– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

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.

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
scam /skæm/ B2	noun - a dishonest scheme or trick to get money verb - to cheat someone out of money
fraud /frɔːd/ B1	noun - deceitful behavior for personal gain
exploit /ɪkˈsplɔɪt/ B2	verb - to take advantage of someone unfairly
force /fɔːrs/ A2	verb - to make someone do something against their will
criminal /ˈkrɪmɪnl/ B1	noun - a person who commits crimes adjective - involving crime or illegal activities
victim /ˈvɪktɪm/ B1	noun - a person harmed by someone else
operate /ˈɒpəreɪt/ B2	verb - to function or work
facilitate /fəˈsɪlɪteɪt/ C1	verb - to make an action easier
launder /ˈlɔːndər/ C1	verb - to disguise the origin of illegally obtained money
cybercrime /ˈsaɪbərkraɪm/ C1	noun - crime committed using computers
marketplace /ˈmɑːrkɪtpleɪs/ B2	noun - a place where goods are traded
illicit /ɪˈlɪsɪt/ C1	adjective - illegal or forbidden
compound /ˈkɒmpaʊnd/ B2	noun - an enclosure or building complex
mule /mjuːl/ B2	noun - a person used to carry money illegally
crypto /ˈkrɪptəʊ/ C1	noun - short for cryptocurrency
telegram /ˈtelɪɡræm/ A2	noun - an instant messaging app
bank /bæŋk/ A1	noun - a financial institution
run /rʌn/ A1	verb - to operate or manage

Key Grammar Structures

• On the edge of this once sleepy coastal town in Cambodia, a concrete fortress looms. Tainted by allegations of fraud and exploitation.

  ➔ Passive voice (present simple)

  ➔ The sentence uses passive voice where the subject 'a concrete fortress' receives the action, rather than performing it. 'Tainted' is a past participle.

• What hadn’t been explored was what infrastructure existed to allow for it.

  ➔ Complex sentence with inversion and past perfect

  ➔ 'What hadn’t been explored was [what]... ' is an inversion for emphasis, and uses past perfect 'hadn’t been explored'.

• These are places where trafficked people are forced to scam people out of money in different jurisdictions around the world.

  ➔ Relative clause (defining) with infinitive of purpose

  ➔ 'where trafficked people are forced [to scam]... ' is a defining relative clause, and 'to scam' is an infinitive of purpose after 'forced'.

• 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.

  ➔ Non-restrictive relative clause with appositive

  ➔ 'the instant messaging app' is an appositive explaining 'Telegram', and 'in which buyers...' is a non-restrictive relative clause.

• Officials who’ve tracked the platform say, with everything in the one place, scams can operate more efficiently and expand exponentially.

  ➔ Participle clause (present perfect) for contrast

  ➔ 'who’ve tracked' is a reduced relative clause (present perfect participle), adding information about 'Officials'; 'with everything...' shows cause/ condition.

• This is a company that doesn’t want to be understood.

  ➔ Infinitive of purpose after 'want'

  ➔ 'to be understood' is an infinitive clause expressing the purpose or desire after the modal-like verb 'want'.

• You have “Gou tui”, which literally means “Dog pushers.”

  ➔ Direct quotation with relative clause

  ➔ '“Gou tui”' is a direct quotation, and the relative clause 'which literally means...' explains it.

• The volume dwarfs anything that’s existed at any other point in time.

  ➔ Present simple in past context with 'dwarfs'

  ➔ 'dwarfs' is present simple for a general truth, even referencing past events ('that’s existed').

• And China has become a very important political and financial backer to Cambodia’s development.

  ➔ Cleft sentence with 'has become' (present perfect continuous implication)

  ➔ This is a pseudo-cleft structure. 'has become' indicates a process leading to the current state, implying continuous aspect.

• We are going to Bartycka Street.

  ➔ Present continuous for future arrangement

  ➔ 'are going' uses present continuous to indicate a planned action in the near future.