When the global scam king targets the world: Howard Chua-Eoan

Key topics:Chen Zhi, global scam mastermind, now fugitive in multiple jurisdictionsPig-butchering scams exploited victims via fake personas and forced laborScam networks spread across Asia, with Chinese-Hokkien links prominent.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Howard Chua-Eoan.I’ve taken both personal delight and dismay at the fall of Chen Zhi, the accused mastermind of a worldwide scammer network who is now an international fugitive. It was a dizzying ride up and now down for the 37-year old. My Bloomberg colleagues describe Chen’s alleged spoils in much detail in the wake of his US indictment: $15 billlion in Bitcoin seized by the US; $115 million in assets, including cars, expensive liquor and a yacht confiscated by Singapore authorities; an office building and other properties worth around $150 million in London; $300 million of stakes in Hong Kong-listed public companies and commercial property. Having relocated sometime around 2011 from China to Cambodia after authorities began looking into scam activities, he won influence with the Phnom Penh government and through it began to ingratiate himself with the great political powers of the world.And here’s why I am happy he is now the target of almost every jurisdiction in the world: The alleged basis of his loot is a poisonous combination of human malice, one that pitted jungle plantations of slave labor against the aging, isolated and lonely in all parts of the world. As a single person clearly identifiable as such by my social media profile, I’ve been caught up partway in some attempts to part fools from their money. The initial approaches seem innocuous enough: An attempt to strike up a friendship via Instagram, for example, citing interests in common — restaurants, ethnicity, the pain of being strangers in strange lands. But a review of the IG profile of the would-be “friend” reveals a gallery of stock photos with banal captions, scores of posts published on a single day or two to give the impression of a real person. It’s like unmasking the Phantom of the Opera..Read more:.Think twice before trusting financial advice on social media.And what does this make-believe — which can take place over weeks or longer — lead up to? Pig butchery. It isn’t an allusion to Carl Sandburg’s poem Chicago. It’s kind of swindle in which “scammers take on fictional profiles, initiate contact with hapless marks, and then slowly gain their trust before tricking them into fake investments” — as defined by the authors of the new book Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds. The original Chinese neologism has enough of a culinary hint to imply a period of “fattening up” before a hog is led to the abattoir. What compounds this already reprehensible crime is that those doing the scamming were probably scammed into this deceit themselves. Many were lured by ads promising large incomes in exotic lands. Instead, they ended up being trapped in horrific situations, living in forest camps, forced to take on fake personas to fool faraway strangers, being subjected to physical and sexual punishment at the whim of their captors. The worst of these camps are in chaotic Myanmar, which, according to the United Nations, may house as many as 120,000 of these digital slaves. But they’ve popped up in unexpected places: Authorities broke up a scam camp based in the Isle of Man, between Britain and Ireland, that had nearly 100 indentured “remote workers” pushing online fraud from January 2022 to January 2023. While the operations of Chen Zhi and his Prince Group now appear to be neutralized, the suspected perpetrator of the Manx scam is still at large. So are many others.What’s personally dismaying is that many of the villains in this continuing tragedy have links to Fujian, my ancestral province in China, and particularly to the areas that speak the Minnan dialect, or Hokkien, which I can still converse in. I’m very proud of my heritage, but everything has a dark side. The book Scam traces the origins of pig butchering to Taiwan, which lies just across a narrow strait from Fujian and where 70% of the population speak Hokkien. When the government went after them, many moved their operations over to Fujian. Indeed, the concept of pooling resources to scam people seems to have originated in Anxi county in Fujian, where Hokkien-speaking families organised themselves into commission-earning teams to commit online fraud — a labor intensive process seemingly replaced by captive labor when the scam masters were forced overseas.Beijing cracked down in Fujian because because most scam victims were (and remain) Chinese mainlanders. Indeed, most of the captive scam laborers are Chinese forced to send alluring messages in Mandarin to their compatriots. English proficiency is increasing, however, especially with the recruitment of Filipinos. In any event, Chinese law enforcement in the 2010s resulted in alleged criminals fleeing to Southeast Asia, where they could mingle among long-established overseas Chinese communities. Many are of Hokkien descent, especially in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. Renouncing Chinese citizenship, Chen chose Cambodia and prospered there, accumulating several passports including diplomatic documents that allowed him into the US. That run is over and now he’s on the run..Read more:.BHI 2.0: Joburg broker disappears with R30m in alleged Ponzi scam.I feel slightly less bad about my parochial perspective only because Chen seems to be from just north of Fujian’s Hokkien-speaking regions, from a county that speaks Hokchew. But that’s little comfort in light of the vast evil he and other princes of fraud have wrought across the world. Chen is now one of the most wanted fugitives in the world, with at least nine jurisdictions investigating him and possible shell entities associated with him. Taiwan alone is looking into nine enterprises linked to Chen. Even tiny Palau in the western Pacific is watching for him. The US indictment says he connived with “known organised crime facilitators” to try to set up a resort there. Not even paradise was safe..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.