The Rise and Fall of Chen Zhi
How the Prince Group Boss Built a Scam Empire—and the Arrest No One Expected
2 days ago, Chen Zhi, owner of Prince Group, was arrested in Cambodia and sent back to China.
This was a very unexpected piece of news, as Hun Sen, the de facto ruler of Cambodia, had been protecting Chen Zhi for a very long time. The news of Chen Zhi’s arrest shocked Cambodia and also triggered a strong reaction in China and internationally.
I worked with several highly professional journalists and researchers, we have pieced together the basic path of Chen Zhi’s rise to power and his eventual acquisition of wealth and influence.
Before this, although he was the head of the largest online scam syndicate in Cambodia and even Southeast Asia, Chen Zhi and the Prince Group were shrouded in mystery. Now, we have a general understanding of their history and structure.
A Brief Analysis first：Chen Zhi is believed to have been taken to a detention center in Beijing
The Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security of China announced yesterday that Chen Zhi had been repatriated to China on on January 7. Their WeChat public account articles include a video filmed by CCTV showing the entire process of Chen Zhi being deported.
According to Sing Tao Daily, Chen Zhi was wearing a blue prison uniform with the logo “Dongkan” (东看) and handcuffs. Armed police officers escorted him off the plane in a vehicle with a Beijing license plate, suggesting that he is being held in the Dongcheng District Detention Center in Beijing.
As seen in the video, the SWAT team’s arm patch reads “Blue Sword Commando.” According to available information, the “Blue Sword Commando” is a detachment of the Beijing SWAT team, responsible for coordinating, organizing, and guiding the overall counter-terrorism work.
As early as 2019, Beijing police established a special task force to formally investigate Prince Group.
Origins: Online Games
According to reports, Chen Zhi, who was born in China’s Fujian province, dropped out of school and once worked as a manager at an internet cafe.
Put simply, he was a petty hoodlum who later capitalized on the internet boom, accumulating wealth by operating in the gray areas of the digital world.
Much of this appears to trace back to a game called Legend of Mir—a South Korean online game that entered the Chinese market in 2001 and quickly became a nationwide phenomenon. At the time, most people in China could not afford personal computers and instead played games in internet cafes. The popularity of Legend of Mir, along with its later variants such as The Legend of Mir 2 and Mir World, is difficult to imagine today: in internet cafes, almost everyone was playing the same game.
When I was in university, my classmates and I also spent countless nights in internet cafes playing Mir World.
By today’s standards, the game seems incredibly boring, but at the time its fantastical universe exerted a powerful pull on young men. There were mages who could unleash lightning, Taoists who could summon skeletons to fight for them—a far more dazzling world than everyday life.
For Chinese boys of our generation, most of us played Legend of Mir.
This phenomenon directly propelled Chen Tianqiao, the founder of Shanda Interactive, which operated Legend of Mir in China, to briefly become the richest man in the country.
As the game exploded in popularity—and as its source code leaked—so-called “private servers” emerged: unauthorized, pirate versions of the game run on independently operated servers.
I never played on private servers myself, but they were indeed widespread in China at the time. Some even increased the drop rates for weapons and equipment in the game to attract players. In short, private servers existed in a legal gray zone: clearly illegal, yet extremely difficult to eradicate.
Chen Zhi’s “first pot of gold” was connected to Legend of Mir private servers—but not from operating the servers themselves.
Private servers needed advertising to attract players, which gave rise to a large number of advertising websites.
According to earlier reports by Chinese media, a quasi-hacker group known as the “Knight Group” emerged at this stage. Through hacking, they took control of numerous advertising agent websites, monopolized private-server ad placements, and quickly made 100 million yuan.
In 2011, police in Chongqing cracked the case. 19 suspects, including ringleader Cai Wen, were arrested, while another key suspect, Hu Xiaowei, escaped.
Afterward, those involved paid fines ranging from several million to tens of millions of yuan and received suspended sentences rather than serving prison terms.
Multiple people connected to the case later confirmed to the Chinese outlet Caixin that Chen Zhi was a member of the Knight Group, though he was not among those arrested at the time.
It is speculated that it was around this time that Chen Zhi went to Cambodia to develop his career.
Cai Wen and Hu Xiaowei are also believed to have later relocated to Cambodia, and they were linked to the Prince Group.
According to the OCCRP report, citing Teo Kang Yeow Cliff, a Singaporean who once managed parts of the Prince Group’s business: “Hu Xiaowei is the person who brought Chen Zhi into the business, online gaming,” Teo told OCCRP. “He’s a ‘big brother,’ that’s what Chen always said. He always treated him with utmost respect, that’s for sure.”
Alliance: Online Gambling Aggregation
Chen Zhi also embedded gambling plug-ins into Legend of Mir private servers, marking his transition from online gaming into the online gambling industry.
According to Caixin, citing a 2020 judgment issued by a court in Sichuan, China, a company known as “73 Network,” which was located in the Prince’s Building in Phnom Penh, was accused of running Legend of Mir private-server websites with built-in gambling plug-ins. Technical staff from the site testified that multiple companies under the Prince Group were involved in setting up private servers with embedded gambling functions.
“Each company had its own boss,” the technicians said, “but in reality they all belonged to the same alliance, under the Prince Group.”
Chen Zhi formally entered the online gambling business.
This is consistent with what I heard from my source years ago. According to my source, the Prince Group was not a single company but rather a cluster of online gambling operators that banded together—mostly entrepreneurs from Fujian province—to form the Prince Group.
These were the more successful online gambling companies. Other Fujian-run operations, somewhat smaller in scale, were pushed by competitive pressure from Prince to band together for survival, forming the Henghe Group—now Cambodia’s second-largest online gambling and scam syndicate, second only to Prince.
Prince and Henghe operate in a competitive relationship, with frequent underhanded clashes. That, however, is another story—one I will explore in detail in a future newsletter, unpacking the love-hate relationship between these two groups.
Transformation: From the Online Grey Economy to Real Estate
Among the bosses operating in the grey economy of online gambling and scam, Chen Zhi and the Prince Group made a set of choices that set them apart—and gave their “business” far greater room to expand in the years that followed.
In 2011, Chen Zhi established Hengxin Real Estate, marking a strategic shift from online gambling into the property sector.
It is said that after holding a plot of land in Sihanoukville for just one year, Chen Zhi resold it at a premium of USD 1.4 million, and that three land transactions in total generated profits of USD 15 million.
These claims cannot be independently verified. At the time, both Chen Zhi and the Prince were still largely operating in grey areas, and their startup capital was not clean, of course.
Real estate, banking, and related ventures served primarily as channels for money laundering and image laundering.
What is indisputable, however, is that the Prince Group acquired vast amounts of land in Cambodia and reaped enormous profits from the country’s soaring property prices.
According to senior figures in Cambodia’s real estate industry, Prince purchased hundreds of hectares of land in northern Phnom Penh alone, which are now valued at several hundred million U.S. dollars. I personally visited the area: most of this land remains undeveloped, with only a small portion used for a townhouse project known as One Tropica.
Beyond capital appreciation, real estate offered something even more important: “legitimization.” Cambodia’s skyrocketing land prices provided an effective channel to launder funds generated from grey-market activities. Groups such as Prince Real Estate Group rebranded themselves as professional property developers operating openly in Cambodia.
A Chinese businessman who has lived and worked in Cambodia for many years told Caixin that when Prince’s Phnom Penh real estate arm opened in 2013, the then 26-year-old Chen Zhi appeared as the group’s general manager. Several associates of similar age and appearance—described as aggressive, risk-taking entrepreneurs—attended alongside him. All were from Lianjiang County, Fuzhou.
By around 2015, Prince had already moved from a small office into a large, full-floor corporate space.
According to this source, among Phnom Penh’s elite it was fashionable to address one another by English names, and Chen Zhi adopted the name “Vincent.”
The Times reported that Teo Kang Yeow Cliff recalled how Chen Zhi’s image evolved—from wearing jeans in his early days to donning tailored suits and designer belts.
Prince Bank: Overseas Expansion
Prince Group’s expansion from Cambodia to other parts of the world reached a pivotal point when it obtained a banking license.
According to Caixin, in 2018 Prince obtained a banking license, standing out among numerous competitors—an outcome that surprised many within the local Chinese community.
“Everyone in Sihanoukville was fighting for it. Only two or three licenses were issued during that period,” a person familiar with the matter told Caixin. “Prince’s strength was clearly far beyond what outsiders understood.”
This aligns with my own impressions when I arrived in Cambodia in 2019 and saw Prince Bank advertisements everywhere.
In the tourist city of Siem Reap, and even in the seaside resort town of Kep, Prince Bank billboards lined both sides of the road—sometimes less than ten meters apart. It was astonishing.
At the time, I found it garish and couldn’t understand the purpose.
In retrospect, Prince was using this overwhelming visibility to proclaim its victory—to signal to all of Cambodia that it had secured a banking license others could not. In doing so, it planted the image of “Prince as Cambodia’s number one.” In reality, it had not been so before; that was precisely why such image-building was necessary.
Prince was not born a giant; It grew step by step.
Some journalist colleagues have speculated that obtaining a banking license was Prince’s critical turning point. With Prince Bank, the group could conduct international transfers and cooperate with overseas banks, making it far easier to move funds generated from grey-market activities across borders. This marked the beginning of Prince’s expansion into other countries and regions.
Subsequently, Prince acquired a cigar company in Cuba and purchased listed companies in HongKong and Singapore. Prince Real Estate and Prince Bank in Cambodia have also pursued listing plans, as the group seeks to build itself into an international, publicly listed conglomerate.
Chen Zhi purchased property in London, and according to a former Prince Group executive, he has spent much of his time there in recent years.
A source close to Prince’s leadership said the group holds significant assets in Japan.
More recently, individuals in the cryptocurrency industry have claimed on X that they spotted Chen Zhi in Tokyo. His company is also said to be based in the Roppongi district—one of the city’s most prominent commercial areas.
One of them claimed to have met Chen Zhi at a barbecue restaurant. She didn’t know who Chen Zhi was at first. Chen Zhi talked to her about the Web 3.0 product he was developing, and she said that Chen Zhi was “very obsessed with the product.” After the barbecue restaurant, they went to a second place to smoke cigars.
The Leadership of the Prince Group
According to that source close to the highest levels of the Prince Group, its formal businesses—including banking and real estate—are all “clean” industries. Its other grey-area operations do not use the “Prince” name.
Prince’s online scam compounds are generally branded with the Chinese character “Jin” (meaning “gold”, and sometimes also translate to “king”): the Jinbei series of compounds in Sihanoukville; the Jinyun compound in Chaitong; the Jinhong compound on National Road No. 3 (also known as the Mango Compound); the Jinhe compound in Poipet; and others.
According to this source, the Prince Group has nine true owners—or core shareholders—each on roughly the same level as Chen Zhi.
In addition to these nine, the group has 13 directors who also wield considerable influence within the Prince system. The Prince empire is highly complex: each shareholder controls their own companies and subsidiaries, with extensive cross-shareholdings among them.
Another Chinese businessman close to Prince said that beyond these major shareholders, the group has absorbed a large number of smaller shareholders as well. In total, Prince has more than 100 shareholders of varying sizes. Most of the smaller shareholders were brought in as partners during the development of specific projects or compounds.
“Chen Zhi is a very gentle person,” recalled a former senior executive at a Prince Group subsidiary, describing their first meeting with him. “I first met him at the Prince Club. I was very nervous, but he has strong personal charisma. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Are you tired?’ Instantly, I relaxed. My guard dropped.”
“He’s extremely smart and very quick on his feet,” the former executive added.
The same executive compared Chen Zhi with “Boss Xi,” the owner of Huione (汇旺):
“Huione has a lot of money too, but Boss Xi doesn’t have Chen Zhi’s strategic thinking or big-picture vision. Compared with Prince, Huione’s business is still relatively single-track.”
“Boss Xi treats his subordinates well, like family,” the former executive said. “Chen Zhi may be a bit tougher—he expects his people to get things done, and to get them done well.”
Arrested—and Protected
As Cambodia’s largest scam conglomerate, Prince’s high-profile operations inevitably attracted the attention of law enforcement.
Within many local Chinese communities in Cambodia, there was a widespread belief that Prince was simply too powerful to be taken down. In my view, that belief was shallow—and naive.
According to Caixin, publicly available information shows that Prince came under formal investigation by Chinese police as early as 2020. Multiple court verdicts mention that the Beijing police established a special task force known as the “5.27 Task Force” that year, investigating Prince and arresting 456 suspects.
In reality, enforcement actions may have begun even earlier.
According to a Chinese police officer who worked on the case, as early as 2019 the Ministry of Public Security launched a nationwide investigation into an online gambling case that ultimately traced back to Prince. The case involved police forces from three Chinese provinces and was handled at an exceptionally high level—reportedly receiving direct written instructions from Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.
After extensive investigation, law enforcement had already mapped out Chen Zhi’s operations and the Prince Group’s structure in detail. The evidence was solid, and roughly RMB 20 billion in funds were seized. However, when China’s Ministry of Public Security, through its Department of International Cooperation, approached the Cambodian side to request Chen Zhi’s arrest, Hun Sen refused.
Chen Zhi, Prince, and Huione were linked to enormous flows of black- and grey-market funds.
According to the same police officer, an estimated USD 100 million in funds flowed through these systems every day. The RMB 20 billion seized at the time represented only a small fraction of the total. Huione’s scale, the officer said, may even have exceeded that of China’s Alipay.
Put simply, Hun Sen protected Chen Zhi in 2019.
Among Phnom Penh’s Chinese community, rumors circulated that Hun Sen was Chen Zhi’s “godfather,” and that Chen Zhi had effectively become Hun Sen’s “son,” even adopting another name: “Hun Mazhi.”
Hun Sen’s three sons all bear the name “Hun Ma-”: his eldest, Hun Manet, is now prime minister; his second son, Hun Manith, serves as deputy commander of the army; and his third son, Hun Many, is deputy prime minister.
After surviving this attempted Chinese arrest, Chen Zhi and the Prince Group appeared untouchable within Cambodia.
In previous conversations with people from Prince, they all said Chen Zhi would never be arrested.
“Cambodia will protect him to the end. Cambodia can still extract money from my boss,” one told me. “We hear China is applying pressure, but handing him over to China is unrealistic. The aid China gives Cambodia isn’t as tangible as the money our boss provides—so it won’t happen.”
Looking back now, it’s clear that even within Cambodia—and even within Prince itself—many people were trapped in an information bubble, clinging to naive assumptions and wishful thinking.
This time, Chen Zhi’s arrest was driven in large part by the enormous pressure created by joint sanctions from the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Prince has been seriously wounded this time,” said a source close to Prince-linked compounds after the U.S. and U.K. announced sanctions. “It’s not mainly about the money. The real damage is that the entire system has been exposed. From now on, whatever they do, they’ll have to look over their shoulder.”
Even so, after the U.S. sanctions, Cambodia only shut down the Jinbei casino. The Jinbei scam compound in Sihanoukville and the Jinyun compound in Chrey Thom continued operating as usual.
Another factor was pressure from South Korea.
Many people may not have noticed this, but South Korea applied significant pressure by discouraging its citizens from traveling to Cambodia, effectively forcing Cambodian officials to lobby Seoul to ease restrictions. Eventually, several Prince-linked compounds that had been heavily reported on by South Korean media were investigated and cleared—something unprecedented.
These included the Brother Compound and the Davis Hotel in Phnom Penh, as well as the Mango Compound and Mango 2 Compound on the outskirts of the capital.
South Korean pressure that led to the shutdown of Prince compounds was likely another key factor.
First came U.S. sanctions, then South Korean pressure, followed by Chinese pressure after clashes along the Thai border. Layer by layer, the pressure mounted—until Hun Sen finally abandoned Chen Zhi.
Had he not done so, Cambodia would have simultaneously alienated both the U.S. and China—the world’s two major powers—while also severely offending South Korea and Japan, both critical sources of tourists and investment after China. Add to that the pressure from Thailand along the border, and the Hun Sen regime would have faced the risk of collapse.
It was this acute threat—of political collapse and loss of power—that ultimately forced the Hun family to make a brutal choice: to cut off a limb to save the body, and hand over “Hun Mazhi.”
The Price We Paid
To confront online scam syndicates, my friends and I have paid a heavy price.
The editor-in-chief of Angkor Today where I previously worked, Shen Kaidong, was arrested by the Cambodian government and deported to China within 24 hours. This happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when flights between Cambodia and China were extremely limited.
The immediate trigger was an article we published about corruption in COVID-19 vaccine procurement. But we all knew the real reason: our earlier reporting on online scam operations. Hun Sen’s assistant Dong Dara (now imprisoned himself on corruption charges), as well as the head of Cambodia’s National Security Bureau—Hun Sen’s son-in-law, Dy Vichea—had already summoned us for questioning over our coverage.
On the day the police came to arrest us, the editor-in-chief and I were both outside. I called him, and he said he was going back and wasn’t afraid of the police because they had come to check several times before.
Because of the so-called “blood slave” case, my friend Chen Baorong was arrested by Cambodian police and thrown into prison. He was detained for ten months before being released on bail, after which he was forced into silence. During his imprisonment, I visited him multiple times, and on the day he was released, I went with his family to the court to bring him home.
The Cambodian government claimed Chen Baorong had fabricated “fake news” about the blood slave case. But Chen isn’t even a journalist—how could he fabricate news? He was the leader of a volunteer rescue team, helping victims. By that time, he had already helped rescue hundreds of survivors from scam compounds in Cambodia. He also spoke frequently to Chinese-language media, forcing the issue of scam compounds into public view. Before that, the Cambodian government had repeatedly insisted that “there is no online fraud in Cambodia.”
Another close friend of mine, Mech Dara—one of Cambodia’s most outstanding journalists covering scam compounds—was also imprisoned. Only after the British and U.S. ambassadors personally intervened and negotiated with Hun Manet was he released, 20 days later.
When we went to Kandal Province Prison to pick him up, we were stunned to find dozens of journalists from international media waiting outside. We hugged, we cried.
I thought to myself: maybe it’s really time for me to leave Cambodia.
Three people close to me have been deported or imprisoned. The reality is brutal. Why wasn’t I imprisoned? Perhaps simply because I was more “cowardly.”
Dara once joked—half-seriously—criticizing me for being unwilling to sacrifice myself for reporting and journalism.
I see it differently.
First, I don’t believe journalists should sacrifice themselves for a story. No individual should be expected to give up their freedom—or their life—for the public interest. Journalism is a profession, grounded in professionalism: investigation, verification, and writing.
Second, on a personal level, I am willing to sacrifice for the fight against scams and for journalism—but only if it has meaning. If our reporting could truly change reality, curb the spread of scam compounds, then I would accept that sacrifice willingly. But if it couldn’t, then I didn’t think it was worth it.
Even if our reporting could have led to the arrest of just one person—Chen Zhi alone—that would have been worth it. Chen Zhi is the mastermind behind what is arguably the largest scam syndicate in Cambodia, Southeast Asia, and even the world. But at that time, I didn’t believe we could achieve that.
This time, Chen Zhi’s arrest clearly involved major national interests and geopolitical maneuvering. It was extraordinary—and rare.
In fact, even before I set foot in Cambodia in March 2019, I had already come to terms with the risk. On the flight from Shanghai to Siem Reap, I wrote in my diary: maybe I won’t leave Cambodia alive.
That sentence is still there.
Fortunately—or so it seemed at the time—Chen Zhi and other online gambling and scam bosses were relatively “civilized.” They preferred bribery, state power, legal detention, and deportation. They didn’t rely on crude street violence to make journalists disappear.
Once, after I published an article about a compound linked to the Prince Group, I received a call from Cambodian police. They told me their team was already assembled and ready to come to me. If I didn’t delete the article, they said, they would immediately come and arrest me.
Very civilized.
In June 2025, I finally decided to leave Cambodia. At the moment the plane took off, I remembered that line I had written in my diary six years earlier. I thought: I’m free—I’m finally not going to die in the streets in Cambodia.
But I soon realized I was still too naive.
After the U.S. and the UK announced joint sanctions against Cambodia, the “businesses” of Chen Zhi, the Prince Group, and others were hit hard. Furious and desperate for revenge, they didn’t understand why the U.S. sanctioned them, nor could they retaliate against American or British journalists who reported on them. So they turned to the Chinese journalists they knew.
Through intermediaries, I received word: if I appeared in Cambodia, they would deal with me using methods of the underworld—physically eliminate me.
“There are so many bodies in the Mekong River, no one will investigate who this one belongs to.”
When their interests were truly threatened, they finally bared their fangs.
They were never civilized.
I had no choice but to stay away from Cambodia and cancel my plans to return, even briefly.
In the days that followed, I sat on the back of Grab motorcycles, driving through the streets of Bangkok, listening on loop to A Cruel Angel’s Thesis, the theme song from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The pounding music filled my ears, giving me the courage to keep reporting and writing with composure.
I continued gathering information about the Prince Group and Chen Zhi, and worked with media outlets to publish it.
When I first saw the news that Chen Zhi had been arrested, I could hardly believe it. But a voice inside me said it was real. Then came the verification.
When it was finally confirmed, I felt an immense sense of release. It was the happiest day of the year 2025 for me—smiling through tears.
On my motorcycle back home, my tears were carried away by the wind in Bangkok’s streets.
Now, perhaps, I am finally free.
Some friends congratulated me, saying I could return to Phnom Penh now.
One asked me, “So I’ll meet you next week in PP?”
My eyes welled up.
I still need time—to observe, to assess whether it’s truly safe.
Overall, now that Chen Zhi has been arrested, and even his brothers are on the run, they likely don’t have the time to go after a small-time journalist like me.
At least, not for now.
Final Note
I swear I won’t write another newsletter this long again. This piece took me some time, delayed some of my other work, and probably placed a heavy reading burden on you as well. But there were simply too many things I wanted to share.
Aside from my own interviewing, the information in this article is drawn from the following sources. I have already cited and linked them at the relevant points in the text, but I am listing them again here:
[Sources listed below]
Caixin report：
https://finance.caixin.com/2026-01-08/102401503.html
Phoenix Weekly report:
https://news.ifeng.com/c/8pLp5kscJT8
OCCRP report
https://www.occrp.org/en/scoop/multiple-identities-reveal-ties-between-chinese-businessman-and-cambodian-criminal-conglomerate
The Times report：
https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/chinas-romance-scam-billionaire-ran-web-of-fraud-from-britain-tz9w5v258
Former US Ambassador Joseph A Mussomeli's stark warning remains apt, as do those from the late King Sihanouk. He said: "Cambodia is the most dangerous place you will ever visit. You will fall in love with it, and eventually it will break your heart". https://x.com/LowrieJohn/status/2009849670584209611?s=20
Thank you for your covering. It reveals an overview of how the crime syndicates in Cambodia get so big and powerful. In Vietnam, I usually see news about human trafficking and kidnapping to Cambodia. Now I understand why there was no major crackdown to this.