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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has unleashed its largest-ever sanctions package, reportedly even larger than that deployed against North Korea, targeting transnational crime syndicates in Southeast Asia.
The move follows the killing, apparently by torture, of a South Korean college student in Cambodia and a slew of recent arrests and extraditions.
The sanctions target 132 entities and 15 individuals. They include two Cambodia-based organizations linked to investment scams, cybercrime and money laundering: the Prince Group, allegedly led by a Chinese national, and the Huione Group, allegedly led by a Cambodian national. The two groups already have been targeted with U.S. and British sanctions.
Seoul also named National Police Agency Commissioner General Kim Chang-yong as ambassador to Phnom Penh.
Seoul felt compelled to act in response to public outrage over reports that a young South Korean embroiled in an online scamming business was tortured to death by enforcers from a telemarketing scam center in Cambodia.
The shocking killing cast light on dubious and deadly practices in some of the more lawless corners of Southeast Asia. The region is an international tourism paradise but also a hotbed of cybercrime.
Tropical paradise rife with risk
Sunny Southeast Asia has long offered amicable, budget-friendly and easily accessible vacation destinations for South Koreans.
However, the near-total lack of street violence and organized crime in their homeland may have desensitized South Koreans to risk. At the same time, their personal prosperity compared with that of Southeast Asians makes them attractive targets for criminals.
In 2012, in response to deadly crimes targeting Korean tourists and expatriates, Seoul dispatched police to the Philippines to work alongside local authorities.
Still, the body count rose. From 2015 to the first half of 2025, 38 Koreans were killed in the Philippines, mostly as a result of robberies and kidnappings, according to Philippine news reports.
Even against that bloody backdrop, gruesome front page news from Cambodia stunned South Korea.
In August, a 22-year-old college student surnamed Park was found dead in an abandoned car in Cambodia. An autopsy revealed the cause of death as blunt-force trauma.
He told his family in July that he was attending an expo in Cambodia. In reality, it appears he was forced to work in a scam center, and a ransom note was sent to his family.
Three Chinese nationals have been arrested in Cambodia in connection with the apparent murder-by-torture. Investigations are continuing.
Muddying the waters of Seoul’s aggressive response are questions of whether South Koreans’ involvement in the scam centers, which focus on fraudulent telemarketing and cyber-marketing, is complicit or coerced.
On Nov. 2, Seoul’s National Intelligence Service, working alongside Khmer authorities, arrested 17 Koreans working in the scam centers in Cambodia.
On Nov. 18, the intelligence service chartered a flight to bring home 64 Koreans detained by Cambodia on suspicion of being engaged in online fraud.
Initial reports suggest that some Koreans entered the country voluntarily, lured by the promise of quick money. Others may have been recruited under pretenses.
Online fraud and telemarketing phishing, also known as vishing, are rampant across South Korea, a country with a large high-tech sector and an advanced network of online retail and financial businesses.
Seoul’s Financial Intelligence Unit has been investigating the cases, which are thought to have led to the recent sanctions.
The China connection
In areas of Cambodia and the Thai-Myanmar border, tightly controlled compounds have sprung up. That’s where criminals and possibly coerced victims undertake online and telephone scams.
The operations are enabled by the opacity of financial transactions in the region, the corruption of local officials and general lawlessness. They are run by what experts say is a new breed of criminals.
“These are Chinese organized crime syndicates. I have not seen the word ‘Triads’ attached to them,” said a Bangkok-based political risk analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his work with multinationals.
Triads are the mobs that have operated since the 19th century out of ethnic Chinese diaspora communities across Southeast Asia, as well as Hong Kong and Macao. Drugs, gambling and protection rackets are among their core businesses.
The online criminals, the risk analyst said, are “mainland Chinese nationals who have taken advantage of open borders and lax tourist visa requirements.”
Key nodes of activity are the borders of Myanmar, torn by war, and Cambodia, where the rule of law is weak. Thailand, the source said, may provide a money laundering hub.
Although the crime rings are run by Chinese criminals, they are not believed to be linked to Beijing.
The source cited the Nov. 13 visit of King Maha Vajiralongkorn to China, the first-ever visit to China by a member of the Thai royal family.
“The king just visited China, and the day before he visited, the Thais extradited a guy who is part of the Yatai Group, an organized crime syndicate,” the Bangkok-based analyst said. “He founded scam centers in Myanmar and was one of the criminals most wanted by Beijing, so as a kind of offering to China, they gave up this guy.”
She Jiliang, chairman of Yatai International Holdings, who holds Chinese and Cambodian citizenship, was arrested by Thai police in 2022 for his links to cyber scams and other crimes, including human trafficking in Cambodia and the Myanmar-Thai border.
The U.S. Treasury Department said this year that Mr. She had created “Yatai City” by transforming “a small village on the Moei River [between Myanmar and Thailand] into a resort city custom-built for gambling, drug trafficking, prostitution and scams targeting people around the world, particularly Americans.”
He was held in Thai prisons and detention centers until three days before the king’s visit, when he was extradited to China.
“He will likely be executed — or probably has been,” the Bangkok source said.
The Myanmar-Thai border is up for grabs because of the civil war. Cambodia is a popular destination for businesses servicing the gambling habits of Chinese living on the mainland, where gambling is strictly forbidden.
The Bangkok source said a crackdown on questionable casinos in the Philippines, where many were found to be fronts for illegal online gambling, had driven many such operators to Cambodia.
The country appears to be luring criminals from across the region, attracted by the lucrative, millennial modus operandi that has been established.
Jake Adelstein, a Japan-based American author and reporter who specializes in organized crime, noted that Tokyo’s long-term crackdown on Japan’s mob, the Yakuza, had sparked a relocation to Cambodia.
“Where better to set up shop than a place where the police are underpaid, corruption is practically a cultural pastime, and you can still buy off the local muscle with a well-timed ‘donation?’” he wrote on CrimeReads in 2024.
Yakuza operations in Cambodia, Mr. Adelstein said, have shifted from more traditional mob enterprises into “sophisticated fraud operations — including cyber scamming.”
The people doing the dirty work in these scam shops are often victims too.
“The victims of these operations are coerced into working long hours under the threat of violence, essentially becoming prisoners of the syndicates,” Mr. Adelstein wrote.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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