
in which buyers and sellers can meet and purchase,
in many cases, illegal items.
Huione Guarantee sells
everything that an online scammer needs
to target and extract money from
its victims all over the world.
So that ranges from stolen personal data,
all the way through to receiving
and laundering payments from victims.
What Huione has said in its defense
is that all it does is serve as a guarantor
and that it can’t moderate every single ad that’s
posted on Telegram within its channels.
Officials who’ve tracked the platform say,
with everything in the one place,
scams can operate more efficiently
and expand exponentially.
These marketplaces are vast.
They can have thousands of merchants and hundreds
of thousands of users overall.
The volume dwarfs anything that’s
existed at any other point in time.
All that first generation of darknet markets
— Silk Road, AlphaBay —
in total, they did about 11 billion dollars worth of transactions,
whereas Huione Guarantee on its own did 28 billion.
It’s just absolutely enormous in terms of scale.
But proving Huione facilitates illegal activity
is not as easy as it appears.
Although registered as a privately owned
business in Hong Kong,
very little is known about its finances.
This is a company
that doesn’t want to be understood.
It doesn’t want to maintain a public persona
and it wants to be a bit of a black box.
But internal accounting documents
seen by Bloomberg,
reveal how Huione International Pay
kept meticulous records,
suggesting its employees may have
actively brokered illegal deals.
Within the documents,
there are cells devoted to each victim.
It will have the amount of money
that was taken from the victim,
it will have the bank where money was wired to.
So what we’ve been able to do with these
documents is create a direct line from Huione
to the victims who have fallen prey to scams
and also to the money mules
who’ve been directly involved in moving
those funds out of the US
and converting them into crypto.
Huione operates in public
Telegram groups similar to chat rooms,
where thousands openly buy, sell and trade
illicit goods and services,
concealed only by the unique use of slang.
So there’s a lot of activity here,
lots of advertisements
for different kinds of scams.
So here you have one advertisement saying
This is not how normal people
would talk in Chinese.
So here they’re using the term “Ban zhuan.”
That literally means “Moving bricks.”
You have “Gou tui”,
which literally means “Dog pushers.”
“Jingliao” refers to in-depth, relationship
building with the victim.
In Western media,
people call it “pig butchering.”
A person who doesn’t understand
anything about this industry would look at this
and think it’s all gibberish.
This sprawling ecosystem for criminal activity
has come a long way since the early 2010s,
when one young Vietnamese hacker
gained access into the database
of almost 200 million American identities.
I was making, like, three million USD
by selling phone information and US identities.
In Ngo’s criminal past,
he had to create his own website
to advertise and sell the data he’d stolen
and launder the profits himself.
The framework Huione has created
facilitates all of this.
Anybody nowadays, can be a cyber criminal.
It’s a lot easier than before.
This is one of these new Huione groups
and this group has 4500 members.
It’s very simple — you just send a join request
and immediately you got into the groups.
And this group is related to money laundering
from 10 million to, like, at least 300,000 USDT.
It’s kind of like eBay or Amazon.
Data, bank account, social media accounts.
You can search anything.
Investigators say there’s a reason
why the group chats are written in Chinese.
Much of the criminal activity
in these Telegram chats
can be tied to China.
When you drive through Cambodia, you’ll notice
something almost immediately,
which is that China has a large
development presence in the country.
So on the roads,
many of the infrastructure projects
will often be sponsored by Chinese companies.
And China has become a very important
political and financial backer
to Cambodia’s development.
But that’s really one piece of the answer
for why China has such a stake in Cambodia.
The cybercrime industry in Southeast Asia,
these scam compounds for example,
are a multibillion-dollar industry
and they’re often underwritten by Chinese
mafia members.
That direct relationship has been key to
Huione’s rapid growth,
according to one UN report.
It also says Cambodia is a major driver behind
Southeast Asia’s transformation into the world’s
fastest-growing cyber fraud hub.
We’re about to enter a part of the city
called Chinatown
which is a pretty sketchy part of Sihanoukville.
There are Chinese-run casinos here.
A lot of security in and out of these compounds.
Human rights groups say thousands of trafficked
people have been imprisoned on the floors
above the casinos, held against their will
to keep the scam operations running.
Here we have some of the electric batons,
electric shackles,
that we saw for sale on Huione Guarantee.
The advert mentions that these are for use
on what they call “Runaway dogs”
which is jargon for individuals
that have escaped from scam compounds.
As a blockchain analytics firm,
Elliptic could track the spoils from scams
as they were converted into cryptocurrency.
A trail that sparked a two-year investigation.
This is probably one of the most complex
pieces of research we’ve ever had to undertake.
We came to the conclusion
that the vast majority of transactions
on this marketplace were illicit in nature.
We are going to Bartycka Street.
We’re looking for a company called Huione Crypto.
In 2023, to circumvent Cambodia’s
complex crypto laws,
people familiar with Huione’s operations say,
it established its very own
cryptocurrency exchange known as Huione Crypto.
Not in Cambodia, or China but in Poland.
I introduced myself, I said I’m a journalist.
He said, “This is a virtual office,
goodbye,” and just hanged up.
I found tens,
hundreds of companies with the same address.
This is not illegal so just a company
renting a virtual address
to pretend they operate here.
While virtual addresses like these are commonplace
in legitimate business,
gaps and inconsistencies
in crypto regulation can also
be exploited by criminals wanting to
move money without detection.
With other business branches in Singapore,
Canada and the US,
Huione’s tendrils stretch across the world.
This here is Panda Bank on the left-hand side.
Investigating Huione further has only
uncovered more mysteries.
Huione has directors that also work as directors
for other powerful
conglomerates and banks in Cambodia.
Hun To, a director of Huione Pay,
is the cousin of Cambodia’s Prime Minister.
He’s also a former director of Panda Bank,
a major commercial financial institution in Cambodia.
And another director of that bank is He Yanming,
the listed owner of Huione Crypto.
This is potentially the tip of the iceberg.
It raises this broader issue of — is Huione acting alone?
How deep does this really go?
And that’s a question
we don’t know how to answer yet.
According to Elliptic’s research,
the Huione Group entities,
which include Huione Pay, Huione Crypto,
and Huione Guarantee,
have received over 91 billion dollars
in crypto assets in the last five years alone.
Since Elliptic published their research in July 2024,
steps have been taken to put pressure on Huione.
Telegram has taken action and has shut down
most of the channels used by Huione Guarantee.
Tether’s USDT stablecoin is accepted
on Huoine Guarantee.
We have seen Tether freeze wallets
both on instruction of law enforcement
but also based on their own investigations.
The other more significant step
from international agencies
was taken by the US.
The Treasury Department has moved to classify Huione
as a foreign entity engaged in money laundering
and effectively blacklist it from US markets.
In this underworld, though,
survival is built into the system.
Moderators from old Telegram
groups have directed business
to other marketplaces,
including one Huione owns a direct stake in.
Huione has also developed its own
stablecoin known as USDH,
which will evade anyone
trying to freeze their wallets.
And as of June 2025, Huione Crypto
appears to have rebranded itself as Kex.
According to Chainalysis, Huione’s
transaction volumes remain as high as ever.
And a number of reports suggest its operations
continue largely uninterrupted.
It’s basically a game of whack-a-mole.
For every Huione that’s taken down,
another one sprouts up.
And the scariest part of all of this is that
this isn’t some dark corner of the Internet
where you have to be in the know to access it.
This is something that anyone can participate in.
This is all in the open.
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