US Says Cambodia’s Huione Group Is Crime Hub

Cambodia’s Huione Group offers things like insurance, money exchange and financial services.

But to the U.S. Treasury Department, the company’s online platform performs another, illicit and unadvertised function, Bloomberg News reported Friday (Aug. 1).

While Huione affiliated companies have repeatedly denied any involvement with criminal activities, the Treasury has called it as a “critical node” for laundering up to $4 billion from scams and cryptocurrency theft.

The Bloomberg report, based on internal documents and more than two dozen interviews with government officials, company insiders and alleged victims, argues that Huione’s network has helped turn Asia’s cyberscam industry into a multi-billion dollar goliath.

“Huione is like the Amazon for criminals,” Ngo Minh Hieu, a cyber threat investigator and former hacker who’s researching the company’s online footprint, told Bloomberg. “It blows my mind, the way they organize the business and their range of products.”

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said in May that it had identified Huione Group as a “financial institution of primary money laundering concern” and called for the company to be cut off from the U.S. financial system.

FinCEN accused the company of laundering the proceeds of cyber heists carried out by North Korea, and for criminal gangs in Southeast Asia perpetrating convertible virtual currency (CVC) investment scams, otherwise known as “pig butchering” scams.

Meanwhile, the National Bank of Cambodia said in a statement to Bloomberg that Huione Pay’s — the company’s banking arm — had its license revoked “due to serious violations of applicable rules and regulations” with the company ordered to shut down by June 19.

Three weeks later, however, Huione Pay told Bloomberg it was “committed to constructive engagement” with American officials and has said it was “undertaking substantial efforts to address and remediate compliance issues.”

The report comes at a time when financial scams are growing in sophistication, forcing financial institutions to re-evaluate their defense strategies, as PYMNTS wrote last week.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence and Featurespace has found that criminals have begun to mimic legitimate business tactics to defraud consumers.

“The findings are stark: 3 in 10 U.S. consumers, roughly 77 million individuals, have lost money to a scam in the last five years, with most victims losing more than $500, and many suffering thousands in financial damage,” PYMNTS wrote. “This trend marks a significant increase, with scams representing 27% of total dollars lost by financial institutions to fraud in the U.S. in 2024, up from 12% in 2023.”