China too had been quietly investigating the Prince Group since at least 2020. There have been a number of court cases accusing the company of running online fraud schemes.
The Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau has established a task force “to investigate the “Prince Group, a major transnational online gambling syndicate based in Cambodia”.
At its heart, the US and UK allege, were businesses like Golden Fortune Science and Technology Park, a compound built by the Prince Group in Chrey Thom, close to the Vietnamese border.
In the past the Prince Group has denied any involvement in scams, and said it no longer has any connection to Golden Fortune, but the US and UK investigation argues that there is still a clear business link between them.
Mr Adamovic Davies interviewed a number of people living and working near Golden Fortune for his investigation into Chen Zhi. They described brutal beatings of the mainly Chinese, Vietnamese and Malaysians who tried to escape from the compound, where they were forced to run online scams.
“I think it’s the sheer scale of his operations which really makes Chen Zhi stand out,” he says, adding that it is shocking the Prince Group was able to build a “global footprint” without raising alarm bells given the serious criminal charges it now faces.
“What should be uncomfortable for a lot of people is that Chen Zhi should never have been able to acquire all these assets, in Singapore, London or the US. Lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, bankers, all should have been looking at this group and saying, hang on, this doesn’t add up. And they didn’t.”