667. Here’s Why You Are Constantly Fighting Off Scammers

Stephen Dubner· Host0:00

[upbeat music] In January, a thirty-eight-year-old Chinese-born entrepreneur named Chen Zhi was arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China. He was one of the richest people in Cambodia and one of the best connected. He was an elite businessman who also served as a government advisor. A few months before this arrest, it was the US government who went after Chen. They designated his holding company a transnational criminal organization, and they charged him with fraud and money laundering. They also seized fifteen billion dollars worth of crypto. Where did all that crypto come from? Chen Zhi, in addition to running a real estate development firm and other businesses, allegedly ran a massive online scamming operation that specialized in what the Chinese call pig butchering. That means fattening up the scam victims for months or years and then, when the time is right, the slaughter. US prosecutors say that cybercrime in Cambodia generates as much as nineteen billion dollars a year, which would account for roughly half of the Cambodian GDP. The US government says that scammers in Southeast Asia stole ten billion dollars from Americans in twenty twenty-four alone. There were other victims, too. After Chen was arrested in Cambodia, thousands of his workers fled the country. They had reportedly been trafficked to Cambodia, and they were being held against their will at scam compounds.