A conglomerate, a militia city, and 276 arrests: how the Cambodia-Myanmar scam compounds actually get reached

A single scam compound page can tell you what a fake trading app looks like. It cannot tell you who owns the building it runs out of, why nobody has been arrested for it in three years, or why the next one opens somewhere else within weeks. For that you need to read several enforcement actions side by side, because no single one of them reaches the whole thing.

Four actions against Cambodian and Myanmar scam compounds, taken over roughly eighteen months, each reached a different layer of the same industry. Put together, they sketch an organisation chart that no single indictment shows on its own, and they show exactly where the reach runs out.

A conglomerate and a militia city

The Prince Group case and the September 2025 Treasury action describe two different organisational models operating a few hundred miles apart, and the difference matters.

Prince Holding Group, according to the October 2025 indictment against its founder and chairman, Chen Zhi, was structured as a conventional conglomerate, “dozens of business entities in more than 30 countries”, that prosecutors allege sat on top of forced-labour compounds in Cambodia. It looked, on paper, like a normal corporate group. Chen Zhi has been charged with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. In January 2026 Cambodia arrested him and sent him to China, not to the United States; as with any indictment, the US charges are allegations he is presumed innocent of unless and until proven otherwise in court.

The compound named in Treasury’s parallel September 2025 sanctions, Yatai New City in Shwe Kokko, Karen State, Myanmar, runs on a different model entirely. Treasury describes She Zhijiang as its creator and largest shareholder, and Saw Chit Thu, leader of the Karen National Army, an armed group, as its co-creator. One compound is a business venture; the other is a special economic zone built with its own private military. Both men were sanctioned, not charged, an executive action, not a criminal conviction, and OFAC’s own designation record is the citable source for it.

That distinction, corporate front versus militia-protected territory, is why the two compounds call for different tools, and why neither tool alone was going to be enough.

What $10 billion buys

Treasury’s September 2025 action put a floor under the money: it estimated Americans lost at least $10 billion in 2024 to Southeast Asia-based scam operations, a 66% increase on the year before. That is a US government estimate of reported losses reaching American channels alone, a floor, not a full measurement, and the growth rate is the more important number. This was, by the government’s own account, a bigger industry in 2024 than in 2023.

Prince Group’s forfeiture is what that industry’s proceeds look like when they are still findable. US prosecutors moved to seize roughly 127,271 bitcoin, worth about $15 billion, the largest forfeiture action in Justice Department history. It was seizable specifically because it sat in unhosted wallets: never handed to an exchange that could be subpoenaed, but also never converted into real estate or cash that would have been harder to trace on a public ledger.

Three tools, three different targets

Read as a set, the four actions show three distinct instruments, each built to reach a different part of the network, and each one that reaches its target leaves the other two layers standing.

A criminal indictment reached Chen Zhi, the person alleged to sit atop the corporate structure, but an indictment against someone outside US custody is, on its own, largely symbolic. Chen Zhi was arrested in Cambodia in January 2026 and sent to China rather than to the United States.

A sanctions designation reached She Zhijiang and Saw Chit Thu, people who will very likely never appear in an American courtroom. Designations don’t require an arrest; they make the compound’s banking relationships, land holdings and corporate vehicles radioactive to anyone who wants continued access to the dollar system. It is the tool built for the militia leader who isn’t going anywhere.

The April 2026 takedown is the outlier: it produced at least 276 arrests, and it reached management, not just infrastructure. A grand jury in San Diego charged Thet Min Nyi, a 27-year-old Burmese national, with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy for allegedly managing scam-centre operations; three more defendants were apprehended in Dubai and one in Thailand rather than only charged in absentia. As with the other charges described here, these are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Who is actually messaging you

Treasury’s September 2025 designation describes the recruitment pipeline inside these compounds: workers brought in under false pretences, then held through debt bondage, beaten for missing quotas, threatened with forced commercial sex work, with families asked for ransom to secure their release. The Prince Group indictment separately describes trafficked workers confined in prison-like conditions and forced to run the scams themselves, one Brooklyn-linked network alone tied to fraud against more than 250 victims.

That is worth sitting with the next time a conversation with a “friendly stranger” from one of these platforms feels oddly scripted. The person typing is very often not a beneficiary of the fraud and frequently not there by choice. It doesn’t change what a target should do, stop, verify independently, report it, but it explains why appeals to conscience don’t work, and why blocking one account never stops the operation. The account is staffed like a call centre, because it is one.

What still isn’t reached

Put the four actions side by side and the honest reading is: partial, layered, and still short of the top. Chen Zhi is charged in the US but was sent to China, not to a US court. She Zhijiang and Saw Chit Thu are sanctioned, not arrested, and Saw Chit Thu commands an armed group inside territory the Myanmar state does not fully control; there is no extradition path that reaches him. The 276 arrests are the deepest cut into personnel yet, and they still describe managers and recruiters, not the ownership layer. Each action is real. None of them, so far, is the whole thing.