The public nature of the criminal transactions is even more shocking when one considers that Huione Guarantee is run by Huione Group, a Cambodian financial conglomerate that includes a company linked to the family of Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Manet. One of the directors of the companies, in fact, is Hun To, a cousin of the Prime Minister, who has been Linked to an Al Jazeera investigation to an alleged scam complex that is reportedly owned by Heng He, a Cambodian conglomerate owned by two Chinese nationals.
Cryptocurrency scam researchers say Huione Guarantee, despite its size, is just one of many money-laundering methods used by pig butchers. Since much of the pig-slaughtering ecosystem has ties to Chinese organized crime, pig-slaughter proceeds are often laundered in a decentralized manner by convincing individual Chinese citizens to accept and deliver cryptocurrency through their personal Alipay accounts for a small fee, notes Gary Warner, chief intelligence officer at cybersecurity firm DarkTower. However, marketplaces like Huione Guarantee offer a path for scammers who don’t yet have a laundering network they can rely on or who need to diversify their options for liquidating funds.
It’s perhaps no surprise that Huione Guarantee began operating in 2021, given that cryptocurrency scams have surged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sophos’ Gallagher notes that in Cambodia, pig slaughtering operations are largely run from hotels and resorts that struggled with the drop in tourism in 2020 and 2021. “They were largely funded or directly owned by Chinese companies in connection with special economic zones and other Belt and Road-linked developments,” he says. Gallagher’s research indicates that workers employed in pig slaughter in Cambodia, often against their will, are typically not citizens but are drawn from the surrounding region. “These facilities follow the same playbook when it comes to taking people’s passports and then using electric shocks, electric prods, and other physical punishments for not following the rules.”
As disturbing as it may be that a service that enables billions of dollars in annual cryptocurrency scam industry transactions is being run openly, and with ties to one of Cambodia’s most powerful families, Elliptic’s Robinson suggests the brazenness offers an opportunity to disrupt a cornerstone of that criminal industry: he proposes international sanctions targeting Huione’s leaders.
“This has the hallmarks of a darknet marketplace, but it’s run by a large Cambodian conglomerate, which has documented ties to the ruling family there,” Robinson says. “There is certainly scope to impose sanctions on a company like this, to prevent this type of marketplace from operating.”
